Lebbeus Woods Is An Archetype
Lebbeus Woods (Lansing, Michigan, May 31, 1940 New York City, October 30, 2012) was an American architect and architectural theorist. He was educated at Purdue University (engineering) and University of Illinois (architecture), and subsequently worked for Eero Saarinen & Associates / Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates, and in private practice. Since the late 1970s, he devoted himself to experimental projects, teaching and writing. With Olive Brown, he co-founded the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture (RIEA, 1988), which later assumed an independent life as RIEA.europa, now RIEA.ch. In this context, Woods spearheaded a series of publications with the Springer-Verlag, promoting the work of young architects and exploring varied architectural issues.  Woods own publications include Einstein Tomb (1980; second, commemorative edition 2013), Origins (1985), OneFiveFour (1987), Terra Nova (1990), Anarchitecture: Architecture is a Political Act (1992), War and Architecture (1993; Italian translation 2013), Radical Reconstruction (1997), Earthquake! A Post-Biblical View (2001), The Storm and the Fall (2004) and System Wien (2005). In the last years of his life, he was an avid blogger: the content of lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com will be published by the Princeton Architectural Press in early 2015.  Woods architectural work embodied in drawings, models and installations has been exhibited worldwide, most recently (2013) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Other important venues include the Architectural Association, London; Aedes Gallery and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna; Fondation Cartier pour l art contemporain, Paris; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Venice Architectural Biennale; the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Henry Urbach Gallery, Whitney Biennial, Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery at The Cooper Union, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Receptive to and encouraging of all forms of dialogues from architectural projects to film Woods collaborated with a number of fellow artists and architects, as well as with his students.  As an educator, his home was the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, New York City, where he taught for over two decades. He also held visiting professorships at The Bartlett, London; Harvard University Graduate School of Design; State University of New York, Buffalo; Cornell University, College of Art, Architecture and Planning; Penn State University; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; Pratt Institute; the University of Applied Arts, Vienna; the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles / Vico Morcote, Switzerland.  Woods had a long-standing relationship with SCI-Arc. He was an Academic Director of the Vico Fellowship program in Spring 1998. There he led a comprehensive design studio, The Cybernetic Circus: Structures of Measurement and Performance, culminating in its one-day installation in Vienna s Graben. In October 2003, Woods held a four-day workshop at SCI-Arc. Describing his role as that of a catalyst, he worked with students to create a sprawling, temporary installation of 1,400 steel rods running the length of the quarter-mile-long school. In Fall 2004, Woods completed an installation at SCI-Arc in conjunction with a studio he taught entitled Analogical Architecture: Space of Conflict, and in 2006, he delivered SCI-Arc s commencement address. Woods was a recipient of the Progressive Architecture Award for Design Research, Institute Honor of the American Academy of Architects, Daimler-Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.