Lebbeus Woods at The Drawing Center

September 27, 2014

Note: This review was initially published in The Third Rail, Issue 3,  September 2014. The full text is available in PDF format here.

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Architecture and war are not incompatible.
Architecture is war. War is architecture.
I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority
that resides in fixed and frightened forms.
—Lebbeus Woods

When Lebbeus Woods speaks of war, he also speaks of time. If history is trauma, then the future is catastrophe. Caught between the positivism of modernist progress and a reactionary postmodern uncertainty, Woods attempted to build a new future atop the lacerated and pulsing topography of the battleground. He embraced, on the one hand, the epistemic skepticism of postmodernism, while, on the other, never abandoning the Promethean impulse of modernism towards the future.

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