Monuments of architecture and creators of the transcendence - Lebbeus Woods (part 3)
(Images sourced from the public domain. Credited to the Lebbeus Woods estate in promotion of his work)
Lebbeus Woods viewed war zones, cities effected by natural disasters as a template, in focusing his experimental architecture to interface a prevision of rebuilding the damaged city. Healing it. This is not dystopian conceptualized imagery, often viewed with the architectual style of brutalism, which in popular culture is mistakenly seen to be a dystopia backdrop, were not constructed as the flip-side to a "Utopian" society. Rather it was, as a building design, to be cost efficient housing for a growing population, with cues taken from the famed architect Le Corbiuser and his inspiration of Béton brut inspired concrete aesthetics. Neither does Woods drift into future dystopia creations of science fiction, he is vastly more intellectual in creating possibilities through a cityscape that has collapsed in real time – whether that be from social upheaval, war or natural events. That its rebuild is not an overabundance of stark apartment blocks, but portayed though the buildings themselves, as an ever changing reconfiguration. And if you study Woods art work and designs, you'll see that it is not the machinery per se that is rebuilding the city, patching its cicatrix together, from an array of distorted shapes caused through extreme violence - it is the people, the inhabitants. At a moment of peace and reconciling, without destroying the city further, using the scars as torn and punctured points of reference. Through chaos, a geometric concept of design. Spreading out of the disfigure monuments. He was particularly inspired by the war in former Yugoslavia, more so the city Sarajevo. This is where Woods starts to meld the experimental architecture as a discussion about war and the human condition. What is nature and the natural environment to the structure? Do we as human beings, live in a separate entity to nature? Our discourse and turmoil overlooked by the natural world without any care or interest. The natural world, with its scars, rejuvenates. Except the human, when we scar ourselves and our cities, sometimes it doesn't rejuvenate and more importantly it fails to learn from its infliction. A repetitive masochism, that is all but in tune with self destruction. And this is where, beyond any fictional dystopian fantasy, Woods offers a slight nihilism to the predicaments of the conscious human machine, it may indeed be the machines that we create – which may actually be the cities themselves that will live in an symbiotic defiance, yet paradoxically harmonious and detached within the natural construct.
What interests me in particular of Woods extensive list of experimental concepts in relation to his building designs, is the humanism that he had in the context of war and architecture. To which he visited Sarajevo, Bosnia in 1993 two years before the war officially ended in 1995. Woods complied a manifesto that he read on the steps of the burned out Olympian Museum in Sarajevo on November 26th 1993, as the last parts of besieged conflict of a European city devastated by artillery shelling while the anxiety of snipers killing, in an indiscriminatingly and detached emotion at anyone who crossed onto the wrong side of the city. Woods decreed, that, even as the city was slowly being reduced to rubble, he saw the ad hoc completion of its inhabitants inserting structures into scarred and broken remains, new shapes and concepts evolved – human ingenuity, from a pure focus of survival. A fusion of piecing the rubble, remolding it into newer angles with a unique purpose, yet not conscious of its design, as the motivation is pure in its reality. They were rebuilding, but in their way. Woods then offers from the nihilism, that we finally master the machinery to rebuild, the human theb transcends away from the fear - to devise structural integrity in a warzone. It becomes unique within its dynamic. Woods contributed to the rebuilding, conceptualizing newer forms.
---
“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. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then “melt into air.” I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city."
---
Comments
Post a Comment