From the Chiasmus archive: July 25th, 2019 "MONUMENTS OF ARCHITECTURE AND CREATORS OF THE TRANSCENDENCE - LEBBEUS WOODS (PART 1)"

(Images from Dazeen, Archdaily, Wired)

 Conceptual architecture is a concept of ideas that envisions the myriad of possibilities of structural design.  Whilst bordering on the fantastic, in some cases the inconceivable, as it evolved from the fictional of science and engineering with its grand idealisms of human ingenuity and technology.  Yet, at the same time it also devises a bases for reality in structural design. What is dreamed and thought of, created via a sketch or drawing on paper by the architect, it also, if sold as a functional idea, can be built.  But, there is an indulgence of conceptual architecture, of how far it can remove itself from what is feasibly practicable in design.  To what is offered as a brief to the client, in reality is the one who pays.  For it is, as a professional service, the income that justifies the costs of designing and implementing a structure design.  Or does the profession of Architecture, as decreed by Conceptual Architects justify the financial reward, for that desire to build, restricted by the whim of a client's temperament or a societal trend - that holds a curse to the ego and as the late conceptual architect Lebbeus Woods once said, in relation to conceptually imprinting architecture as idea, rather than a tangible development that he would rather not be beholden to the client.  And this is where his greatness of embracing, what was born of the 1960s and 1970s conceptual architecture, begins to arise, Lebbeus Woods to this day is unrivaled as one of the most prolific and important conceptual architects of our time. 

 

There is the long standing duality in architecture and design, not always articulated and at times not clearly presented in projection.  But, the architect, who looks at nature as a presence, an omniscience, tries to figure how the human perspective fits into the natural world – the expanse of landscape, sky and water.  He or she, sets in motion the building of human endurance that is the fundamental need for shelter to protect from the harshness and unforgeable template that is nature.  The ultimate goal is to bridge the duality between the indifferences of the two entities, the human being one side and nature on the other.  That we may, from these structural designs, find a peace within nature, that by definition has neither a like or dislike of human folly.  We are pale in its comparison. Yet, when I study Lebbeus Woods drawings, of the many he created over the period of time before his passing in 2012, it stands a focus of technological and design, that after a cataclysmic event, be that either from a natural or man made violence, the broken city rebuilds.  And it is in these configurations of drawings and ideas, that the city, the structure rebuilds itself.  Almost in a more nature and structured way, as though calamity was need for the machines, not to take over, but to rise, build and mend the destruction left in wake of disaster.  Conscious in its reformation to only to house and protect the inhabitants that remain.  A re-moldered city that embraces its scars and it is human being that survives, within the configured machinery and begins with anew vision. 

Lebbeus Woods, in his purpose as a conceptual and experimental architect, created a world, in a development of ideas, from his models and drawings and sketches; all realizing a potentiality.  As he once said, “I'm not interested in living in the fantasy world...All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of correctional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.” So, there is this pure architectural idealism that Lebbeus Woods portrayed in his work, free from social and political concepts, rather transcending away from the rigidity of societal trends in relation to aesthetics, it is in this new world, open to the imagination and possibilities. Whilst, as Lebbeus Woods said is “free” from the constriction of both what we perceive as the natural world and also what restrains the human being, possibly the curse of being conscious of the self.  We defy that  burden of knowing both life and death, by  experimenting in defining the elements of space and time.  Redesigning it and entering  another Universe.  

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(A.Glass 2019)