RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION / LEBBEUS WOODS

Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) was an American architect, artist, theoretician and educator. His father was an Air Force officer, involved in the development and testing of the atomic bomb, dying at the age of 52 from leukemia probably due to radiation poisoning. Woods says, until his father’s death, he spent his free time reading, drawing, hanging out around jet aircraft and their pilots. His architectural work remained mostly in writing, drawings and models, yet has been influential in many fields. 

Some may remember that he was hired as conceptual architect for the movie Alien 3, but his work was not used. Later he received a large settlement from the director of the 12 Monkeys movie for unauthorized use of his work. A gemini.

Radical Reconstruction’s focus is on sketching a theory from an architectural perspective, considering the conditions of existence resulting from destruction, initiated by nature or by humans.

Published in 1997, the theories here are discussed over the case studies of Sarajevo, Havana and San Fransisco. Woods says the crisis can be first and best met at the peripheries, and not at the core. The core tends to disguise the crisis, and the peripheries are usually more neglected by authority, therefore the crises are better revealed there. Woods says crises arise when different things meet, but with consumerism (and controlling with pleasure) we are pushed to become similar, hide our individualities, so we are pacified and lose our creativity. ‘There are always people who will come to inhabit the difficult [spaces]. They are the people of crisis, pushed usually unwillingly to confrontation with limits, borderline cases of every sort, adventurers, criminals, inventors, con artists, opportunists, people who cannot, or have not been allowed to, fit in elsewhere.’ He says, therefore they transform crisis into advantage, and consequently, the initiative for transformation cannot be expected to come from governments and corporations. 

He proposes the injection of new structures into the spaces of destruction, and these do not fit neatly in, and require creativity to inhabit, acquiring meaning only with habitation. He uses the metaphor of wound, proposing the ideas of scab and scar for the formation of these injections. The constructs in his drawings look so much like piles of rubble that I had the sense, deep inside he was striving for something indestructable: What difference does it make to bomb a pile of rubble, would that give any ‘satisfaction’ to a destroyer, how can you cause chaos in something that is already in a state of chaos?

He says we know orthogonally framed buildings will fail, and we still build them. The reasons are several he says, ‘including those that can only be assigned to the realms of psychopathology, especially that concerned with the psychodynamics of denial’. One excuse seems to be that it is economical to build with industry standards, however what about the massive costs arising after earthquakes and such? And this ‘orthogonal’ thinking is so engrained in society, and it is such a homogenizer that it is not challenged. So Sisyphus carries his stone back up the hill, rebuilds again after yet another collapse.

Massive destruction makes it impossible to disguise the forces that are always in action, invisible at times of relative peace and ‘normalcy’. In that sense Woods also says there is always war.

Extreme conditions are transformative and opportunities for growth and progress. Woods suggests that when the ‘normal’ is disrupted, and overall meaning is lost, ‘life cannot be taken as a whole, but only as a collection of the idiosyncratic, the fragmentary, the ephemeral, the isolated, the unique’. Therefore the need for expression becomes redundant and invention is necessary. Nietzsche quote here: ‘The mythless man stands eternally hungry’.

Woods proposes that the reconstruction must not rebuild the old, but also not forget the lost. A dynamic stability is the new aim- as opposed to the passive stability of the old. This is a paradox that is often not acknowledged- there is in our lives both creation and destruction. And ‘the architect is a designer of space, not of living’. Function following form would not explain this, the architect needs to reconsider his relation to program.

Woods’ propositions may seem impossible, utopian or dystopic, but to me their value resides in the possible transformation of our perspective, however small. He does not suggest total chaos, but the providing of breathing space for chaos. 

He searches for the structuring of multiplicity without resorting to hierarchical tactics, but with exploring heterarchical indeterminacies. And in the afterword by Michael Menser, the mentioning of the metaphor of seeing all this as dance, and not as conflict/war is a concept I encountered some 20 years ago, and have been in search for its origin almost ever since, so I will be reading some Brockman, Goodwin and Gould.

Woods’ theories presented here are more crystallized and developed in his Slow Manifesto, however this book includes many drawings from his incredible collection. 

‘Willful destruction exposes for all to see the nature and effects of these forces in a way that peace often disguises, or attempts to disguise, through its maintenance of the appearance of normalcy, which architects are trained to exalt.’

‘The only way the new can be created is from deep within precise conditions existing in the present, fusing all that is remembered and all that is dreamt within it, as though existence itself were hanging in the balance.’

‘The simultaneous realization of contradictory or mutually exclusive qualities and ideas leads to a transcending of former categories of knowledge and types of experience, to a next higher level of understanding and work, where what was formerly considered paradox is revealed as a more developed, more complex form of order.’

Author: Lebbeus Woods
Title: Radical Reconstruction
Published: 1997, by Princeton Architectural Press
First published: 1997
Pages: 168