This semester in New York City has exposed us to contemporary architecture, built works, and the professional world in which most of us hope to someday practice. Sometimes, however, it is productive to be reminded of the place where new ideas come from – from the imagination of what architecture could be if physics or economy didn’t govern our actions. If architecture were treated as a living, breathing part of our world – a direct reaction to the lives we lead and the action we take – what form would it take?
The Drawing Center in Soho has an exhibition of the work of Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012), an architect who pursued experimental architecture through drawings and models. Some of his most famous works are drawings and models focused on Sarajevo (after the war), Havana (during trade embargo), and San Francisco (after the Loma Preita Earthquake). These phenomenal works focus on particular locales undergoing a particular event, and the reaction that the built environment might have to these events.
A friend recently shared a quote from Russian photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov: “There are things happening before and after the event. These things are even more important than the event itself.”
Events have a time-initial, and a time-final, as life flows continuously by. As humans, we are attracted and intrigued by events – emotional turning points through which we gauge progress, accomplishment, time – and we are unimpressed with the flow of daily life. As architects, we must be cognizant of what came before, and what comes after events. We must focus significantly on the aspects of daily life which others may take for granted. Our designs and our influence on the built environment is temporally derived, and temporal in nature. We attempt to react to current conditions with an awareness to how our interventions will change the way that a site, a district, a society functions.
In one of Woods’ sketchbooks, he wrote in capital letters: DON’T REBUILD RECTANGLES. Perhaps this one statement encompasses a major argument he makes. As designers, we must detach ourselves from what we know in order to truly create something new. We must disassociate from the event of designing a building, and from the distinct events that mark the passing of time, in order to encompass all that it means to live within the worlds we create. After a semester surrounded by the innovative and astounding rectangles of New York City, it is refreshing to have an injection of the imaginative into our experience of the city.
Lucas Greco at The Drawing Center’s Lebbeus Woods exhibition
Stuart Pidcock at The Drawing Center’s Lebbeus Woods exhibition
M.Arch I students attending Lebbeus Woods celebration event at Cooper Union.
(all photos by Luke Erickson)