Леббеус Вудс: Архитектор эксперимента и пространства

American architect (1940 2012)

Lebbeus Woods (May 31, 1940 – October 30, 2012) was an American architect and artist known for his unconventional and experimental designs.

Woods studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue University. While Woods called himself an architect he never received a degree in architecture nor was he ever licensed to practice architecture. He first worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen as a field representative on the Ford Foundation building designed by Saarinen in New York City. After leaving Saarinen's office he worked for a short period for the Champaign, Illinois firm of Richardson, Severns Scheeler & Associates. He also produced paintings for the Indianapolis Art Museum during that period. In 1976 he turned exclusively to theory and experimental projects. He designed a light pavilion in the Sliced Porosity Block, Chengdu, China with Steven Holl, and buildings in Havana, Cuba. In 1988, Woods co founded the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, a nonprofit institution devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice while promoting the concept and perception of architecture itself. The author of nine books, he was a 1994 recipient of the Chrysler Design Award. To this end, Woods saw a parallelism between the designer of a building and the creator of a pyramid who follows forms imposed by those who represent, express, dominate, and exploit others’ obedience to regulatory rules. This pyramid, based on a triangular structure, is by nature the most stable solid. On one hand, at the lowest level of the structure Wood places the inhabitant of the pyramid as the bearer of its full load. On the other hand, the architect who designs building non types, or else the freespace of unknown purpose and meaning, inverts the pyramid and creates new building types. Every resident of this inverted structure becomes a top. The pyramid extends into the space of time seeking a base or terminal point to complete its form. Yet, the base subsides before the volume of the experience increases. In the undefined darkness of the void where this structure is located, many pyramids interpenetrate and dissolve, one in the other. They generate a flow; a form of indeterminacy; a contradictory plan; a city of unknown origin and destination; a state of continuous transformation. This can as also be seen in Woods's project Horizon Houses about which he states:

They are structures experimenting with our perception of spatial transformations, accomplished without any material changes to the structures themselves. In these projects, my concern was the question of space. The engineering questions of how to turn the houses could be answered by conventional mechanical means—cranes and the like—but these seem clumsy and inelegant. The mechanical solution may lie in the idea of self propelling structures, using hydraulics. But of more immediate concern: how would the changing spaces impact the ways we might inhabit them? The majority of his explorations deal with the design of systems in crisis: the order of the existing being confronted by the order of the new. His designs are politically charged and provocative visions of a possible reality; provisional, local, and charged with the investment of their creators. He is best known for his proposals for San Francisco, Havana, and Sarajevo that were included in the publication of Radical Reconstruction in 1997 (Sarajevo after the war, Havana in the grips of the ongoing trade embargo, and San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake). 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. Woods, who envisioned experimental constructs and environments, stated that, "the interplay of metrical systems establishing boundaries of materials and energetic forms is the foundation of a universal science (universcience) whose workers include all individuals". Realizing the need to redefine the meaning of human existence by means of architecture, Woods envisioned the creation of spaces sheltering the diverse material and immaterial needs of each of their inhabitants. In his works, terms of a conventional architectural vocabulary, such as the void, wall, volume, and surface, give their place to combinations of heterogeneous and radical interpretations of their content including the "freespace", "multiplicity", and "heterarchy". In a similar way, Michel Foucault identified transitional spaces that accommodate diversity or else the other pertaining to each inhabitant as opposed to the entire community. For him, these heterotopias are real and institutionalized spaces lost within the grid of the urban fabric. However, they constitute "a kind of dislocation or a realized utopia, in which all the real spatial arrangements, all other spatial arrangements encountered within society, are simultaneously represented, challenged and overturned".

Woods introduced the term freespace to propose an architectural approach freed from its conventional, predetermined and deterministic character, or else an architecture that instrumentalizes the ever changing landscape of the modern era which is exposed to natural and man made changes. In contrast to the model of organization and development of the modern city, the freespace was for Woods a field of unpredictable forces and continuous transformations of both its user and society which is characterized by morphological fluidity and ideological liberation. To this end, he developed three architectural proposals. Woods won a "six figure sum", and allowed the film to continue to be screened. The end credits state that his work "inspired" the Interrogation Room set. Woods is credited as the "conceptual architect" for Alien 3, establishing the look and feel of the film, especially the opening sequence.

Woods married Pattilee (née Haagsma) in April 1961. Together they had two children: Angela, born in 1963, and Lebbeus Woods II, born in 1967. As of 2024, Lebbeus Woods II currently works in finance, and Angela is a social worker. Woods has three granddaughters and four grandsons. Woods' marriage to Pattilee dissolved in 1972. He remarried Aleksandra (née Wagner) in 1998, with whom he had one daughter, Victoria. As of 2024, Victoria is an artist residing in New York.