Customer Reviews

Lebbeus Woods: Anarchitecture Architecture Is a Political Act (Architectural Monographs, No. 22)

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This book is the bible for millenium era Architecture, ideal for a world steeped in cyberspace, bioterrorism, and chaos. There is no book that a could more highly recommend!!!

Lebbeus Woods is the master architect: his theoretical explorations and investigations lay as exhibits that modern architects pull and borrow for their own artistic palate. His investigations are rooted in deep concepts that are difficult to follow at times, but understanding his drawings and his attempts are easily understaning his genius. The politcal connections he pulls from are all relevant and his drawings are indescribably beautiful, very active with the reader, exciting and full of life and vibrance.

Woods is as much philosopher and urban planner as architect in the traditional sense. His buildings rip open the landscape of the ordered grid, and also open new possibilities about what it means to inhabit a space. The functions of some of his ideas for buildings are obscure even to him. He is constantly trying to deconstruct the politics of architecture and it's place in history. He actively embodies Heidegger's idea that "dwelling means to recieve the sky", except in his dwellings it also means to recieve the ground, and to actively take part in constructing your world.

Very pleased to see work by Lebbeus Woods being published and to hear he is being recognized by the Whitney now in its first show on architecture. I think of Leb when I see Ansel Adam's photograph, 'Moonrise Over Hernandez, New Mexico', considered by some to be the best photograph of the 20th Century. It has a moon hanging over a town set in a landscape, something of an architectural study. And it calls back a show on the Urbana Campus, years back, when Leb was an upperclassman at Illinois studying architecture. Sometimes shows of student projects are pretty standard and tentative; they're required work to get a grade. But here was Leb's uniquely impeccable and stunning drawings. Already mature work, I believe. His presentation included a casein rendering depicting a building in an early evening landscape. Above the building in the sky he had drawn a moon. Nobody should have had the courage to do that, nobody. And you won't see a drawing like that but once in a lifetime. He probably could do line drawings done with a marker and still be museum quality.