Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods (May 31, 1940 – October 30, 2012) was an American architect and artist.

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.

The techniques that Woods describes is against restoration or erasure, but rather maintaining the scar and creating new spaces in between as form of a scab, which he refers to as “injections”, which resist the act of reconciling and connecting the void, but rather offer new opportunities, or “freespaces”. He sees these freespaces as a network through the widespread ruins of the city.

The majority of his explorations deal with the design of systems of crisis:the former of the existing being confronted by the order of the new. His designs are politically charged,and provocative visions of the possible reality; provisional, local, and charged with the investments of their creator. He is best knows for his proposals for San Francisco, Havana, and sarajevo That were included in the publication of Radical Reconstruction on 1997 ( Sarajevo after was, San Francisco after the earthquake, Havana in the grips of the ongoing trade embargo)