cruces: Lebbeus Woods - The Chair No. No. That is incorrect. That is not the name of this but for some reason tumblr user cruces felt the need to add this name. It is incorrect and the correction is important. Lebbeus Woods became a mentor to me in correspondence over the short few past years before he died this past November. It’s painful to see his art, design and creations misappropriated or incorrect information attached. Especially this specific design as it has a story of misappropriation behind it. This is not called “The Chair” This is “Neo-mechanical. Tower (Upper) Chamber”. It was drawn in 1987 and published in the collection “Centricity” and then again in color in 1992 in his book “The New City”. On January 18, 1996, Lebbeus Woods went to the theater to see “12 Monkeys”. Apparently he was not amused; a week later he notified Universal Studios that he considered the interrogation room to be an unauthorized reproduction of his work. The director, Terry Gilliam, admitted that he reviewed a copy of the book that contained the drawing “Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber”, and that he discussed it with both the producer, Charles Roven, and the production designer, Jeffrey Beecroft. Film Imitates Art The court found that a comparison of “Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber” and the footage of the interrogation room in 12 Monkeys demonstrated that “the movie had copied Woods’ drawing in striking detail.” The court cited the fact that: “…the wall and floor were composed of a visibly jointed grid, the walls had the same worn texture, and a horizontal shelf and apron near the top of the vertical rail. The chairs themselves consist of four rectangular planes, arm-rests with diagonal supports, etching on the chair back.” The court also noted the both spheres were suspended in front of the chair from a metal framework with similar surface designs. The judge ruled for Prof. Woods, a result that would require Universal Studios pull all copies of the movie from world-wide circulation after only a month’s run. Universal would be able to subsequently release film after the scenes in containing the offending chair had been excised to the cutting room floor, a fate that had befallen the Devil’s Advocate. Showing that he had a sense of humor after all, Lebbeus Woods allowed Universal to continue distribution of the movie, chair and all, for a high six-figure cash settlement. If you are going to come up with credit for images you post at least get them right. (7:16pm)
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sfmoma: Lebbeus Woods, Architect is currently on view at SFMOMA, and throughout the run of the exhibition, we’ll be using Tumblr as a place to sequentially share Woods’s wonderful sketchbooks, since only a fraction of the pages can be on view in the galleries. Featured here is the 2nd page from a sketchbook he worked on in NYC from 1995-1998. Image: Lebbeus Woods, Sketchbook (30 July 1995, NYC - 23 May 1998, NYC), 1995; Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Estate of Lebbeus Woods (2001.153 A-Y) (2:36am)
LEBBEUS WOODS DIED ON THE OCTOBER MORNING after Hurricane Sandy blew into New York. He was tall and charismatic, a visionary with a smoky voice and silver hair. Architecture’s “moral center,” his friend Thom Mayne, the Los Angeles architect, called him; the greatest architect of our day, thought the critic and architect Michael Sorkin. That his name won’t ring many bells outside the profession was partly because he produced just one permanent construction, devoting himself instead to teaching and drawing, at which he was a kind of genius, as gifted with a pen or pencil as any artist of his time. His drawings, haunted and chockablock with weird machines and otherworldly vistas, meditated on destruction, poverty, science and afflicted cities like Sarajevo, Zagreb and Havana, where he imagined quasi-Cubist designs like bandages on open wounds. Accompanied by suggestive but often incomprehensible texts, the drawings mixed Piranesi with Ridley Scott: dystopian throwbacks, painstakingly handcrafted in an era of computer-generated modeling. Woods pictured a city floating above Paris, and Berlin after the wall as a crumble of ruins and cramped spaces, an obstacle course to democracy. He reinvented Einstein’s tomb as a Constructivist satellite, revolving around the earth on a beam of light. I’ve read comparisons of Woods to John Cage and to William Blake and of his paper architecture to the designs of 1960s collectives like Archigram in London. He belongs to a long line of urban dreamers that includes Sant’Elia and Le Corbusier. His lone permanent construction, “Light Pavilion,” designed in collaboration with Christoph A. Kumpusch and just completed in Chengdu, China, suspends angled ramps and beams of colored lights in a void that’s part of a tower by Steven Holl. Woods disdained style for its own sake. Earlier this year he castigated Zaha Hadid for her Aquatics Center in London. Hadid, Woods wrote on the blog that became his confessional and pulpit, settled for “wrapping such conventional programs of use in merely expressionistic forms, without letting a single ray of her genius illuminate the human condition.” The human condition was architecture’s responsibility, inseparable from the catastrophes we bring onto ourselves, and the solutions we discover for them. Born in 1940 in Michigan, he was the son of an Army engineer who worked on the Manhattan Project. After school, Woods joined Eero Saarinen and Associates but decided during the ’60s to pursue a different sort of career. He was a founder of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture and settled into a teaching post at Cooper Union in New York. In later years, he went to war-ravaged places to draw. For Sarajevo he composed a manifesto, read in full view of Serbian snipers: “I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.” He advocated a third way between restoring old buildings or building anew. It involved a mix of salvation and invention, memory and morality. The task of designing real buildings, he thought, belonged to local architects; his aspiration was “on the level of principle.” You might argue that it’s harder to grapple with all the messy compromises that go into actual construction, but Woods hoped to liberate architecture from its material tethers and encourage everybody who engaged with it to think more boldly and humanely. “Architecture should be judged not only by the problems it solves,” he once said, “but by the problems it creates.” (The Year End Obituary of Lebbeus Woods via NYT) (7:17pm)
transceiverfreq: photon kite.lebbeus woods from the series centricity1988 architectural drawing | graphite on paper  (7:42pm)
Deeply crushing news. Architect and mentor Lebbeus Woods died in his sleep this morning at the age of 72. I learned more about myself through his lens than any one else. I hope I will be able to live to his standard and his relentless pursuit of theory and form. (7:41pm)
joel schumacher+lebbeus woods having an awful day. please distract me. (6:42pm)
the storm and the fall.lebbeus woods (12:19pm)
photon kite.lebbeus woods from the series centricity1988 architectural drawing | graphite on paper  (10:18am)

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residual.self.image (1:53am)
pureaesthetic: reblog: art: arch: as401: vertical manhattan 2 « lebbeus woods fuck, i miss home. (6:07pm)
einsteins tomb.lebbeus woods, 1980 (10:16am)
professor lebbeus woods (12:30pm)
Prof. Lebbeus Woods (8:13pm)
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