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Architecture is about ideas in the first place. You don’t get to design until you have an idea.
Lebbeus Woods
Gravity is the insidious enemy of the animate.
Lebbeus Woods
Unlike the past decades, the present moment is lacking in architectural discourse.
Lebbeus Woods
I can’t honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn’t so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso — because everything visual stimulates me.
Lebbeus Woods
I’ve always been interested, — if you look back at my work from the beginning, really — I’ve always been interested in the idea of the artificial landscape. Reforming the landscape. Architecture being a method of reforming the earth’s surface. We reshape the earth’s surface, from architecture to paving streets, to parking lots and buildings that are really reforming the surface of the earth. Reforming nature, taking over what we find. And we’re mushing it around and remaking a new earth — or, what we used to call Terra Nova.
Lebbeus Woods
I want to provoke questions. I’ve never felt that I provide a definitive, conclusive answer to anything. But there are some very important questions, neglected usually in the architectural discourse, and they have to do with the volatility of contemporary life. And, buildings of stone, steel, glass, and concrete don’t answer those questions. Maybe it’s temporary architecture. A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.
The Reality of Experimental Architecture: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods
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.
Lebbeus Woods
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