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The New City
Lebbeus Woods is an architect, a teacher, and a visionary. He is equally at ease with Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, and science fiction, man’s spiritual life and humanity’s pursuit of artificial perfection. The New City blends elements of each.
Starting with simple geometric forms, Lebbeus Woods combines chaos and order--the mundane and the sublime--and allows a new form of urban existence to grow. The New City is an organic conception, creating many new questions as it answers old ones.
The images of The New City reflect Woods’s investigations into science and art and his desire to create challenges for the next generation of urban planners. Woods’s designs represent interior discoveries, exposed for all to see. Many of the shapes and structures defy standard concepts of what living and working spaces should be. They seem lived in and well used, but how and by whom is unclear. Strange and futuristic, the structures do not travel the well-worn architectural path of from dictated by function. Rather, they are new forms, with specific functions unclear--left to the citizens of The New City to decide for themselves. What is clear is that these structures soar and inspire, leaving the future unwritten while stimulating the field of urban planning to investigate new paths, new ideas.
Powered by an as-yet undeveloped form of electromagnetic energy, The New City ultimately reaches out, beyond earthly ties--a visionary metaphor for humanity’s destiny.
Starting with simple geometric forms, Lebbeus Woods combines chaos and order--the mundane and the sublime--and allows a new form of urban existence to grow. The New City is an organic conception, creating many new questions as it answers old ones.
The images of The New City reflect Woods’s investigations into science and art and his desire to create challenges for the next generation of urban planners. Woods’s designs represent interior discoveries, exposed for all to see. Many of the shapes and structures defy standard concepts of what living and working spaces should be. They seem lived in and well used, but how and by whom is unclear. Strange and futuristic, the structures do not travel the well-worn architectural path of from dictated by function. Rather, they are new forms, with specific functions unclear--left to the citizens of The New City to decide for themselves. What is clear is that these structures soar and inspire, leaving the future unwritten while stimulating the field of urban planning to investigate new paths, new ideas.
Powered by an as-yet undeveloped form of electromagnetic energy, The New City ultimately reaches out, beyond earthly ties--a visionary metaphor for humanity’s destiny.
- GenresArchitectureArt
84 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
117 people want to read
About the author
Lebbeus Woods
31 books30 followersLebbeus Woods was an American architect and artist.
Woods studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue University and first worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen, but in 1976 turned exclusively to theory and experimental projects. He has designed buildings in Chengdu, China and 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.
He was a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
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, has stated, "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"
Woods studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue University and first worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen, but in 1976 turned exclusively to theory and experimental projects. He has designed buildings in Chengdu, China and 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.
He was a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
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, has stated, "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"
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