A House for Lebbeus Woods in Ukraine

The question is: if Lebbeus Woods lived in Ukraine, now, would he have imagined what very often he imagened in his drawn oeuvre ?

A similar question could have been: if Peter Eisenman lived in Haiti, at the time of the tremendous earthquake that devastated the country, would he have still chosen the theoretical banner of En Terror Firma ?

But then, perhaps it is not art that copies life, but the other way around.

So maybe, to an extent at least, both Lebbeus Woods and Peter Eisenman had premonitions… they anticipated disasters that were to come.

But maybe those disasters were mainly within themselves.

Architecture is War – War is Architecture – wrote Lebbeus Woods.

And this year there are 10 years since he died.

We invite you to imagine A HOUSE FOR LEBBEUS WOODS – in Ukraine.

Would it be very similar to what we already see, published, almost daily ?

Or would it be in some kind of opposition?

What do you think ?

Please reflect on the way he drew… he drew like an old master… magnificently well… the manner of drawing was somehow in disjunction with the matter depicted.

Woods was obsessed by death, although one could have rarely found a more vital man than him. Maybe not by accident Peter Cook called him “the craggy optimist.” Yet, this “optimist” drew some of the most horrific scenes in architectural imagery, lately.

Would we like to live in his drawings ? What do his drawings represent ? A world in turmoil. A world in conflict. A world at war with itself.

Was there any Apollo to be envisioned at the end of the dark tunnel ?

Not really, although the beauty of the drawings (if one makes abstraction of that they depicted) could be seen, somehow, sometimes, Apollonian, although Woods was rather attracted, it seems, by Dionysus.

We invite you to imagine a house that would be, possibly, an extension of his drawn works, a physical expression of his fears and his hopes, an architecture of turbulence, at a time of turbulence, in a world which cannot stand still.

DESIGN A HOUSE FOR LEBBEUS WOODS – IN UKRAINE.

JURY

Christoph a. Kumpusch (chair); Head Forward-slash ( / ) Architektur; Co-Founder Mutating Cities; Director Extraction Lab + Faculty Columbia GSAPP
Devanshi Agarwal; Speculative Architect and Theorist
Amina Blacksher; Principal, ATELIER AMINA; Faculty Columbia GSAPP
Remi Connolly-Taylor; Founder REMI.C.T. Studio; Co-Founder Kit London
Yolande Daniels; Co-founding Principal studioSUMO NY+LA; Faculty MIT
Phillip Denny; Editor-at-Large, New York Review of Architecture
Jovani Furlan; Principal New York City Ballet
Salomon Frausto; Architectural Theorist, Editor, Curator and Educator; Director The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design
Andrew Holder; Co-Principal The LADG; Director MArch and Faculty Harvard GSD
Ivan L. Munuera; Critic and Curator at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices; Faculty Bard College
Rachely Rotem; Co-Founder MODU Architecture; Faculty Yale University
Praditi Dinesh Singh; Urbanist, Disaster + Resilience Researcher
Nada Taryam; Founder Architecture + Other Things; BEEAH Group Sharjah UAE
Anthony Titus; Principal, TITUS Studio; Faculty and Coordinator, RPI Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Hrag Vartanian; Decolonial Curator; Art Critic Futurist; EIC/Co-Founder Hyperallergic