Its very hard to quantify influnce, but I would say Danny-boy, Wolf Prix, Zaha, Gehry and even Eisenman himself all show Decon/Woods influences. I think however that Woods was more part of this movement than an influence on it. I think at this point many of the people Woods influenced, like me, are still quite young and not exactly building that much yet. Same goes largely for Eisenman.

Toronto ROM:





Gehry's serpentine:





Prix's Welt:





But again, the question. Was Woods an influence on these architects? Or were they part of the same movement that was influenced by something else? I think the latter is true.

I disagree strongly with Kazys Varnelis when he says: The boom has not only produced almost no good buildings, by distracting architects from the proper task of developing the discipline, it has set our task back by over two decades. There is almost no speculative work worth mentioning, almost no serious research going on in a field that begs to be rejuvenated. A few people, generally at the intersection of architecture and media, do interesting work. But they don't get the attention they deserve and are constantly tempted by industry money. The architects I respect the most today work outside of the traditional field. They make exhibitions, set designs, graphics, program computers, and make maps but they tend to be abandoning a dying field rather than applying the defibrillation it needs. The boom has undone architecture. There are no new ideas and architecture is hurting.

This is all a matter of perspective. I personally hated the unlivable car-wreckages of Eisenman, Woods, Coop Himmelb(l)au and their ilk. And I love the tectonic inquisitiveness of many Spanish, Swiss, and Dutch architects such as OMA, MVRDV, Zumthor, Herzog & De Meuron, etc.

People like Varnelis confuse formal games with making architecture. But architecture is not about who produces the next wacky form. It's about so many other things: program, materiality, experience, site.

So for me, the last ten years have been the strongest period for architecture since the 1960s. We moved away from playing semantic and pictorial games like Eisenman does, and toward an architecture that is mature, detailed, experientially interesting, and philosophical.

We moved away from a masturbatory pseudo-philosophy of formalism, and toward a true tectonic philosophy.

SMIB: I believe most of wood's most famous/influential drawings were done in the late 80's/early 90's. Specifically in reference to Bosnia and post cold-war berlin.

FW1: Couldn't agree more.

I will say, however, that the promise of Koolhaas's urbanistic focus in the late 1990s has dissolved. We don't seem to be having a coherent conversation about the city any longer.

I believe that's for two reasons. We have a reactive approach to urbanism in the wake of 9/11. We're no longer proactive or generative regarding the city—we only wait for catastrophes and events to change it.

And the internet, for all its promise, has circumvented any sort of sustained, true dialog. Everyone blogs in the dark these days, or yells at each other from behind the veils of anonymity that forums like this create. The quantitative possibilities for connection are greatly increased, but the qualitative dialogue has been greatly reduced.

So I suppose I do agree with Varnelis in part after all. I just think people like Eisenman were overrated.

it's a timely discussion given the economic climate. over time it seems that go-go times when everybody is flush with work and money is flowing, the work is less speculative and more about getting things done. often that means that the forward-thinking work of a previous decade starts to become reality but the NEXT forward-thinking work tends to not get developed. paper architecture is less economically necessary for a burgeoning designer if architects are getting paid to build.

so maybe now we'll see a shift back. we're coming on leaner times, firms are laying off, others are retrenching and will have a lot MORE time to spend on FEWER projects. those projects may get to be more thoughtful, more rigorous, and there may be time left over for truly speculative next-gen stuff.

it's all a function of how much time you've got to spend on something. or, put more bluntly:

1."When your ass is on fire, patience is not a virtue."
2."When pursuing excellence, patience is a virtue."
3."There is no question of excellence when your ass is on fire."

time is the factor then, i guess, rather than speculation. and whether a project is INTENDED to be speculative or intended to be built.

woods spends a lot of time on each idea, refining it until it's right because he can. his 'production schedule' is based on publication, not hitting landmarks toward making a %age of construction profitable. he's a thinker, and that's what his income is based on.

projects in most offices, whether ultimately built or not, seldom have the luxury of a lot of time. schematic design has an end point, beyond which the project becomes a money loser. same with design development. if the client intends to build the project, there's usually a target date for construction start which puts a definitive end to the potential for wallowing in design time.

anarchitecture, was published in 1992. it contains most of his earlier and most influential works. I'm a proud owner of this limited edition monograph. I bought it for $38 now it's on sale in the UK for 339 pounds. I think that shows a bit of capitalistic influence.

A disctinction is yet to be made, and I'm not so sure if I'm what I'm going to say makes sense or not

The thread originally started with eisenman and woods,, and I find it troublesome putting the two in one category (along with zaha, gehry, co-op and especially Morphosis). The difference is simple (if its really true), woods never meant to build, or translate his drawings into built form, while the others did, even when their drawings were "non-traditional- like Zaha's earlier paintings,, or eisenmans diagrams, which I always find difficulty in understanding,, but thats just me

this kind of set's both their influences apart
does this make sense?


"if Woods and Eisenman are indeed so influential, then perhaps they should be held accountable."

and yes, I blame eisenman!!

lebbeus woods' designs are bold and uncompromising almost exclusively as a result of not being reliant on someone paying to build his designs. he is positioning himself on one extreme end of the spectrum to see what can be produced. it is not to say that architects who build lack vision.

absolutely...

bldgblog

...from the interview: a rethinking of ground, property lines, and the memorial.

he produces intriguing thoughts as much as beautiful drawings.

In the 80's, Massimo Scolari was producing similarly seductive drawings...





perhaps his vision was more nostalgic than futuristic...
in any case, it seemed to fit what was happening at the time (po-mo, rationalism), but maybe he didn't go beyond just an aesthetic either.

I agree with the critique that Shock Me seems to be levelling against Woods: that his designs, and even his ideas, are primarily aesthetic. He seems inspired by the aesthetics of war and of wreckages, but is there a larger social critique inherent in his work?

I've become skeptical or tired of designs that are radical in form only. This is an easy way out of being truly thoughtful as an architect. The manipulation of forms, whether on a canvas or in rhino, requires an aesthetic eye but little else. It puzzles me when critics like Sanford Kwinter and Jeff Kipnis talk about formal architects as revolutionaries.

Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, or Rem Koolhaas offer a coherent socio-cultural program in their work. People like Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, and yes, even Peter Eisenman do not. All they offer is the shock of new forms—a shallow shock.

there isn't/wasn't a specific critique-to-form correspondence in woods' work. yes, he's developed an aesthetic through which to illustrate his critical positions. but that doesn't mean you throw out the critical positions, dismissing them as aesthetic.

he's looked at troubled aspects of society - or places that have a history of trouble but have new potential - and broadcast visions for their reclamation and rebirth. possibly inspired his audience to pay more attention to the potential inherent in their difficult histories. there is a certain socio-cultural aspect in that, even though he's not offering some prescriptive solution for fixing the world like corb. (note how often these modernist efforts made bigger messes anyway. so much for prescriptions.)

like we tend to do, we're responding only to woods' seductive illustrations, ignoring the fact that most come with texts that establish the context for them and situate them as critiques. woods may not be revolutionary, but he's certainly been a sort of 'sand in the vaseline' activist, showing us things we might ignore or find ugly without his shining a light on them.

a rigorous and holistic (self-)critical vision for architecture can, and in many instances does, occur while designing and/or building buildings. the ability to carve out the space to exercise this critical stance is what makes some architects truly exceptional - because it's difficult and rare within the context of the profession. and it's still a luxury, a product of standing out of the day-to-day fray.

Steven, can I work for you? I have no issue moving to Louisville.

i'm in more of the 'ass-is-on-fire' profession than anything resembling what leb does, apu. but, hey, we look at every resume...

well no one's exactly adopted the woods' aesthetic...

shock, by your criteria, what architect could you say has gone beyond providing an aesthetic for their critical position? for point of comparison, lets talk about the architect of architects, corbusier:

corbusier introduced the aesthetic of mass production. he didn't invent mass production. he celebrated the exuberance of the machine which in hindsight has been more destructive than good. i think for woods, he recognizes the destructive potential of the machine and tries to reconfigure it, producing an aesthetic of war and offers a critique of such a world, which is not dated to me, but highly relevant given all the current wars being waged.

There is little point to being critical simply for the sake of being critical, and Varnelis seems to be traveling that road. I think very few of the architects we celebrate are worth listening to as cultural or social critics. The modernists provided a critique and a forward looking ideology, since then, we have had nothing but crap, reactionary movements aspiring to match the sophistication of the philosophy's they are indebted to. What does Gehry, Morphosis, etc say that is genuine in terms of its critique, instead they sell an aesthetic dressed up in critique. IN academia, architects need to start chasing after "IDEAS" not representational mind games.

At what point did an ideology become a requirement to be influential? Perhaps we should start looking at the reasons for conflicting or absent ideologies at this point in time, rather than bemoaning the lack of a single coherent one or treating the current state of the world as if it should be operating the same way it did 90 years ago or even 30 years ago. Maybe as the world's organization changes, that of architectural thought might too?