For Lebbeus Woods

"Lebbeus was the living proof of Derrida’s theory that often a small sketch can have more influence on the world than a large building.

And as such we will think of him as a grand architect without built work, but his designs – hey!: they are designs and not drawings! – his conceived buildings and forms had massive impact, which conquered the drawing boards of innumerable students and architects and which put the question about the contents of a future architecture into the foreground. (I notice that I wrote DRAWING board.)

Lebbeus’ forms were never lacking content, because he could only generate new timely forms with new content – everything else to him were empty building gestures, architectureless surface. Senseless to bother about them. Today we call them Lady Gaga-aesthetics.

When 20 years ago we explained this to each other in the bar of the small airport in Santa Monica in a late afternoon, we had already emptied the Champagne supply of the bar.

But it was crystal clear, like the Roederer Cristal, what he meant by saying: if we architects cannot give impact for new content, we should leave it – the architecture.

We won’t Leb. Promised!"

Wolf D. Prix / COOP HIMMELB(L)AU

source: archdaily