Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #657902 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 40 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Serbo-Croation

Customer Reviews

The Architecture of Catastrophy
The work of Lebbeus Woods has always fascinated me. From the initial shear beauty of his art of alternate built landscapes both familiar and alien to his in-depth commentary.

This small book pulls some big punches, revealing the examined paper architectural propositions expressing the underlying spirit and intent of the buildings within their context, altered, re-revealed to that society's 'catastrophe.'

Well worth a buy for students to Architects to all those wishing escapism back to simple truths, and to delight in the satisfaction gleaned. Only wish the inside images were colour!

inspirational
Woods is as much philosopher and urban planner as architect in the traditional sense. His buildings rip open the landscape of the ordered grid, and also open new possibilities about what it means to inhabit a space. The functions of some of his ideas for buildings are obscure even to him. He is constantly trying to deconstruct the politics of architecture and it's place in history. He actively embodies Heidegger's idea that "dwelling means to recieve the sky", except in his dwellings it also means to recieve the ground, and to actively take part in constructing your world.

Truly remarkable little book.
In this work I have seen the necessity for Woods' architecture to exist; where before I had only seen compelling drawings. Lebbeus Woods has dedicated this manifesto to the city of Sarajevo, and to all cities which bear the signs of armed conflict on their walls. He states that the emergence of a new architecture is especially crucial in Sarajevo where the architecture was the target of the attackers (from within) who meant to destroy the culture there in all of its manifestations. The architecture of that culture, the places of worship and of social congregation, became the primary target for the ethnic genocide. As much as the bodies of the people, the architecture was destroyed for its significance as the public body. Therefore it is the architecture which must give a physical presence to these atrocities. Woods makes it clear that it is the responsibility of the architecture to preserve the memory of the destruction- not in a sentimental or memorial manner- but in the same manner as the life of cities has been preserved through use and adaptation throughout history. The war is part of the reality of the place and therefore should not be erased. This work also resists the glorification of war of the Italian Futurists, and the `tabula rasa' erasure of existing conditions of the Modernists. This is a work which acknowledges growth and destruction in the same breath. It is existential in its acceptance of reality and its means of building with it.... not nihilistic. It is existential in that it knows no reality other than what is there, but is not fully convinced by its authority. It revels in the multitudinous nature of the contemporary world, of the present. Unlike the Modernists, Woods does not intend to reinvent the city but to allow the city to be more itself. This work, his infamous drawings, is an attempt to recognize the reality of a place through actualization of events.... By building in and upon the ruins he remakes them into the living substance of the city, leaving no trace unexposed.