Lebbeus Woods Drawings for BCJ

Drawings done for BCJ by Lebbeus Woods back in the day.
Awesome!

Tenderlointreon Article - May 1st, 2009

Perception 1 - May 6th, 2009 2:00 p.m.

Walked up O'Farell street from Market. Felt things change at Mason st from shopping district to Tenderloin.

Sat and ate lunch at Larkin and O'Farell in children's park on a busy corner. There were no benches or places to sit. Probably for fear of the homeless sleeping there. The whole park is fenced off. People of all sorts walk by and look in.

Across the street is the New Century Theater, the sign reads:

$5 AMATEUR SHOW
EVERY SUN 9 PM
75 NAUGHTY HOTTIES
OPEN TIL 3 AND 4 AM

I feel uncomfortable and out of place. The traffic is noisy and I'm not looking forward to the walk back.

A child's laughter, however, seems to break the tension. Makes me wonder what life is like behind the facades and sidewalks that smell of piss.

Thesis Proposal w/ comments

Through the pursuit of an architecture thesis I hope to explore the dynamic and complex relationships present in San Francisco's Tenderloin Neighborhood. I am looking to engage in an architecture that critically examines, investigates, and redefines the nature of boundaries; seeing physical, cultural, and social scars and fissures as rich opportunities for creative spatial, formal, and psychological exploration. It is these sharp places, which are laden with tension and seem to be spaces of darkness, that I see as extremely potent and pregnant with possibility.

How can the architectural process be used as a catalyst for change by and for the people? How can a design proposal truly engage a demographic of people who have otherwise been forgotten, displaced, and swept between the cracks such as inhabitants of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. How can architecture get at the core of the human condition and critically respond by representing the spirit of a place* and the struggle of its people *? How can the Tenderloin's sharp and volatile history be honored and recognized in a way that uncovers and exposes transformative forces waiting to emerge from beneath the layers of oppression, abuse, and violence**?

* Many of these ideas have been explored in the context of nationhood; post-colonialism. It will be challenging to bring this discussion into a neighborhood. In "community" design some of these issues emerge, but from an anti architecture perspective.

** Is that recognition itself transformative? How would you test that? What is the potential for more direct efficacy w/r/t agency and ownership? Requires a nuanced definition of "public".

My goal is to challenge outdated structures and systems (such as?) through the exploration of new social and spatial typologies within the urban landscape. Not only do I want to design with these ideas in mind, I want to use the actual design process as a means to interact and engage in the community.

Branches of sociology have informed community-oriented design workshops: worth looking at if nothing else to critique, develop a position

I will start my preliminary research by drawing inspiration from Lebbeus Wood's work surrounding the Loma Prieta Earthquake, Rebecca Solnit's text "The Ruins of Memory", and Donna Haraways "A Manifesto for Cyborgs".

These are all interesting texts but they are all exploring very different topics

Studio I: Limantour Beach Dwelling

Order is the sun walking arced trails across the sky,
Downward is the rain’s motion as it is tumbles from the heavens,
It follows gravity’s pull, carving rivers in the earth.
Rapid is the wind racing up the slope from the sea,
It shifts; sporadic and indecisive,
Sometimes it brings slow fog, which lingers,
Sometimes it feeds a sparking fire.

Pathways of earth,
Pathways of sky.

What does it mean to be human and to dwell in this changing and dramatic landscape?
A landscape with expansive views? A landscape of rain, slope, ocean, fog, wind, fire and sun? What is the human pathway within this space?

Humans are caught in between-
are pulled by earth and by sky.
They are reminded by gravity that they are beings of the physical realm
And yet when they look to the sky their thoughts often transcend the physical.

The human is the horizon, a connection between earth and sky

This dwelling is about human experience in nature
It is about observing the balance of natural pathways and cycles

Studio I: Limantour Beach Site Study

This drawing was created by fusing two different studies; the first involved the site's physical topography and the second was about the path I took from the road down to the boundary of the site during our studio site visit.

For the first study I made a topographic model of the landscape and covered it with a layer of trace paper. Then I took blue ink and let it drip and run down the trace in three different locations starting at the top edge of the model. I repeated this step on 5 different layers of trace and then overlaid them in one drawing. This was to show how water would generally flow on the site. I think overall it was more of a poetic and artistic gesture than a rigorous analysis. I was interested in pathways on the site made by different elements. I was especially inspired by the maps of the Mississippi River.

The second study was a drawing of the path I took down to the tree which was at the border of the site. It shows vegetation was and the scope of my experience of the grass on either side of me as I walked down the hill.

By overlaying these drawings, I began to mold my understanding of the site as a layering of pathways which were both natural and man-made.

Summer Thesis Research Manual

1. Begin by looking to your own creative output.
Look at your portfolio of past creative work, writings from your history and theory courses, analyze the way you think and make, begin to articulate what specifically draws you to the discipline of Architecture. This is what will make your research unique and keep you interested in it. How has the work you have done begun to establish a specific and distinctive methodology for architectural experimentation? What problems have you consistently encountered?

Thesis Proposal: First Draft

Through the pursuit of an architecture thesis I hope to explore the dynamic and complex relationships present in San Francisco's Tenderloin Neighborhood. I am looking to engage in an architecture that critically examines, investigates, and redefines the nature of boundaries; seeing physical, cultural, and social scars and fissures as rich opportunities for creative spatial, formal, and psychological exploration. It is these sharp places, which are laden with tension and seem to be spaces of darkness, that I see as extremely potent and pregnant with possibility.

How can the architectural process be used as a catalyst for change by and for the people? How can a design proposal truly engage a demographic of people who have otherwise been forgotten, displaced, and swept between the cracks such as inhabitants of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. How can architecture get at the core of the human condition and critically respond by representing the spirit of a place and the struggle of its people? How can the Tenderloin's sharp and volatile history be honored and recognized in a way that uncovers and exposes transformative forces waiting to emerge from beneath the layers of oppression, abuse, and violence?

My goal is to challenge outdated structures and systems through the exploration of new social and spatial typologies within the urban landscape. Not only do I want to design with these ideas in mind, I want to use the actual design process as a means to interact and engage in the community.

Lebbeus Woods: War and Architecture

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 can you know mine.
Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.
(Woods, 1)

When society can no longer define itself in classically deterministic, objective terms, but only in terms of continuously shifting, fluid-dynamical fields of activity, then architecture must forsake the monumental, because there is no hierarchy to valorize, no fixed authority or body of knowledge external to human experience to codify. In such a society, the classical distinction between art and life disappears. Art and life flow together, inseparable. Architecture then concerns itself with fluid-dynamic structures: tissues, networks, matrices, heterarchies.
(Woods, 6)

Today, knowledge has caught up with the human potential to choose, to shape, day to day, its own presence within the presence of others. The human right to self-determination can today be enabled not only at an ideological and totalizing, a national or ethnic scale, but for each and every human being. Chaos is a complex, nonlinear form of order, and the intellectual tools of discerning and articulating it are today firmly in place. The development of new information and communication technologies resulting from existential knowledge has made it possible to comprehend a new form of order in chaos, one appropriate to present human conditions. Now it is possible to create complex, fluid, and multilayerd societies, rich with diversity and choice. For the moment these technologies are controlled by public and private hierarchies who use them as a means of domination from above, frustrating the emergence of a new and more fully human society. But that will change, in fact change has already begun. The building of new urban tissues where the old ones have been torn to pieces by war is one crisis point-- beyond the immediate provenance of hierarchies-- where the struggle to form the new, heterarchical societies will be engaged.
(Woods, 8)

The new cities demand an architecture that rises from and sinks back into fluidity, into the turbulence of a continually changing matrix of conditions, into an eternal, ceaseless flux -- architecture drawing its sinews from webbings of shifting force, from patterns of unpredictable movement, from changes of mind, alterations of position, spontaneous disintegrations and synthesis-- architecture resisting change, even as it flows from it, struggling to crystallize and be eternal, even as it is broken and scattered -- architecture seeking nobility of presence, yet possessed of the knowledge that only the incomplete can claim nobility in a world of the gratuitous, the packaged, the promoted, and the already sold -- architecture seeking nobility of persistence in a world of the eternally perishing, itself giving way to the necessity of its moment -- architecture writhing, twisting, rising, and pinioned to the unpredictable moment, but not martyred, or sentimental, or pathetic, the coldness of its surfaces resisting all comfort and warmth-- architecture that moves, slowly or quickly, delicately or violently, resisting the false assurance of stability and its death -- architecture that comforts, but only those who ask for no comfort -- architecture of gypsies, who are hounded from place to place, because they have no home -- architecture of circuses, transient and unknown, but for the day and the night of their departure -- architecture of migrants, fleeing the advent of night's bitter hunger -- architecture of a philosophy of interference, the forms of which are infinitely varied, a vocabulary of words spoken only once, then forgotten -- architecture bending and twisting in continual struggle against gravity, against time, against against against -- barbaric architecture, rough and insolent in its vitality and pride -- sinuous architecture, winding endlessly on and through a scaffolding of reasons -- architecture caught in sudden light, then broken in the continuum of darknesses -- architecture embracing the sudden shifts of its too delicate forms, therefore indifferent to its own destruction -- architecture that destroys, but only with the coldness of profound respect -- neglected architecture, insisting that its own beauty is deeper yet -- abandoned architecture, not waiting to be filled, but serene in its transcendence -- architecture that transmits the feel of movements and shifts, resonating with every force applied to it, because it both resists and gives way -- architecture that moves, the better to gain its poise -- architecture that insults politicians, because the cannot claim it as their own -- architecture whose forms and spaces are the causes of rebellion, against them, against the world that brought them into being -- architecture drawn as though it were already built-- architecture built as though it had never been drawn--
(Woods, 36)


Lebbeus., Woods,. War and architecture = Rat i arhitektura. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural P, 1993.