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.