The long-awaited exhibition Lebbeus Woods, Architect at the Drawing Center presents works spanning over 35 years of Lebbeus Woods’s radical architecture. The show features a dizzying array of transdisciplinary experiments with fields of light and tectonics in drawings, notebooks, loose sketches, collages, physical constructions, scale models, a full-scale drawing, and fragments of texts from publications, manifestos, and entries from his blog.
Exhibiting a body of work that constantly challenged the restraints of gallery spaces and the usual practice of hanging drawings on walls and exhibiting models on pedestals is a challenge for any curator. By the early 2000s Woods had moved away from publishing drawings in architecture publications and pamphlets towards the physical construction of tectonic fields and ephemeral installations, among them The Storm (2001) at the Cooper Union Houghton Gallery in New York, “The Fall” (2002) at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, and System Wien (2005) at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. Woods often joked that these exhibition spaces and their curators were his first clients, since they were willing to take risks to show architectural works that had no precedent.
