Lebbeus Woods’s period of greatest notoriety coincided more or less with my student years. His extraordinary drawings were much admired and often copied; his concepts of open-ended and parasitic structures were hugely influential. I attended the Bartlett School of Architecture during the Peter Cook years, when Woods was a frequent visitor and something of a guru.

All of which is to describe a landscape in which Woods figured prominently, although it wasn’t one in which I particularly participated. I was heading in a different direction and it wasn’t until I came across his blog, begun in 2007, that I developed a more personal appreciation of his work.

The first thing that struck me then was that he was writing a blog at all. For someone of his stature it seemed a remarkably generous gesture. It was words written for free for anyone to read, uncommissioned, and put out in the world without much fanfare or pretense. It helped that it was a genuinely exciting period for architecture blogs, lots of new voices eager to take part in a free-flowing and dynamic conversation. Blogs democratized architectural criticism. Suddenly, you didn’t need an editor or a commission from a magazine to be a critic. Nor did you need to spend time making a fanzine and finding a way of distributing it as previous generations of ambitious young architects and writers had done. Instant global access was possible and the words stood on their own merits. A number of interesting young writers, many of them now established authors, built their careers from blogging.

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