24 Facts About Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods was an American architect and artist known for his unconventional and experimental designs.

Lebbeus Woods first worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen as a field representative on the Ford Foundation building designed by Saarinen in New York City.

Lebbeus Woods produced paintings for the Indianapolis Art Museum during that period.

Lebbeus Woods designed a light pavilion in the Sliced Porosity Block, Chengdu, China with Steven Holl, and buildings in Havana, Cuba.

In 1988, Lebbeus Woods co-founded the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, a nonprofit institution devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice while promoting the concept and perception of architecture itself.

An exhibition of Lebbeus Woods' work, including his drawings, was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013.

Lebbeus Woods was a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Lebbeus Woods's designs are politically charged and provocative visions of a possible reality; provisional, local, and charged with the investment of their creators.

Lebbeus Woods is best known for his proposals for San Francisco, Havana, and Sarajevo that were included in the publication of Radical Reconstruction in 1997.

Lebbeus Woods introduced the term freespace to propose an architectural approach freed from its conventional, predetermined and deterministic character, or else an architecture that instrumentalizes the ever-changing landscape of the modern era which is exposed to natural and man-made changes.

Lebbeus Woods developed a comprehensive theory about the wall as a structural element, giving it a multi-dimensional and totally different value from that of the boundary.

Multiplicity, for Lebbeus Woods, is directly linked to creation but it involves the possibility of chaos and violence.

Under such circumstances, Lebbeus Woods envisioned a world that is reborn and continuously transforming, thus responding to the ever-changing environment but to each individual's needs.

In 1988, as part of the Kyong Park exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, Lebbeus Woods proposed a solution of an architectural and political nature to address the crisis in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a strip of land that runs through the Korean Peninsula and almost bisects it, forming a neutral zone between the northern and southern part.

In 1995, Lebbeus Woods dealt with the urban fabric of Havana, in a period when Cuba was undergoing the consequences of a socio-political revolution that was turning into communism, of which the most important was the trade embargo by the United States.

Lebbeus Woods's work aimed to activate every citizen in Havana by proposing the practice of a radical architecture which he considered an extension of the revolution rather than an adaptation to old habits and conditions.

Lebbeus Woods' aimed to use the boundary in a dual way: on one hand, to protect and separate the urban fabric from the forces of nature; on the other hand, to create a new space on the extension of the old boundary between land and sea in an attempt to reconcile an artificial and a natural element.

Lebbeus Woods introduced the concept of a wall to propose the construction of an urban wall along the old city boundary in order to bring together the decomposition and redevelopment activities of Havana Vieja.

Lebbeus Woods's aim was to design rules and practices through which the institutes could be reorganized and reformed.

In 1990s Berlin, in order to reduce the importance of the Wall that divided the city into the Eastern and Western part, Lebbeus Woods envisioned the construction of an underground community along the U-Bahn lines, a project which again remained on paper.

Lebbeus Woods's goal was to encourage the citizens of Berlin to reconnect their own city and their fragmented culture.

Lebbeus Woods sued the producers of the film 12 Monkeys, claiming that they copied his work "Neomechanical Tower Chamber".

Lebbeus Woods won a "six figure sum", and allowed the film to continue to be screened.

Lebbeus Woods is credited as the "conceptual architect" for Alien 3, establishing the look and feel of the film, especially the opening sequence.