Lebbeus Woods, who died last year at age 72, was among the most singularly gifted and stubbornly consistent architects in American history. His fantastically dense drawings in pencil and graphite imagined not just new kinds of buildings–some burrowed into the earth and others floating in the air or through space–but new cities and new worlds. Though he is often connected with the Deconstructivist movement and with architects like Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, and Daniel Libeskind, his work also directly recalls earlier figures and precedents in architecture, from Piranesi to Archigram.
If Woods's talent was plain to see, his legacy and what it means for practicing architects remain less so, as a stirring if incomplete new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes clear. Organized by Joseph Becker and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, assistant curators in the museum's architecture and design department, the show (which runs through June 2) was in the works well before Woods died last fall. It is packed full of examples of his often breathtaking talents as a draftsman and conjurer of alternative architectural universes.
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