Lebbeus Woods Quotes About Architecture

• Architects are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to "think outside the box." Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box?

  Lebbeus Woods

  Hate, Thinking, People

• I've always been interested in the idea of the artificial landscape. Reforming the landscape. Architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Ideas, Earth, Landscape

• 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.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Time, War, History

• I'm not interested in living in a fantasy world ... All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Real, Space, World

• Architecture is about ideas in the first place. You don't get to design until you have an idea.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Ideas, Design, Firsts

• Gravity is the insidious enemy of the animate.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Enemy, Architecture, Gravity

• Unlike the past decades, the present moment is lacking in architectural discourse.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Past, Architecture, Moments

• I can't honestly say where the inspiration for my work came from. I think it came from reading. It came from texts, from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, it came from, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre. These are the ideas that got me worked up and inspired. It wasn't so much the visual things that inspired me. Although, of course, there were plenty of painters in history that I admired all the way from Brueghel to Goya, to Picasso - because everything visual stimulates me.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Inspiration, Reading, Thinking

• I've always been interested, - if you look back at my work from the beginning, really - I've always been interested in the idea of the artificial landscape. Reforming the landscape. Architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface. We reshape the earth's surface, from architecture to paving streets, to parking lots and buildings that are really reforming the surface of the earth. Reforming nature, taking over what we find. And we're mushing it around and remaking a new earth - or, what we used to call Terra Nova.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Ideas, Landscape, Looks

• If there's going to be another movement, another direction in architecture, it has to engage people differently. Other than saying, here, look at this, isn't this amazing? It has to interactively involve them other than as spectators ... it has to engage them as creators.

  Lebbeus Woods

  People, Looks, Movement

• I think, you know, architecture should not just be something that follows up on events but be a leader of events ... by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Thinking, Leader, Political

  "Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods". Interview with Geoff Manaugh, www.bldgblog.com. October 3, 2007.

• A lot of my work is about questioning the stability and permanence of architecture, and, in turn, the stability of society.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Architecture, Stability, Questioning

• Architecture is a political act, by nature. It has to do with the relationships between people and how they decide to change their conditions of living.

  Lebbeus Woods

  People, Political, Architecture

  "Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods". Interview with Geoff Manaugh, www.bldgblog.com. October 3, 2007.

• If there is no idea in the drawing, there is no idea in the constructed project. That's the expression of the idea. Architects make drawings that other people build. I make the drawings. If someone wants to build from those, that's up to them. I feel I'm making architecture. I believe the building comes into being as soon as it's drawn.

  Lebbeus Woods

  Believe, Expression, Ideas

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