ubiwar . conflict in n dimensions

Everyone should have a favourite architect, which Mrs. Ubiwar finds slightly disturbing, and mine is Lebbeus Woods. Principally famous for never having built anything, he is for my money the most significant architect of a generation. This is Woods on Woods:

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. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no ’sacred and primordial site’. I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then ‘melt into air’. I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhoutte against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city. [via Motel de Moka]

Having mentioned Paul Virilio and the Accident yesterday, I was pleased to see that Woods also had Virilio in mind when he decided to blog Junk:

I was immediately drawn to the large metal scrap piles that lay near the tracks. Looking back on that attraction, I can understand it as a reflection of sensibilities deeply felt. Complexity. Richness of form. Accident. Undesigned design (they are entirely of human origin). The extraordinary in the ordinary. But also, the mystery of objects, in our apprehension of them, and in their origins, their originality (every scrap pile is different, even if, at first glance, they all look the same). How does their sameness/ difference call the reality of memory into question? And, it occurred to me then and still occurs to me, what that I cannot see is inside the junk pile? Are there different things piled inside, or only more of what is outside? In either case, what does light and darkness matter to them? Then, of course, there is the question of space. Space is created by objects, between and around them. What is the nature of these spaces? Do they have any meaning? For sure, they are a-systematic - or are they the products of a new system? Or, are they just meaningless accidents, the products of a randomness that human beings cannot devise, except (as Paul Virilio claims) indirectly, by creating the technological products that end up as scrap thrown into piles along railroad tracks? Is this, in fact, their meaning for us? Clearly, the scrap pile is loaded with meaning as the detritus of human striving, but is its meaning something more? Is it a model for a human future, in both negative and positive senses? Are they piles simply waiting to be recovered and converted into new objects, or, can we somehow inhabit them, and why would we?

About the last thing we need is either Iraq or Afghanistan becoming the ‘detritus of human striving’ but I think the implication is clear. Get your act together, or that’s exactly what we risk.

[Lebbeus Woods, Injection Parasite, Sarajevo, 1992-93]

Read two superb interviews with Lebbeus Woods by Geoff Manaugh and Bryan Finoki.