Lebbeus Woods Architectural Woodwork

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 dedicated his manifesto pamphlet War and Architecture, Rat I Arhitektura to the Bosnian capital in 1993. To read it is to immerse yourself in an ethic which is also a poetics of Romanticism: an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. Sarajevo, 1992, "architecture resisting change, even as it flows from it, struggling to crystallize and be eternal, even as it is broken and scattered...".The American architect and critic's idea is that the physical and existential remains of the destruction in Sarajevo should be preserved as a habitat for new organisms that will live among the ruins of a war which so many people - Westerners, do-gooders, hard-liners - have been forgotten, avoided or erased from memory. These organisms will inhabit the scars of war like parasites, leave wounds open, courageously accept the pain of the present, the recent past, the dead.The forms he imagines are anything but attractive. He designs huge insects, uses the words of animal life and of sickness: the scar, the scab. Acceptance of the scar is an acceptance of existence. Lebbeus Woods was a war correspondent in Bosnia for the Japanese architecture magazine a+u, a voluntary architect-on-the-spot.