PITTSBURGH, PA.- The Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art presents Lebbeus Woods: Experimental Architecture, the most comprehensive American exhibition ever of works by one of the most innovative and internationally acclaimed experimental architects working today. The exhibition, on view through January 16, 2005, is presented as an engulfing architectural experience, designed and installed by Woods and organized in collaboration with Carnegie Museum of Art curator of architecture, Tracy Myers. A dozen projects dating from 1987 to the present are represented in the exhibition through models, original drawings, photographs, and mural-sized digital reproductions of drawings. The exhibition also features a new, site-specific installation that Woods describes as a "drawing in space."

 

"The proposals of Lebbeus Woods are at the forefront of experimental work, and it is our distinct pleasure to present this installation at the Heinz Architectural Center," says Richard Armstrong, the Henry J. Heinz II director at Carnegie Museum of Art.

 

Better known abroad than in his native United States, Lebbeus Woods is a theorist who has devoted his career to creating radical new forms of space that are responsive to the uncertainty and continual shifts of contemporary society. Though speculative, his work is grounded in real-world conditions and meant to provoke new ways of thinking. The exhibition is a physical manifestation of his ideas.

 

"The kind of work that Lebbeus Woods does is very important to the architectural profession," Myers says, "and the sorts of questions he engages should be of interest to anyone who cares about the future of culture and society. In much the manner that scientific exploration advances understanding even when it produces inconclusive results, experimental architecture stretches the limits of what is thought to be tectonically possible despite the fact that it seldom produces buildings in the conventional sense. We encourage exhibition visitors to similarly stretch their minds and embrace Woods� challenging but stimulating ideas."

 

The Heinz Architectural Center�s exhibition spaces consist of a long "spine" corridor from which three small galleries and one large gallery radiate. Because the spaces vary in scale and shape, the exhibition is not installed in a uniform manner throughout the galleries but instead is conceived as a variety of experiences. A video interview of Woods located near the Center�s main entrance provides the context for the exhibition and an understanding of the architect and his work. Beyond the video there are no explanatory materials, and the visitor is left to a uniquely thought-provoking experience of what Woods calls "visual and spatial energy."

 

The first small gallery contains Berlin Free Zone, Woods� 1991 series of drawings that were created after the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. In them, Woods questions the social shifts in the newly reunited city and creates "freespaces"�individual "living labs" whose functions are determined by their users, rather than by the architect, and which come together into loosely formed and continuously changing communities. The 24 enlarged digital reproductions in this gallery are arranged end-to-end and shown as a frieze that is 76 feet long and 23 inches high.

 

Woods is an extraordinary draftsman, and the second small gallery houses 23 original drawings from Aerial Paris (1989) and several of Woods projects for Sarajevo (1993�1994). In the former, freespaces are held aloft from Paris by Earth�s electromagnetic field. The latter propose reconstructing the war-damaged city of Sarajevo by "healing" the ruined sections of buildings using elements made from the remnants of the destruction, so that they serve as signs of survival and reinvention. In both cases, Woods advocates living experimentally when new conditions demand it. "Experimental architecture is not for everyone," he says. "It is for people whose lives have been transformed by an experience."