Curated by Jennifer Olshin, this exhibition brings together an impressive corpus of Woods’ drawings, focusing on three building projects created between 1984 and 1990. Together, these drawings represent a cache of ideas so radical and prescient that even today works that are over 30 years old offer students, architects, and thinkers all over the world, a never-ending springboard for architectural imagination.
Using a vast breadth of narrative, romantic, axiometric, schematic, or completely abstract visuals, Woods presents architecture that responds to society and within which society could engage in limitless possibilities. Epicyclarium is a complete thought experiment – designed to generate an evolving global image. Woods describes Epicyclarium as the “cure for a fever” to build a “new unity of form, idea, and experience.” As he wrote, “it is not meant to be a style of architecture per se, but in an evolution of consciousness, a co-ordination of hand and eye and mind with elemental forces acting in the world.”
Lebbeus Woods: Ecologies, 1984-1990 offers an opportunity to cross-reference these discrete series’ that each bear out Woods’ thesis; that drawing is neither a proposal nor a standard tool for communication, rather a means of exploration, for thinking and discovery at the micro and the macro-levels. Each starts with light, energy, matter, the cosmos, and each incorporates idiosyncrasies and verisimilitudes of humanity to challenge existing grids and offer solutions.
