Lebbeus Woods, “Quake City, from San Francisco: Inhabiting the Quake” (1995) (Image via sfmoma.org) (click to enlarge)
We may stay awake in our sleep and write what we read in dreams.
On the night of 8 December, three days after viewing MoMA PS1’s Greater New York show, I dreamt “I” toured alive inside the drawings of no-topian architect Lebbeus Woods, indispensably exhibited there.
The lines below visited me in short successive spells, walking through his past-date oneiric future. Excepting his Light Pavilion installation (2013 Chengdu, China), no design by Woods was ever realized.
At crux, he so radicalized himself that theory outstripped matter, baring modernism’s phantom menace in structures too teratological to be built — yet. Dare. Zardoz? Impact Ozymandias. See his inhabited high crisis preen and shudder.
Renaissance Sci-Fi
We were on a desert planet.
The black knight from the chessboard
Hooked across a plain. Church
On a beach. I’d never seen Tang
Hexagrams fashioned with such ease.
(For Lebbeus Woods, 1940-2012: all lines from dreams)
Greater New York runs October 11, 2015–March 7, 2016 at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens).
