Perpetual Work in Progress

(as inspired by @jamesclar-  Twitter user)

Can it be True?  Yes- the man has a blog.

Lebbeus Woods is bigger than his time.  I cannot tell you how many aspiring architects were inspired by his illustrations when I was in school.  His drawings typically revolve around some traditional rectilinear builings or urban view being affected by some alien organic machine-like chamber or construct.  Many times this was attached to the buildings or grew out of the space.  I loved the dichotomy of this organic form piercing  the everyday mundane architectural mass.

In school we had a project that dealt with a “machine for architectural space”  I felt that his works showed a machine like presence that injects itself into our world and in doing so creates this solid/void relationship with the interspace between the two being as interesting as the object in question.  Our challenge was to build a machine that creates architectural space.  It could not use electrical power, but had to perform some action that either during its work or after affected the space around it in some fashion.  Many students created boxes and structures that opened or flipped when a mass was dropped during the presentation.  I took a different tact.  I chose to use a machine within a machine.  the most obvious was a pendulum clock which used weights for its power.

I took the clock mechanism and mounted it face down in the top with the chains for the weight attached to pulleys that went over the backside and hung down vertical again.  I also removed the pendulum and modified it so when the weight was attached it would move about 3 hours time in 3 minutes.

While you cannot see the mechanism in the photo (architectural portfolio excerpt) you can see the “arms” of the clock.  These are the interior and exterior drums that consisted of basswood frame and miscellaneous sheets of material with different transparent and translucent properties as well as mesh pieces that when acting together would cast shadows on the exterior vellum drum and further into the space when the lights are off in the space.  the light source is a long cabinet bulb that allowed the light to be vertical in the cylinder.  During the presentations while others had dropped their weights to active their machine and then talk about it, mine was able to operate during the entire duration of my presentation.

I have always been a huge fan of Lebbeus woods and his work still today affects my thinking about architecture and the environment in which we live.  His hand in 13 monkeys was obvious and even though I am not a huge horror fan, I will probably rent Aliens 3 when it comes out on Blu-ray just so I can see the sets that he supposedly had a hand in designing.

Here are some related links if you would like to find out more information about Lebbeus Woods and his works:

lebbeuswoods.net

Lebbeus Woods Blog @ Wordpress

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/arts/design/25wood.html

Wikipedia on Lebbeus Woods