Lebbeus Woods on Why He Became an Architect

Architizer News

Lebbeus Woods on Why He Became an Architect

February 9, 2012

A slide from Woods’ introductory lecture in ARCHITECTONICS, First Year Studio at The Cooper Union.

Recently, we have been dwelling quite a bit on the ills of architecture school and the unspoken practices of the profession itself, much of which has painted a grim picture of a field that has often hinged itself on its distinct and determined enlightenment. Whether in response to the recent surge of doubt or not, admired architect, artist and avid blogger Lebbeus Woods recently released a two-part expose on why he became an architect. Woods’ intimate prose is a love letter to the arts; absent are the 71-year-old architect’s musings on buildings and bridges or ruminations on masterpieces of engineering and design. Instead, the seed that germinated the architect’s inclination to call himself an architect sprung from a youthful fascination with engravings, frescoes, oil paintings, and the artistic conception of divinity, salvation and light.

Woods recalls spending his childhood painting and also, significantly, leafing through images of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in Life Magazine and staring in awe at Gustave Doré’s 19th century engravings of Dante’s Inferno. He began to contemplate lightness and darkness and the “inexhaustible source of affecting ideas” that emerged from Western faith and its accompanying explosion of artistic renderings. As he writes in Part 1, his ideas and early fascinations have crystallized in retrospect: “[T]he arts have not been merely ornamental, but central to people’s struggle to ‘find themselves’ in a world without clarity, or certainty, of meaning. The very different worlds of Dante and Michelangelo testify equally to this condition, and led me slowly, inevitably towards architecture.” Read on.

Gustave Doré‘s illustrations date from the latter 19th Century of the Roman poet Virgil leading Dante to the Inferno. As Woods explained, above the opening to the Inferno is inscribed “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”

In Part 2, Woods expresses a personal sentiment that many architects might claim to share: he was not content with life as he found it, and he was determined to improve it. Alas, as with many professional architects, he found the need to unite his affection for the arts and their elusive transcendentalism with “something really useful that people would be willing to pay for.” He, like everyone else—transformed by art or not—needed to make a living. As he began experimenting with the geometries he made with his t-square, triangle, protractor and compass in high school, he saw that “the order of geometry that could actually be made by anyone was its own form of exaltation, a lifting of thought and action out of the messiness of the everyday to a realm of truth, at least a human truth.”

His personal association of light and truth with geometry ultimately pushed him in the direction of architecture, sending him through engineering school, architecture school, and spitting him out at 24 to work for several corporate offices before working independently. But this path, which has drawn so much attention in this day and age, is almost an afterthought in Woods’ story. To him, it was his persistent love of drawing and painting and his incredible faith in the fine arts that grounded him in his career of choice. As he reiterates: “[I]t was the arts’ celebratory aspect, its exaltation of light, uniting its presence with profoundly important concepts—the struggle to be fully human—that touched me so deeply. Works of art could lift experience out of the commonplace to a realm of meaning that, for me, would otherwise be unreachable.”

From Woods’ Architecture-Sculpture-Painting series, 1978. All images courtesy Lebbeus Woods.