Lebbeus Woods, Futuristic Architect, Dies
Lower Manhattan Lebbeus Woods The influential architect, who once proposed a traveling space station to memorialize Albert Einstein, died today. Lebbeus Woods, an experimental architect, artist, and theoretician, has died. He passed away in his sleep this morning, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman reported on Twitter. Woods toiled away at the intersection of science fiction and architecture, favoring big-concept paper projects over the quotidian limitations of brick and mortar. He proposed a traveling space station to memorialize Albert Einstein, a dark underworld beneath the streets of Manhattan (see top image), and a new San Francisco waterfront sculptured in the aftermath of an earthquake. For Woods, architecture was a way of reconsidering our basic assumptions about the built environment. As Geoff Manaugh, of the architecture site BLDGBLOG, wrote: Woods's work is the exclamation point at the end of a sentence proclaiming that the architectural imagination, freed from constraints of...