“Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype”. Exhibition at SCI-Arc.

The Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles presents the exhibition called “Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype”; it will also complete the Earthwave installation, an “inhabitable drawing” originally designed by the great, visionary Woods, who passed away last year, but never built.



The installation at the SCI-Arc in Los Angeles opened to the general public on 28 June and will remain on display until December, as a prelude to the exhibition called “Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype”, a tribute to the visionary architect, artist and professor Woods, who passed away last year.



“Earthwave” is the actual realisation of one of the 20 drawings that he prepared for the 2009 Biennale of Architecture and Art of the Mediterranean in Reggio Calabria, Italy. These sketches reinterpreted area buildings destroyed in the terrible 1908 earthquake.





The temporary structure includes four parallel steel frame “swarms”, each frame in turn penetrated by a field of steel vectors. Acting as the backdrop for the architect’s dystopian vision in the Arts District, it invites visitors to conceptually inhabit this urban sculpture in a scale of 1:1, relating it closely to the work of Woods.



The main exhibition opens on 11 October 2013 and it takes its name from a quote by Eric Owen Moss. When Lebbeus Woods lectured at SCI-Arc in 2003, he was introduced by Eric Owen Moss, who defined his work with the words “Silence. Exile. Cunning.” referring to James Joyce’s literary alter-ego Stephen Daedalus: “That is Wood's archetype”.

Lebbeus Woods' “Earthwave” installation at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, USA
www.sciarc.edu
Year: 2013
Photography: by Joshua White/Courtesy of SCI-Arc and Yuan Mu/Courtesy of SCI-Arc (Opening)