I C A R C H International Competitions in Architecture: A House For Lebbeus Woods

Yarışmada son teslim tarihi 31 Aralık 2012.

“We were friends, for a good number of years.

And he died on October 30th, in his sleep, in New York City.

Strange, when ‘Sandy’ attacked, violently, the East Coast and New York…

Who was Lebbeus Woods…?

It is hard to tell… time will settle the matter… as with so many other things, people, etc…

He drew unbelievably… in a certain way he was some kind of a modern ‘Piranesi’, although a certain reference to old masters of the craft of drawing wouldn’t seem inappropriate.

I always thought and felt that Lebbeus was a father without children (although he did have several children) and a child without a father… maybe he was not alone in this situation.

When I first visited him in his studio in New York City, downtown, there it was a ‘romantic’ place, with a broken large window, a productive maddening disorder, and drawings, drawings, drawings… everywhere.

He was not quite understood in The Brave New World, and not quite appreciated, for a good number of years.

Yet, many people, especially young architects, revered him.

Not only that he drew remarkably well, but he was also a thinker.

His words were felt thoughts, or thought out feelings.

He was attracted by myth, more perhaps than he himself knew.

We met at Storefront for Art and Architecture, where he came to see me, at the opening of my exhibition ‘Architecture and Consciousness’. This is how we met.

We became friends.

Now he is gone.

But we have to continue.

We have to go on…!

So I invite you to imagine A HOUSE FOR LEBBEUS WOODS.

For this ‘cranky optimist’ as Peter Cook called him.

Can we do it…? Can we be, like him, ‘cranky optimists’…?

Design A HOUSE FOR LEBBEUS WOODS.

Now that he is dead.

We accept ANY work, ANY size and ANY format. While our competitions are essentially continuously open, since they are mainly competitions with our own selves, we do have a deadline in this case: December 31st, 2012. We will publish all the works received, but the winner will receive a CD signed by Lebbeus Woods, that he sent me some years ago, containg some of his works.”