Architecture Loses Two Giants

At BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh has a remembrance of Woods, the visionary architect, artist, writer, and teacher, who trained with Eero Saarinen in the 1960s and passed away on Tuesday, at the age of 72. "Lebbeus will probably be missed for his formal inventiveness: buildings
on stilts, massive seawalls, rotatable buildings that look like
snowflakes. Deformed coasts anti-seismically jeweled with buildings.
Tombs for Einstein falling through space," says Manaugh. "But this would be to miss the motivating absence at the heart of all
those explorations, which is that we don't yet know what the world is,
what the Earth is-whether or not there even is a world or an Earth or a
universe at all-and architecture is one of the arts of discovering an
answer to this. Or inventing an answer to this, even flat-out
fabricating an answer to this, meaning that architecture is more
mythology than science." 

"Lebbeus Woods should be on the same sorts of lists as James Joyce or
John Cage, a person as culturally relevant as he was scientifically
suggestive, seething with ideas applicable to nearly every discipline." 

Late last week came news that John M. Johansen, the last surviving member of the Harvard
Five, died at the age of 96. In The New York Times, Fred A. Bernstein examines the impact that Johansen and his Modernist colleagues had during their heyday in the 1950s and 60s. "In the postwar years Mr. Johansen and four other young Modernist
architects - Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores and Eliot
Noyes, all with connections to Harvard's architecture school - dotted
southwestern Connecticut with houses conveying the optimism of the time.
Hugely influential in the field, the buildings were seen in museum
exhibitions and on the covers of Life and Look magazines." 

But while some of his colleagues worked in a minimalist vein, Johansen produced some of Brutalism's most notable buildings, including the now-threatened Morris A. Mechanic Theater in Baltimore (1967) and the Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City (1970).