The peak mentality

Why do we need to identify certain things as peaks? Why isn't the fabric more important than peaks? It should be. Why can't the fabric of our so-called common life be the peak [of human achievement]? Why do we have to go to churches to have a peak experience, to a great temple in Greece – I am against this trivial peak-thinking, this peak-mentality in art or in architecture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Round Table Discussion: Positions In Art' in Positions in Art (MAK, 1994) p. 148

Modernist architecture

Modernist architecture, just as the positivism that formed its foundations, was as single layered and hierarchical as the damaged cultural tissue it claimed to erase. Modernist architecture was too classical in its knowledge, too tied to cause-and-effect conceptions of process, too slavish in its worship of the machine (and its deterministic processes) to embody the chaotic spirit of the new age. Architecture, tied then and now to hierarchies of authority of both the left and the right, to modernist and postmodernist doctrines, has missed out on the revolution in knowledge that occurred in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and that continues today.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 15

FREEDOM: a state emptied of preconceived value, use, function, meaning; an extreme state of loss within which choice is unavoidable; a condition of maximum potential, realised fully in the present moment.
[...]
KNOWLEDGE: the invention of the world in all the complexity and multiplicity of its phenomena.
ARCHITECTURE: instrument for the invention of knowledge through action; the invention of invention.
[...]
HIERARCHY: a predetermined vertical chain of authority that works from the top down.
HETERARCHY: a spontaneous lateral network of autonomous individuals; a system of authority based on the evolving performances of individuals, eg, a cybernetic circus.
[...]
CONSTRUCTION: the invention of reality.
REALITY: a state necessitating the invention of construction.
OBJECTIVE/SUBJECTIVE: terms of dualism divorcing experience from reality.
[...]
BEAUTY: 'knowledge without interest'; ideas embodied in and transcended by forms.
[...]
MEANING: the free interaction of values.
[...]
RELATIVITY THEORY: the great destroyer of hierarchies; description of the world according to an observer.
[...]
CONSUMERISM: a state of becoming limited by the total entropy of a system.
MASS CULTURE: a system diminishing the autonomy of individuals; a state of undifferentiated nature within which the making of distinctions is difficult.
REVOLUTION: self-cancelling mass political machinations; the necessity of formlessness.
[...]
FORM: the condition of boundaries, perceived as exterior to self.
SPACE: the condition of boundaries, perceived as interior to self.
[...]
STRUGGLE: the essential condition of freedom.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Glossary' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 142

So long as the concept of hierarchy dominates architecture (as it presently does), architecture will stay rooted in classical models, at the urban and building scales alike. So long as architecture stays rooted in classical models (as it presently does), it will continue to express an old, even archaic, idea of knowledge. So long as architecture expresses another idea of knowledge than that which best serves the present conditions of living (as it presently does), architecture will be a regressive force in the world of human affairs, even of human existence itself.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Heterarchies' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 46

The difference between the hierarchical and the heterarchical city is the difference between being and becoming.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 11