History is now

The best part of history, Goethe said, is that it inspires. This is a maxim by which all creative people have lived and worked, including those who become creative because they have no choice. Willful destruction obviates the burdening weight of history, leaving only the liberating elixir of its inspiration. History is now. The accumulated remnants of the past are important elements in culture, and in the individual's existence, but exist only to be transformed into the material of the present. Willful destruction is an attack on history that at the same time drives its survivors to react by elevating history to a near-religious importance. Whenever this happens, history becomes pernicious, infecting the present with the odor of the dead.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 29

Progress, quantity and quality

Progress becomes quantitative and tends to delay indefinitely the turn from quantity to quality – that is, the emergence of new modes of existence with new modes of reason and freedom.

Herbert Marcuse, quoted in Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 22

Cartesian logic

The most intractable problem in applying radically inventive architectural thinking comes not so much from the invincibility of the prevailing system of reasoning as from an intrinsic flaw in that system's structure. Cartesian logic posits the existence of fundamental dualities that can never, by its own rules, be entirely rationalized, just as the orthogonal frame can never be completely stabilized. Thus, presumed opposites remain unreconciled. So it is with the "man versus nature" paradigm. From this follows the belief that it is rational to tame or defeat nature – including "human nature," the source of all uncivilized, unsocialized behavior – by insisting on applying an abstract spatial system even when it has been proven inadequate in coping with particular conditions.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 21

The poetic and the paradox

Only through aesthetic evocations of the paradoxical – in other words, through the poetic – can such contraries as war and peace, construction and destruction, suffering and pleasure be resolved without a loss of creative tension. In this sense, if in no other, Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that "the word can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon." And it is true for societies at least as much as for individuals. This is what is meant finally by the term "culture," the highest pinnacle of which is invariably occupied in any society by conscious manifestations of the poetic.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) p. 22

Broken buildings

Wherever buildings are broken by the explosion of bombs or artillery shells, by lack of maintenance or repair, by fire or structural collapse, their form must be respected in its integrity, embodying a history that must not be denied. In their damaged state they suggest new forms of thought and comprehension, and new conceptions of space that confirm the potential of the human to integrate with the building, to be whole and free outside of any pre-determined, totalizing system. The new spaces of habitation constructed on the existential remnants of war and natural disaster do not celebrate the destruction of an established order, nor do they symbolize or commemorate it. Rather they accept with pride what has been suffered and lost, but also what has been gained. They build upon the shattered form of the old order a new category of order inherent only in present conditions, within which existence feels its strengths, acknowledges its vulnerabilities and failures, and faces up to the need to invent itself as though for the first time, thus seizing the means to continuously refresh and revitalize itself. There is an ethical and moral commitment in such an existence, and therefore a basis for community.

Lebbeus Woods, Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) pp. 15-16

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

Words and doing

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear.

[...] I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) pp. 160, 162

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind – and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) p. 38

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Vintage, 2004) p. 34

I'd say we all have a dead child within us. We don't die once, we have already died several times over.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)

Boltanski: Well, I'd say that there are very few subjects in art, and these are looking for God, asking questions about death and love and sex. I'm working around the idea of vanitas, a huge subject in art. You are somebody, but if I kill you, you will become an awful body in a bloody sheet, an object. I find that idea very strange and unclear and it's a question I often think about. I also think that our relationship with death and dying these days is not good at all. Fifty years ago one's grandfather, say, would die at home, and the grandchild would see the grandfather's dead face. The fact of dying was inside the fact of living. Now we've become ashamed of dying, we want to forget that we're going to die. Dying has become an accident. But I think it's important to speak about it as it's the only thing we can really be sure of. We are all going to die. We also have a problem with the fact of killing. For example, I eat meat but I would never dream of killing an animal. But I think if we eat meat, we have to accept that being alive means that we kill things around us. But we forget these basic aspects of our humanity.

Garb: But there's a difference between speaking about death as one of the grand themes of life, and confronting one's own death. Is making art about death yet another defence against the question of your own mortality?

Boltanski: I'm sure of it. When I told you at the beginning of the interview that I was 'dead' already, it was to do with avoiding death. If you are already dead then you don't have to die.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)

We can no longer speak of wisdom. Only the products of its decay remain. There are two: one is the rumour about the true things (a sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete); the other product of this diathesis is folly – which, to be sure, has utterly squandered the substance of wisdom, but preserves its attractiveness and assurance, which rumour invariably lacks.

Walter Benjamin, 'Max Brod's Book on Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 142

To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.

Franz Kafka, quoted in Walter Benjamin 'Franz Kafka' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 126

It is a desire to stand in the ritual unfolding of the world that inspires me to build, rather than only wander and see, for to build is to participate more fully in the great cycles of natural change. In building, I do not propose a return to nature, much less a return to primitivism, but an alignment of modern technology, including that of architecture, with cycles of change and the great powers both active and latent in the world.

Lebbeus Woods, Origins (Architectural Association, 1985) p. 42

In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. Though concealed and fragmentary, it is an active force in life as the symbolized thing itself, whereas it inhabits linguistic creations only in symbolized form. While that ultimate essence, pure language, in the various tongues is tied only to linguistic elements and their changes, in linguistic creations it is weighted with a heavy, alien meaning. To relieve it of this, to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation. In this pure language – which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant by all languages – all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 80