Lebbeus Woods was an original thinker. You can’t say that about most people: We are born copycats (what species isn’t), and becoming otherwise requires serious effort. Staying otherwise is the work of a lifetime. Such work is also called thought, and for Woods—the late, iconoclastic architect who engaged politics, philosophy, and speculation to argue for a different future—thought manifested through language and drawing, model and collage, teaching and criticism, and his own muscular hybrids of these pursuits. His visual style was entirely singular, too, such that describing it is as futile as trying to imitate it. (The unfamiliar reader should start with 1980’s Pamphlet Architecture #6, Einstein Tomb, and grab a flask.) But describing his thought: This is a worthwhile task.
Undercurrents, which was on view at a83 over the summer, staged a dialectic between two projects by Woods, created at either end of a decade: Turbulence (1991–92) and The Storm (2001–2). The first took primary form as a series of drawings; the second, as a gallery-size installation at Cooper U…
