Detroit Research Volume 1

198
Dequindre Cut
tendencies in urban architecture that sup port the
criticality of Detroit’s lessons in destruction. The
first is the work of experimental architect Lebbeus
Woods, a Michigan native living in New York who
has produced a re markable corpus of unbuildable
architectural fantasies. 9 In Woods’s imagined architecture,
destruction and detritus are integrated
into the form of building itself; no building can
survive its own tendency toward entropy, and this
is symbolically acknowledged through its extrinsic
form. In the late 80s, Woods was influenced by the
favelas of São Paolo to seek a practice that would
acknowledge the “urgent human problems” and
formal structures of global cities (LW, 14). Working
in Sarajevo in the 90s, he integrated architectural
elements ref erencing urban warfare into
buildings themselves in order to create what
he terms “free spaces” and “free zones”: “Into
the voids created by destruction, free spaces
are injected” (19). A vocabulary of “scabs”
(introjected spaces), “scars” (“deep levels
of construction that fuses new and old”; 19),
“the fall” (the recognition of unpredictable
forces such as violent conflict, plane crashes,
or earthquakes (20)), and “walls” (peripheries
and edges that create “complex, fluid, multilayered
societies” (RR, 14) predict “a new
and yet-unknown social or der” (LW, 26) that is
anything but utopian. Several of Woods’s 90s
drawings depicting the in tersection of buildings
and airplane fuselages clearly predate
Images courtesy of Barrett Watten © 2013
the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001
(confirming Slavoj Žižek’s diagnosis of anticipatory
destruction as the “desert of the Real” of the
West’s fantasy structures). In later projects in
Havana and San Francisco, Woods destroyed
boundaries and interior spaces and assumed an
uncertain, fluid ground; in all his buildings, disintegration
is an element of design, uniting utile
and inutile, spaces of movement and of obstruction.
This recognition of necessity of the inutile
and indeter minate joins Woods’s heterotopian
fantasies with the lessons of Las Vegas and
Detroit, with the advantage that the destruction
at their core is mobilized on both symbolic and
material levels. Woods’s prescription for “radical
reconstruction” refuses to monumental ize consumer
detritus or industrial decay but continues
the cultural work of negativity through an avowal—and
even a certain pride—of their specific
materials forms:
In the spaces voided by destruction, new structures
can be injected....The new structures contain
freespaces, the forms of which do not invite occupation
with the old paraphernalia of living, the old
ways of living and thinking. They are, in fact, difficult
to occupy, and require inventiveness in order
to become habitable. They are not predesigned,
predetermined, predictable, or predictive.... They
offer a dense matrix of the new conditions as
an armature for living as fully as possible in the
present, for living experimentally. The freespaces
are, at their inception, useless and meaningless
spaces. They become useful and acquire meaning
only as they are inhabited. (RR, 16)
Dequindre Cut