Terra Nova

by Lebbeus Woods

(...) we have to recreate the world to inhabit it fully. In this way, all of our utopian schemes are attemps to create the Garden, the Eden that we lost (...). To become part of the world, I cannot merely represent it through critique or some kind of mimetic activity, but must invet the world. Not a world, not my world, but the world. It is our modern fate to live in uncertainty and ambiguity. We inhabit space in which we are not sure how to move. Then how do we do this? "(...) in my drawings I've already built" (...) They are material and no longer purely in the realm of the mind. One promise of my projects is that I am not only interested in an architecture that serves an existing idea of linving, but more so in the prospect of new ways of living.

About his project Underground Berlin, 1988. A new way of life - what is it? All our ways of living are connected with the physical conditions of the world we inhabit (...) Each structure is a living laboratory? Why do we do anything? Why do we get up in themorening and what do we do?

About his project aerial Paris 1989 (...) there is a continuous stream of instants when the nets form a new type of grid, a new type of urban pattern, which becommmes a new kind of community being formed and re-formed over the city. (...) A new community. What kind of community can be created by free-floating structures? Their inhabitants are like gypsies, or like people living in automobiles.

About his project Berlin Free Zone There are no sky and no clouds, no atmosphere per se, but only mathematical domain. (...) They are not easy spaces to be in, so there need to be places within to sit or work, to lie down, to sleep. These could be also stations nodes where telecomunications equiptment to make contact with other spaces in the city. I call these spcaces free spaces. (...) It is not a cartesian world of neutrality, but physically something very definite. They are useless spaces. (...) they are difficult to occupy. (...) Freedom is difficult, right? (...) What then is the new pattern of livinf within the city? (...) A new community can be established at the center of Berlin, a network of thought and action stablished by free individuals. (...) The outcome is up to their habitants. (...) The result more complexities and difficulties (...) where the enclosure of free-space meets the cartesian room, the only external presence of free-space, the space of the new and hidden city within the city.