"After destruction, it is not possible to immediately resume the old, disrupted ways of living. Indeed, this can only be done by regressing to them, led by the resurgence of social, political and professional institutions under whose authority they once existed. But too much has been suffered and lost, too much learned at too great a price to be quickly forgotten. The spirit of invention that makes survival possible under the extreme conditions created by destruction makes possible the new ways of living in a city that will, in a sense, always remain in a paradoxical state of destruction and construction. That the dynamics of change, were at the same time political, technological, epistemological and personal, are the ingredients of what may correctly be called a creative form of destruction in the city’s day to day existence. Rather, it elevates the “paradox” to a more complex plane of experience for everyone. The spaces of the old city were shaped to sponsor conventionality. In their damaged state, they offer an entirely new possibility for understanding the origins of both space and habitation. The architect leads the way by codifying this new understanding only in terms of space, without the fixed reference of habitation. The architect is a designer of space, not of living. The spirit of invention demanded by perpetual transformation thrives best in space shaped by its own invention."

“I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world … All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules”

“Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, nor firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no ‘sacred and primordial site’. I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then ‘melt into air’. I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor can you know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.”

Lebbeus Woods, 1940 – 2012