In all honesty I don’t know Woods’ work well. Just finished this interview and he has a reputation for making radical work that changes perceptions.
Some excerpts:
“It wasn’t about cleaning up the mess or fixing the damage; it was more about a transformation in the society and the politics and the economics thorough architecture… I think there’s not enough of that thinking today in relation to cities that have been faced with sudden and dramatic– even violent– transformations, either because of natural or human causes. But we need to be able to speculate, to create these scenarios, and to be useful in a discussion about the next move. ”
“Architecture has the ability, rivaling literature, to imagine and propose new, alternative route out of the present moment. So architecture sn’t just buildings, it’s a system of entirely re-imagining the world through new plans and scenarios.”
“I think achitects– at least those inclined to understand the multi-disciplinary and the comprehensive nature of their field– have to visualize something that embraces all these political, economic, and social changes. As well as the technological. As well as the spatial.”
“To me politics means one thing: How do you change your situation? What is the mechanism by which you change your life? That’s politics. That’s the political question. It’s about negotiation, or it’s about revolution, or it’s about terrorism, or it’s about careful step-by-step planning– all of this is political in nature. It’s about how people, when they get together, agree to change their situation.”
“That by implementing an architectural action, you actually are making a transformation in the social fabric and in the political fabric. Architecture becomes an instigator; it becomes an initiator.”
“I think in my more recent work, certainly, there are still boundaries. There are still edges. But they are much more porous, and the property lines… are even less, should we say, defined or desired. (…) Probably the political implication of that is something about being open– encouraging what I call the lateral movement and not the vertical movement of politics. It’s the definition of a space through a set of approximations or a set of vibrations or a set of energy fluctuations– and that has everything to do with living in the present.”
” over and over again that architecture can and should always be a form of radical reconstruction, unafraid to take on buildings, cities, worlds, whole planets.”