SFMOMA Retrospective is a Love Letter to Lebbeus Woods

According to Joseph Becker, assistant curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the late American architect Lebbeus Woods always questioned the status quo through his visionary drawings of utopian structures.

From February 16 to June 2, 2013, The museum is hosting a retrospective of Woods's work of the last 35 years, featuring 175 drawings.

Primarily working in graphite and pastel, Woods evolved from creating imaginary cities in the 1980s to proposing egalitarian urban interventions in Zagreb and Berlin following the political unrest of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Europe.

In the mid-1990s, he created a series for SFMOMA in response to San Francisco earthquakes. As in his earlier European utopias, which insert themselves into existing infrastructure, Woods' earthquakes series proposes structures that adapt with disaster rather than fight against it.

His only built project, the Light Pavilion inside Steven Holl's Micro-City in Chengdu, China, was completed in 2012.