THE NEW CITY by Lebbeus Woods

Touchstone Books, 1992 First edition, Unpaginated, 11 1/4" X 15 1/2", Hardcover

Fine in near fine+ dust jacket

Lebbeus Woods is an architect, a teacher, and a visionary. He is equally at ease with Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics, and science fiction, man’s spiritual life and humanity’s pursuit of artificial perfection. The New City blends elements of each.

Starting with simple geometric forms, Lebbeus Woods combines chaos and order--the mundane and the sublime--and allows a new form of urban existence to grow. The New City is an organic conception, creating many new questions as it answers old ones.

The images of The New City reflect Woods’s investigations into science and art and his desire to create challenges for the next generation of urban planners. Woods’s designs represent interior discoveries, exposed for all to see. Many of the shapes and structures defy standard concepts of what living and working spaces should be. They seem lived in and well used, but how and by whom is unclear. Strange and futuristic, the structures do not travel the well-worn architectural path of from dictated by function. Rather, they are new forms, with specific functions unclear--left to the citizens of The New City to decide for themselves. What is clear is that these structures soar and inspire, leaving the future unwritten while stimulating the field of urban planning to investigate new paths, new ideas.

Powered by an as-yet undeveloped form of electromagnetic energy, The New City ultimately reaches out, beyond earthly ties--a visionary metaphor for humanity’s destiny.