Bennington's 2007 Adams-Tillim Lecturer: Pioneering Architect Lebbeus Woods

Internationally acclaimed experimental architect Lebbeus Woods has been named Bennington’s 2007 Adams–Tillim lecturer. Woods will visit the campus and deliver a lecture on Wednesday, April 25, 2007, at 7:30 pm in Tishman Lecture Hall. This event is free and open to the public.

Woods, a faculty member at The Cooper Union and one of just a handful of architects that have received the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, is devoted to theory and experimentation that envelopes entirely new thought in architecture, often abandoning gestures towards practicality in an effort to fully encapsulate the social and cultural circumstance of place.

A notable example of Woods' physical commentary is his reconstruction design for the war-damaged city of Sarajevo (1993-1994). Woods' design proposes using remnants from the ruined sections of buildings in the new construction; the remnants serve as symbols of survival and reinvention and, in this way, further the "healing" of the city and its people. Woods explains: "Experimental architecture is not for everyone. It is for people whose lives have been transformed by an experience."

Co-founder and scientific director of RIEA.ch, an institute devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice, he is the author of many books, most recently Radical Reconstruction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), The Storm and The Fall (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), and System Wien (Hatje Cantz/MAK, 2005), among others.

Woods’ works are in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Cooper–Hewitt National Design Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna; the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

The Adams–Tillim Lecture was established in 1992 by alumnus David Beitzel MFA ’83 in honor of two retired visual arts faculty members, Pat Adams and the late Sidney Tillim. Adams and Tillim both taught at Bennington College for nearly 30 years.