This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted here I’m slowly considering the work of Robert Woods, slowly constructing the building that will hold my thoughts about his work. I’m moving towards a discussion of the verbo-visual collages that grace the walls of his current home. Those collages formed the impetus for these words, but I’ve decided it best to move towards them slowly now, not all at once. A building does not go up in a day, after all. Apparently, it takes three. When I visited Robert last night, he lent me three of his sketchbooks, those three that I determined had the images I’d be most interested in looking at and writing about. I thought this a generous and foolhardy offer from a man who had met me but once before. It turned out that he trusted me because I’m an archivist, so I would be sure to take care of valuable records. These sketchbooks primarily document Robert’s time living and traveling in Europe. In 1978, he began his European travels by going to Switzerland as a student, followed by living there as an assistant professor of architecture, and continuing as a traveler, someone moving over the face of the earth to see what exactly it is and how parts of it differ from others. I’ll consider a few pages from these sketchbooks in chronological order: Oktober 91 – May 92 [img_assist|nid=1301|title=Woods Weniger Kontrolle|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=260|height=400] I love how the headline about kontrol and kreativity in this piece is pasted right over Robert’s notes about same. This act of gluing over and obscuring his original text goes hand in hand with the text itself, which is fighting out an argument about whether freedom or control leads to creativity. Robert’s notes are balanced and sensible, calling for both liberty of expression and a level of control: Defining basic rules, limits the freedom to plan and experiment, but guarantees a satisfactory result. The framework has to be flexible. [img_assist|nid=1303|title=Woods Anti-Aesthettic|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=276|height=400] The notes that make up “Anti-Aesthetic” record the salient points of a book Robert was reading on post-modernist thought and esthetics. Though it is difficult to appreciate this feature in a reproduction, this is a micrographic text, very neat in a loose way, but exceedingly small. There is something ineffably right about layering strips of tiny handwriting across a page like this, in a form that approximates the shape of some ancient pattern poem, in order to lay out fragmented notes about esthetics. [img_assist|nid=1302|title=Woods Ticket Collection|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=260|height=400] Occasionally, this book erupts into collage. This collage of museum tickets, newspaper cuttings, and maps recreates his travels, boils them down into a mishmash that is exactly right. Travel is about collecting experiences at too quick a rate, about living in the moment because there are so few of them to live, about sucking in a place before it disappears from you, maybe forever. This piece, which intentionally bisects longitudinally a little white-on-black headline about Berlin, is about that fragmented experience and how we remember in fragments and wholes: Sometimes, a memory is whole (as are most of the tickets), and sometimes it is just a tiny shard of itself (like the bits of map and gift bag that peek out from beneath the tickets). The muted but attractive colors, enhanced by aging, similarly suggest the dimming of memory. [img_assist|nid=1305|title=Woods Architectural Collage|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=384|height=400] Yesterday, Robert told me that his teacher Bernard Hoesli promulgated the ideas of his own colleague (and sometime co-writer) Colin Rowe in the book Collage City. I expect that I’m mangling the information here (in true journalistic practice), but let me make the best of it. Rowe argued (along with his co-writer, Fred Koetter) that architects can understand urban space by playing with collages, that cities are built piece by piece (and that these function like scraps of paper on a collage), that the structure of a city can be overcome by the chaos of certain bits of its collage, and that, essentially, every city and every plan for a city is a collage: pieces can be added or removed, moved or left in place, and that that understanding of the flexibility of space and how collage affords the architect a chance to make a new environment were important considerations to those recreating or adding to cities. So that leaves us with a number of architectural collages in this sketchbook of Robert’s. Most function in gridspace, to some degree, overlaying strips of text atop architectural forms. A few resemble Mondirans. Their undercarriages are watercolored sketches and their superstructures are strips of texts that seem to wash over the spaces. They play with space, with perspective, and they allow the mind to understand the space, but forcing the fingers to do some thinking. 10.1992 – 4.1993 [img_assist|nid=1304|title=Woods Osporto|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=256|height=400] For personal reasons, I was overjoyed to see that Robert had visited Oporto, Portugal, and sketched bits of the city, including the market I used to visit with my mother when I was a child. Oporto represents in my mind my entire childhood; to me, it was a magical place, the place where I learned to read and write (though not yet English), the place where I learned two languages, and the place where I changed from being a fairly rambunctious kindergartener into the shy student I was for the rest of my school career. Robert, unfortunately, seemed not to have sketched the bridge that haunted my childhood and which I’ve written about before. His wonderful sketch of a building that includes a plan that places it in it geographic space in the world, however, still remains a perfect travel sketch, something that captures this space beautifully, accurately, and imaginatively. [img_assist|nid=1306|title=Woods Osporto Map|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=284|height=400] And Robert’s partial map of the city of Oporto, with its microscopic details feathering out into nothingness make me scan this incomplete world for Foz do Douro, the dark street of my memory where my muddy Polaroid childhood was played out in greys and whites. Robert’s world here is an architect’s—clean, pretty, neat, and seen from above—so it hardly resembles my life on the ground, but it will do. [img_assist|nid=1307|title=Woods Bar Txepetxa|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=260|height=400] Another perfect travel sketch is this collaged sketch of San Sebastian, Spain, with its Euskara-language* bar names. It provides little information, yet it suggests an eye at work and a memory at play. Sketchbook: Collected Travel Scraps, August 2004 [img_assist|nid=1308|title=Woods Tear Away Collage|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=260|height=400] In some of his later books, Robert creates interesting aleatoric collages by gluing a strip of paper to a page and then ripping off the paper, leaving behind part of the top side of the paper and spectral hints of the contents of the half-unburied back sides of the paper, with their mirror-reversed texts. These are little dream collages, especially this one, where an almost almond of a man’s faces peers out of a tight space, while behind him bits of text give us a message we cannot make out the significance of. Freedom and control allow us everything. With these two tools alone, we create everything—all art, all ideas, all arguments, all meals. And Robert shows how they work together. His way is mostly controlled process, but always via a liberated search for an esthetic answer. Tomorrow, the collages that began this trek for me. _____ * Okay, I could’ve used “Basque” instead, but where’s the fun in that? ecr. l’inf.