This Blog was copied from a blog by Geof Huth of Schenectady, New York. The original is posted here [img_assist|nid=1310|title=Robert Woods with His Collages|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] I asked Robert Woods to stand in front of a row of his collages so I could capture the man with his work and in his work. He stood inside the house he had torn apart and rebuilt, changing an ancient structure into a modern wonder of clean lines and limpid cul-de-sacs of light. He stood beside the collages he made in a brief time in 1993, when he was in Europe, and these pieces reverberated with the aura of his field of endeavor at work and life, architecture. The collages are simple studies of shape: how the simplest repetitions of shapes can have meaning, how these shapes might suggest organic forms or architectonic ones, how the real world (the world of shapes) can be overcome by the human world (the world of text), how technique and materials change meaning. [img_assist|nid=1311|title=Four of Robert Woods' Collages|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=120] My interest in Robert’s work started a few weeks ago, on the 29th of September, when I met him at a party at his house, took a tour of the place, learned something about his interest in livable and beautiful design, and spent about an hour talking to him. The house itself began the conversation, but his collages, which grace almost every wall in his house, captivated me, starting with this set of four collages laid out across the living room wall. The collages were simply arrangements of bits of German-language newspaper, yet they held sway over my attention. The tension always in such pieces is that between the ostensible visual aspect of the pieces and its almost latent verbal component. The words in such pieces are not meant to be read, they are merely decorative, but their existence suggests an additional layer of meaning. The text in these serves as a stratum of meaning, one that people can uncover even if they cannot decipher them. [img_assist|nid=1312|title=Woods Collage with Mask|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] Robert’s sense of design even extends beyond, yet through the collages. In this shot, with the flash of my camera obscuring the image, a collage resembling a gazelle’s head is paired with a horned mask. In this way, the two pieces are one; they inhabit the same space, and one is a shadow of the other. Connections abound. The world doesn’t exist as a set of discrete objects but as an intertwingled whole.* [img_assist|nid=1313|title=Woods Collage A|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=300|height=400] To keep track of Robert’s collages, I have assigned each a letter based on the order in which I shot its picture. The “titles” I have assigned these collages are meaningless, since the collages exist without titles. Their titlelessness allows them to exist in visual space, nameless, amorphous to the lettered mind. Unfortunately, the images I have captured of these photographs, using nothing but the ambient light in the room, are inadequate reproductions of the originals, allowing almost nothing of the careful beauty and grace of these pieces to shimmer through. [img_assist|nid=1314|title=Woods Collage C (May 1993)|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=300|height=400] This simple out-of-focus collage suggests a building (walls, a central courtyard) or a beast (long legs, tiny crabbed claws), so we don’t know what to make of it. Certainly, it is abstract, but just as certainly it is coming from a mind that creates concrete reality out of abstract shapes. Any building we live in is made out of shapes uncommon in nature (rectangles, squares, the occasional semi-circle), whereas nature is a congeries of indistinct shapes, rampant with possibility. Any human habitation itself is an abstract form in nature. [img_assist|nid=1316|title=Woods Collage between Sconces|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] At the top of Robert’s staircase, on the second floor of his house, a climber is greeted with a single bold collage between two illuminating sconces. The background of this collage is different from that of the first-floor collages. It is dark, created out of Scherrenschnitt (“scissorcut”) paper, the paper used to cut silhouettes. When you look at the collage in person, you can see how the Scherrenshnitt is arranged in patterns on the page. [img_assist|nid=1317|title=Woods Collage F|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=300|height=400] Here, you can see that the Scherrenschnitt is laid over sections of the collage in four parallel and horizontal lines, making it appear that the paper beneath it has been cut away. This allows for a fairly dramatic set of shapes, suggesting a dock system, or maybe a huge sailboat moving out onto the water—depending on whether you allow the positive or negative space in the collage take precedence. [img_assist|nid=1318|title=Doorway to Robert Woods' Collages|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=290|height=400] If we descend the stairs and return to the first floor, we find a small room just the right size for a few collages. The doorway frames the collages, and the collages draw us in. [img_assist|nid=1319|title=Robert Woods, Two Collages (May 1993)|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=400|height=300] These collages form a set that is one of the three (I believe) distinct sets of these collages. These are built upon a light background, and they each resemble the incomplete outlines of ruins dug out of the sand. Each has a courtyard surrounded by fragments of walls, some laid in place at angles, most straight. If you look closely at one of these collages, you can see that these inchoate structures are made out of layers of newspaper, not just a single layer. They encompass their own stratigraphy. Layer upon layer was added to the original sheet of these collages: paint, newspaper, newspaper, Scherrenschnitt, and a final glaze that freezes it all in place. We understand these pieces as two-dimensional pieces that represent three-dimensional space. Considering this set of collages, I recall something that Robert said to me: “Ruins, in a way, remind me of labyrinths.” As a building decays and is reduced to its foundation—which is itself then interrupted by the course of time—it becomes harder to limn. Its sturdy continuities of wall become fragments as spaces open up, and the resulting structure is indeed something like a labyrinth, which is itself a space for contemplation. One might contemplate the shape and design of the place, or one might contemplate how to extract oneself from that space. The world is all about collage. We take one idea from our childhood and a thought from yesterday and turn them into a new way of thinking about the world. We are constantly reusing bits of information we use, repurposing it to do different duty. In thinking about collage today and about how to apply the concept of collaging to architecture, Nancy remembered the board game Cathedral, which we used to play often. In Cathedral, two opposing players must set their game pieces in a confined space, a square that can hold all of the game pieces perfectly at once, if they are arranged in the right order. But the players compete to close off sections of the space from their opponents, thus leaving the opponent with leftover game pieces at the end of the game. The person who places the highest value of game pieces on the board wins the game. Nancy wrote me a note about her thoughts today, which began with collage, moved to Cathedral and architecture, and ended up discussing the remodeling of a home, which is how we began this three-day discussion of Robert’s work: I was thinking about Cathedral and how urban architects really have to use the space allowed to its fullest . . . I find that so appealing, the idea of using (or trying to use) the natural constraints to your advantage. Working within limitations. Layers of existence that are uncovered or covered to be uncovered again. It’s why I love our remodel [of our home], and why I think I would find a new construction vaguely unsatisfying. It’s also probably why I prefer to edit rather than start from scratch. I’ve been thinking about Robert’s way: his careful attention to detail, to beauty, to a clean uncluttered style. And I’ve been thinking about the life he’s lived as an architect and a thinker, as a traveler and someone who’s lived for years in Europe. So I wondered why he is in Schenectady—as I often wonder why I am, after having lived in nine countries on four continents. The reason he gives is that his family is from here—including his eight siblings. All five of my siblings live around Davidson County, Tennessee, yet that fact had no effect on where I lived, so I wondered if there might be something else keeping Robert here, in this small post-industrial city in the graying Northeast. And I wondered if he stayed here, in his hometown, because that is what buildings do. They persist in place. They endure where they were built. Maybe he had to stay here because he is his own architectural feat and that marvel must stay where it was built. _____ * Apparently, I am obsessed by the concept of intertwingularity. Below the Bar