Curated by Joseph Becker and Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher

In 1995, Lebbeus Woods imagined San Francisco creatively transfigured by the very earthquakes that threaten it. These “Inhabiting the Quake” drawings depict an architecture that amplifies and arrests seismic forces, modeling them as arched, fractured, and splintered forms. SF MoMA’s major exhibition, which opens under the cloud of the architect’s recent death, will showcase these drawings in the city that inspired them, alongside works from thirty-five years of Woods’s speculative practice. The seventy-five drawings, collages, sketchbooks, and models on view address other cities whose infrastructures have been subjected to sometimes violent forces of change, Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Berlin among them. “War is architecture,” Woods once wrote. “Architecture is war.” Wielding pen and ink (and rarely seeking building commissions), this end-of-the-millennium Romantic proposed an architecture of conflict: between the static and the dynamic, the organic and the orthogonal, the constructive and the destructive forces shaping the city.

— Michael Wang