Heterarchy of Space
Year: 2002 Authors: Lebbeus Woods
Core claim
Architecture must move beyond hierarchy toward heterarchy if it is to respond to contemporary living conditions and knowledge.
Topics
architectural hierarchy, urban and building scales, theory of knowledge, contemporary living conditions
Domains
architecture, theory, urban design
Methods
critical argumentation, conceptual analysis, manifesto-style prose
Media
Paper text
The text below is the locally extracted OCR/Markdown version of the paper. Raw PDF files remain local and are not published here.
BRIDGES Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science
Heterarchy of Space
Lebbeus Woods The Cooper Union, School of Architecture, 7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003 architecture@cooper.edu
So long as the concept of hierarchy dominates architecture (as it presently does), architecture will stay rooted in classical models, at the urban and building scales alike. So long as architecture stays rooted in classical models (as it presently does), it will continue to express an old, even archaic, idea of knowledge. So long as architecture expresses another idea of knowledge than that which best serves the present conditions of living (as it presently does), architecture will be a regressive force in the world of human affairs, even of human existence itself.
