Nine Reconstructed Boxes by Lebbeus Woods

"if you are talking about the anti-house, the conversation is still about the house" Peter Cook

Lebbeus Woods' discusses the work:

The reconstructed box has been an occasional subject of my work, but the box itself has been a constant challenge. This is because the box—the Euclidean solid par excellence— has been, and remains, the basic element of architecture, worldwide. The main reason for its pre-eminence is that the box can be added to other boxes, with no leftover space between, making an efficient assemblage of spaces—a building, a neighborhood, a city. A corollary reason is that the box, which is constructed of straight lines meeting at clear angles of intersection, lends itself to precise measurement by relatively simple instruments such as have existed up to the invention of the digital computer. Even in the computer and its relative ease in measuring complex shapes, the box—in the x, y, z coordinate system of Cartesian mathematics—still dominates. The box is perhaps the single most practical invention of human thought. Considering that it appears nowhere in the visible scale of nature, it is also one of the purest and most abstract. 

The box does appear in the sub-visible natural world. At a minute level, cubical lattices of molecules appear frequently in crystal structures and various compounds. The crystalline structure of sodium chloride, common salt, is roughly cubical and can almost be seen with the unaided eye, but it is unlikely that this or any other natural formation was the source of the box’s invention. Rather, it was the mind’s insistence on putting itself, and thereby nature, in order. 

The human mind is the product of nature and belongs, at least at its inception, to it. Yet it seems that the mind wants to free itself from the natural, instinctual—that is, the deterministic—order of nature and to become autonomous, creating its own order. All the mind’s inventions spring from this impulse. The box is a prime example. Still, it is quite obvious that there is much about the mind that is instinctive, that is, determined by the inherited order of nature. The box, as all other inventions of the mind, represents either a genuine freedom from nature--and something uniquely human and separate from nature-- or simply a special case of nature. The rule structure governing the creation and transformation of the box—which is highly deterministic--tends to support the latter view. The shape of the box is predicted once the rules of its formation are applied. On the other hand, it seems clear that a reconstruction of the box combining the given rule structure with purely arbitrary structure breaks out of nature’s determinism in the direction of a human order. However, there are two qualifications, even in this case. First, the term “purely arbitrary” is suspect, given that every human thought and act emerges from experience, hence at least indirectly from the natural world. Secondly, if we consider a box left outside during, say, a hailstorm, or a conventional house subjected to a strong earthquake, we must concede that the box in such cases is ‘reconstructed’ by forces more arbitrary than any the mind can devise. So, is the reconstructed box also a special case of the natural, though of a higher order of complexity--combining two rule structures--than the box itself? If so, why is the ‘reconstructed’ framed by qualifying quotes? The truth is that the how matters more than the what. It is less significant that a box is changed by the impact on it of unbox-like forces, than how those forces are applied. Human intelligence directs forces that change, whereas the earthquake and the hailstorm are undirected, ‘purely arbitrary.’ Hence, the reconstructed box is wholly systematic and speaks to different aspects of human intention, to differing modes, really, of the same intention: to realize the complexity of formative processes in both the human and the natural. 

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Further investigation:

http://lebbeuswoods.net/