With flowing tubes of steel, Lebbeus Woods captures moments of flux in the space before collapse.

The article focuses on the exhibition Unknown Quantity conceived by Paul Virilio held in Paris, France in March 2003. The exhibition featured a major installation by Lebbeus Woods, New York's resident architectural visionary. The site of Woods's ruminations is usually a zone of crisis on which he builds. Woods, who teaches at New York City's Cooper Union, is the rare architect who draws rather than writes theory, but over the years he has actualized his paper drawings as space drawings through exhibition installations. In 2002, at the Cooper Union gallery, in one of his infrequent shows in the United States, he visualized a force field shooting through space by constructing wires and batons streaming into a midair collision that formed other vectors.