Einstein Tomb silkscreen prints

Lebbeus Woods

Einstein Tomb Silkscreen Prints
Cityscapes Foundation offers two vintage silkscreen prints from the Einstein Tomb project that Lebbeus Woods produced for his exhibition in 1986 at Luce van Rooy gallery in Amsterdam. The two prints are signed and numbered by Lebbeus Woods and were acquired by Cityscapes Foundation from Luce van Rooy.

ARTIST: Lebbeus Woods,
TITLE: Einsteins Tomb View 03 and View 04,
YEAR: 1986,
TECHNIQUE: silkscreen print,
EDITION: 65, signed and numbered,
PRICES: 750,- (each)

Lebbeus Woods
Conceptual architect Lebbeus Woods’s designs took the form of fantastical drawings and models rather than physical structures. Woods worked for Eero Saarinen from 1964–68 before starting out on his own. He had shifted to a purely theoretical practice by 1976, designing never-built structures intended to serve as havens in a dystopian world wracked with natural and manmade disasters. Many of his conceptual drawings were situated in upended places, like war-torn Sarajevo, post-earthquake San Francisco, and divided Berlin. He envisioned a future Manhattan in which the Hudson and East Rivers are dammed, revealing the rocky terrain below the island. Inspired by conceptual architecture firms like Archigram, Woods challenged architecture’s basic tenets, even calling the Cartesian grid into question. Only one of his designs was ever built: a pavilion for a housing complex in Chengdu, China, completed in 2012.

Einstein Tomb Project
Einstein Tomb
(1980), one of Woods’s earliest projects, is a proposal for a celestial cenotaph ― a monument for a person buried elsewhere ― for physicist Albert Einstein. In it, he envisions a vessel that rides a beam of light to the edges of the cosmos, eventually and infinitely orbiting back toward its origin. Woods both honors and embellishes the contributions of the late genius, playing poetically with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.