Woods, Shadrach, 1923-1973

Shadrach Woods was an American architect and urban planner. A student of Le Corbusier, he worked extensively throughout North Africa, France, Germany and New York City on architectural projects ranging from low-cost housing developments to university campuses. Also highly regarded as a critic and theorist, Woods taught at Harvard and Yale and lectured and published widely.

Born in Yonkers, New York, Woods was schooled in engineering at New York University and in literature and philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. Though never trained as an architect, he joined the Paris office of Le Corbusier in 1948. Assigned to the Unité d'Habitation project then under construction in Marseille, Woods collaborated with the Greek architect George Candilis, with whom he would later form a lasting partnership.

With Candilis and the engineer Vladimir Bodiansky, Woods designed and built housing throughout North Africa during his tenure as head of the Casablanca office of ATBAT-Afrique. Architectural solutions developed during the course of this work led to their winning proposal for a low-cost housing competition in France in 1954. Woods and Candilis joined with the Yugoslavian architect Alexis Josic to create the firm Candilis-Josic-Woods in 1956.

Among the firm's major built projects were the development of the quarter of Le Mirail in Toulouse in France and, with Manfred Schiedhelm, the Free University in Berlin. Simultaneously, Woods participated in the proceedings of Team X, a group of architects that emerged from the meetings of CIAM in the postwar years. He published numerous essays on urban themes, including explanations of his concepts of "stem" and "web," and participated in the Milan Triennale at the invitation of Italian architect and fellow Team X member Giancarlo de Carlo.

After the breakup of his partnership with Candilis and Josic in 1969, Woods settled in New York City. He taught and lectured at architecture schools throughout the United States. He also continued to work as an architect and urban planner until his untimely death in 1973. His book, The Man in the Street: A Polemic on Urbanism, was published posthumously by Penguin in 1975.