I'm not an architect but I will soon be giving a lecture on deconstruction in architecture, fashion and art. I am actually an artist with about $200,000 sunk into getting my MFA and I have found myself stuck in a foreign country teaching fashion illustration. Good planning. I have the lecture pretty much done. But I need a conclusion. I need to figure out if it helped move anything else forward. Seems like a black hole instead. Did it influence anything else? Did fracturing form help parametric design in architecture along? Maybe the best thing it did was push people towards better urban planning or some kind of reinvented modernism (out of disdain for Eisenman).
Give me a hand here. Ideas? I want to close the book on this crap. If I listen to one more Libeskind interview I am going to blow my fooking brains out.
suf's comment seems right, to an extent. but as part of freedom from 'historical commitment', i'd make a special point of freedom from both recognized typology and recognized construction industry standards/techniques. it's not just the shedding of historical garb and stylistic approach that was triggered during the 80s and 90s, it was also the dropping of any pretense that a building had to look like a building (much less communicate what type of building), had to appear to honor gravity, had to be built in ways that the construction industry commonly practiced, or even had to accommodate particular uses in a meaningful way.
there was a huge freedom for architecture to become more like product design in that it could look like anything, but also less like product design in that it sometimes became less efficiently responsive to the things it had to do.
while overall i think this was a good evolution, it has its challenges: when you can do anything, what *should* you do? we are often better designers when we have more constraints...
It was a branded event. Who actually fits in the criteria is open for debate. Personally, I think it opened the door to more formal investigations of architecture from many unknowns and those possibilities are still evident today (let's just forget the blob era ever existed, please).
So, imho, it did push architecture into a new realm (but again, the term is a bad umbrella of many things that were occurring at the same time). I loved it. It brought recognition to many of the big names out there now (even though they aren't, necessarily, deconstructivists, like Hadid and Gehry).
To your point, I think it catapulted Hadid, Gehry, Libeskind, Mayne and others to the forefront of architecture, giving them the foundation to have great success. So yeah, it had a huge impact on the profession. For me, I think it was the single most positive influence to architecture in my lifetime.
I always saw it as a byproduct of postmodernism, though it wasn't just that. An extension of "anything goes," maybe a sub-category. So to understand deconstructivism, I would say you need to look at postmodernism, Russian constructivism, and Derrida.
And the above comments about historical references really refer to the origins of post-modernism, which is also where Gehry's earlier work belongs. As most architects keep practicing and evolving, so does their work. So Gehry's architecture eventually evolved into the bloby stuff, which became very appealing and popular to the masses and he ended up getting stuck doing more of due to demand. Another camp that evolved from the three references above is the more pragmatic/programmatic architecture, i.e. the school of Koolhaas.
In order to build Bilboa, they implemented software used to build aircraft, which became a new architectural tool that people started exploring, and we ended up with a bunch of blobs as a result. As this technology advanced, some people forgot that it was a tool, and started using it to actually derive architectural ideas. That's how I would define the origin of parametric design.
Parametric design helps construct, and questionably (very questionably) justify these forms by the architects who subscribe, not the other way around. So I personally think parametric design is a tool that helped some of these architects further explore and pursue the ideas that were always at the core of their Architectural agendas.
This is my short version, there were many other factors and contributors and exceptions. i think the most important answer to your question is to remember that all of these architects sort of created their own vocabulary out of some common theory, so you can't simply say this became that. That common theory is still very much alive in various forms and shapes. And modernism never went away. There are a lot of parallel lines in architecture.
I have never come across the phrase "freed from historical commitment" and it is great that Steven Ward clarified a little by saying "freedom from both recognized typology and recognized construction industry standards/techniques." What other things do you think deconstructivist architects freed themselves from? I always get the idea that they freed themselves from a lot more than that.
"freedom from both recognized typology and recognized construction industry standards/techniques."
"...heed Tafuri's warning that "once the 'form is made free', the geometric universe becomes an uncontrollable 'adventure." (see Tafuri's "European Graffiti." Five x Five = Twenty-five, 1976)
peter's canon
2008.08.22 22:05
Just did a side by side chronological overview of the work of Gehry and Eisenman, and in terms of architectonic, geometrical experimentation, Gehry manifests a greater and more mature repertoire.
Eisenman goes through a lot of intellectual and theoretical rigor to ultimately arrive at his geometry, but Gehry simply demonstrates that the intellectual and theoretical rigor isn't even necessary when it come to unprecedented architectonic geometries.
The only reason Eisenman's approach gets respect is because it fits well into 'higher' education. To have students pay large amounts of money to then learn that, "Hey, just look at Gehry, you can design pretty much anyway you want these days." just wouldn't go over well.
first off, you need to clarify some terms. Not all blobs and fish-shaped Ghery buildings are deconstructivist. They have no theory associated with the design, they are just sculptural forms. Deconstructivist buildings have theory/explanation to every shape, color, material or space, look at Eisenmann or Tschumi, the theory that came with their buildings is vaster than the building itself. The only thing you can call 'deconstructivist' today is probably Libeskind (jewish museum) or Coop. When it comes to Gehry or Hadid you can speak of sculptural expressionist-like work and parametric design is today's avant-garde, but not deconstructivist. As a matter of fact Zaha hates to be called deconstructivist.
COSMIN_BUTA-- Yes, for my presentation I have been trying to focus on architects who specifically use terminology related to deconstruction (trace, undecidability, binaries) in interviews and writing. Libeskind and Eisenman for the most part. Although I think Gehry may have been on board for a few minutes in the beginnings. It is slippery territory because of the title given to this group of architects by a critic, and the following 1989 Deconstructivist Architecture show at the MOMA.
The label "deconstructivist" causes problems because it implies a style. The deconstructivist labeling of Hadid, Gehry, Koolhaus and others came from this labeling which implied a recognized style or new aesthetic. Incidentally, to this day, no architect from the 1989 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition accepts the labeling. It isn't a style or an aesthetic.
There is the same problem over in fashion design. Martin Margiela and a couple others from the Belgian Five are the only ones who could properly be called deconstructivist and even they have no comment on the labeling. The designs of Comme des Garcons is constantly labeled as deconstruction fashion but Rei Kawakubo fervently denies any association. She is in the same boat as a lot of these architects who are not deconstructivist. Mixed into their designs is a little of this and a little of that (deconstruction included of course).
The best thing to do is say "this architect incorporates elements of Derrida's deconstruction into his/her design process". But that is pretty messy.
exit's comments from 2008 were right on then and, for the same reasons probably, gehry is maybe the more respected of the two now: the fact that his work has pushed boundaries of construction technique and process *without* reference to theory is more accepted in the current climate.
definitely true that there was only 'deconstructivist' architecture in that a couple of critics at a certain time noticed certain commonalities in the work of several architects. it was not a movement, just a tendency, which is also why its legacy might be very hard to pin down. if the group never agreed to be in a club, how can you determine what influence they had together?
what you may be looking at is what the recognition of this group of projects meant (and inspired?) in the period in which the profession at large was generally making very conventional construction - sometimes straightforward modern, sometimes with some historical appendages. a generation of architects saw the group identified by wigley et al each trying out individual new vocabularies for architecture and realized that they could do the same.
the blob trend was maybe one thing to arise from this, but it was also an exploration of what was possible with digital tools. positing a direct evolution is tough.
A lot can be attributed to the dissemination of all the pretty diagrams (I fondly recall getting that first El Corquis of Hadid, before Vitra had been built). There were so many Decon books it was easier for a student to pile up on the latest and greatest.
Koolhaas followed this momentum when he produced SMLXL.
Without all these books, and I still have stacks of them, I don't think it would have gotten anywhere (or at least not be something as grand).
Blobs were a direct result of software. Nothing more, imho, just a result of animation software that became affordable (or free). Once Maya was released, blobs were everywhere (I recall when it was released and all the hoopla from Lynn and company, although he'd been using, what was it, SGI's and Power Animator?).
The blobbers also took advantage of the mass publication system and saturated the student market instantly, promising mass customization, etc., etc. The blob movement was a direct result of #1 Software availability on regular PCs and #2 Marketing tons of new books, articles, silly theory, etc. Thankfully, that movement didn't get much farther than academia!
So, really, I don't think much of what actually mattered had anything to do with specific thought or intent, just great marketing.
seems like an important question is/was: what does deconstruction actually have to do with architecture? judging from the public "letters" between derrida and eisenman, it certainly wasn't clear to derrida.
imho, it's another misappropriation symptomatic of a general crisis of legitimacy, probably the most lasting aftermath of writings of postmodern architecture. just as some architects responded by reached outside of architecture to quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc, to borrow the epistemic solidity of other fields, others reached to continental philosophy.
which isn't to say that these other areas have nothing to offer architectural thinking, but unfortunately it rarely went beyond some sort of clumsy transliteration from text to form...
to call asher's installation 'incredibly pointless' is like saying i will condemn everything i don't know anything about. don't be so lazy to look up further. you might not like his work but historically michael asher's works are total opposite of pointless.
eric, i don't connect his work, specially this show, with deconstruction.. maybe you have meant deconstructing the text and the narrative of the story. if anything, it is a critique of museum operations. santa monica museum does not have any permanent collections. artist is building a permanent collection for the SMMOA that is in itself has a life span (the duration of the show itself, a paradox) which is much more interesting and close to home than exposed metal studs. could the artist do this by drawing the floor plans of past installations on the floor? i am not a mind reader, but they already exist as floor plans.
This is a tricky issue, I agree with Derek Kaplan: Derrida's construction is essentially an analytical tool that he used to pick apart texts by authors such as Nietzsche. I have always found the use of the term by architects for the synthetic work of making buildings to be gratuitous, instead it merely denotes an architectural style characteristic of a particular period.
Thank you Eric for the reminder about the Michael Asher show; as you say, it approaches an art/architecture of deconstruction in that it reflects on the nature of the museum exhibition and the history of the institution.
Various forces were at play in formalizing the Decon exhibition,
Zaha - grew tired of drawing right angles
Gehry - hung out with artists because he was going thru a rough marriage
Rem - became interested in architectural mutants
Eisenman - frustrated by his habit of over-intellectualizing everything, produced some very complicated drawings and then decided to become friends with Derrida, in order to lend himself some credibility.
Tschumi - was the one interested in violence..
LIbeskind - was a disciple of Eisenman, and fully absorbed contructivist art from Cooper Union in the 70's
Coop Himmelblau - were just crazy
Philip Johnson - was the rich guy, and while still feeling guilty from his Nazi days, decided to team up with Eisenman. They would meet in bars and talk about who the next stars were going to be. Among others, they ruled out SITE architects for the decon exhibition
All of the above, referenced constructivist art, in some fashion. And that made it easier to pitch to students like the ones that started Arquitectonica and other corporate architecture firms.
Decon arch was supposed to be about psychoanalyzing a geometry and allowing it to exist as an un-oppressed shard, but the adventure has ended, it's now a page in history. For a new day is upon us. The so-called blob-era is a vague generalization of what's been happening since, blob is a term which is championed mostly by conformist designers
exactly, nick. Deconstruction is somewhere between decay and reverse engineering, but applied to latent historical genealogies in texts. to recast it in the role of a generative creative platform, not just in architecture but in any context, just seems premised on either 1) a mistake, or 2) such extreme interpretive liberties that one has to question why the name is kept...
had never seen that asher work, so thanks e.c. for the reference...
B.. but gravity is one of four universal constants in the entire universe! It's one of four things that have ever existed and will continue to exist. Gravity will last longer than the sun burns and longer than our nearest stars stop shining.
And even if our galaxy collapses and turns into a super massive blackhole, gravity will always be there. As it crushes our tiny planet into a speck of cosmic goop, after its immense forces grind our bones into nothingness and rip the flesh from our corpses, gravity will be there forever binding us to that singularity.
Why wouldn't you want to worship and also fear this force?
but gravity is one of four universal constants in the entire universe! It's one of four things that have ever existed and will continue to exist. Gravity will last longer than the sun burns and longer than our nearest stars stop shining.
...or until we've fully figured out quantum physics.
F.T.B., please tell us when and where Arquitectonica went to school and who their teachers were. I know Fort-Brescia went to Princeton and Harvard, and Spear went to Brown and Columbia and briefly MIT, but I'm not exactly sure when, so go ahead and fill in the rest.
When I look at the early graphics of Arquitectonica, I'm immediately reminded of Zenghelis and Koolhaas, hence, it appears the real inspiration came from the (new) architecture of Delirious New York, which isn't exactly a book pitching Deconstruction.
emergency exit wound,
Having seen Bernardo's portfolio in the late 70's, when he had long hair and wanted to teach in south florida, he could have been in the deconstructivist architecture exhibition. He didnt necessarily touch upon deconstruction-the philosphy, but his drawings were Libeskind-ish with a Lappidus touch
My original humble opinion was that the many, once exciting ideas formalized in the deconstructivist architecture exhibition were diluted once they went 2nd hand, and IMO Arquitectonica were among those who got it 2nd hand and ran with it.
According to Fort-Brescia, "I came down to Florida, originally to teach at the University of Miami where I taught for two years until I decided what I really wanted to do was practice and so at that point I switched." Assuming the switch point was October 1977 (or just before that), then you, F.T.B., saw Fort-Brescia's portfolio sometime early-mid 1975. And who were his teachers again?
So, your last statement above suggests that Arquitectonica diluted the ideas presented in the 1988 Deconstructivism exhibit, but Arquitectonica was already diluting those ideas in the mid-late 1970s? And this is based on your seeing Fort-Bresicia's portfolio something like 36 years ago?
For a very good representation of Arquitectonica's earliest work see GA Document 7, August, 1983 (and compare these early projects to the OMA projects presented within Delirious New York).
A fascinating discussion. A couple of phrases caught my eye.
"Derrida's construction is essentially an analytical tool" Architects used these ideas for self-analysis, to justify formal approaches that fell outside linear processes, and to support intuitive, non-linear, and often non-tectonic results.
"crisis of legitimacy" which followed the 'crisis of meaning' that resulted in the first great wave of Post Modernism, in the Neo-Classical wave of the late '70s and '80s. As corporate Modernism became increasingly unable to provide solutions for smaller grained architectural problems, a nostalgia inducing approach was taken to attempt connect the Architect with the individual. The problem was that it took the form of a specific stylistic language that could be associated with pre-modern institutions as impersonal and elitist as the functional programs monopolized by late modernism.
In the absence of meaning that would connect as a relevant cultural movement, architects looked to other modes of analysis and meaning to lend legitimacy to Architecture.
All of which seemed to be a separate impulse form the business of form making, and had more to do with branding the Architect than with meaning.
Is it that "Architecture as Architecture" is not sufficiently meaningful to be legitimate in the larger culture? As an analogy, does some understanding of musical theory enhance the non-musicians enjoyment of a Symphony?
And for "Architecture as Architecture", see Colin Rowe's "Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" as an example.
Is it that "Architecture as Architecture" is not sufficiently meaningful to be legitimate in the larger culture? As an analogy, does some understanding of musical theory enhance the non-musicians enjoyment of a Symphony?
The difference between architecture and symphonies is that symphonies has no physical form or utilitarian value. That is, a symphony is purely an intellectual and emotional pursuit.
Unless it is a folly, architecture still has a tangible physical value and a utilitarian aspect that much be respected— even if it doesn't look like a building, it should still function as a building.
You can really stretch out the meaning of "function" to be any number of things— art museums are the cultural elite versions of U-Store-It, a mostly empty place devoid of secondary and tertiary demands for the infinite storage of all things yesteryear. Some places, like the Barcelona Pavilion, store ideas— a veritable prison of image and pride.
Architecture as architecture is great if it fulfills the basic reasoning for it to exist; to provide shelter to its intended uses and inhabitants. But overriding those "primal urges" a building has to exist in the name of vanity and expression is equivalent to blowing random notes on a pan flute and calling it a cantata.
@ Aldorossi: “A fascinating discussion.” Seconded, this one has been/is a fun one. this sort of thread is my favorite part of archinect...
“Architects used these ideas for self-analysis, to justify formal approaches that fell outside linear processes, and to support intuitive, non-linear, and often non-tectonic results.” To the degree that the first part about self-analysis is true, that it is used as a means of adding a more complex self-reflexivity within their own design thinking, more power to them. I guess I just haven’t seen much of that. The only meaningful intersection between deconstruction and architecture that I have seen is the “collaboration” between Eisenman and Derrida, and everything you say after “to justify” fits squarely into this problem that came up during it (discussed above):
“…At the outset of this project Derrida makes it clear that working in a foreign field (architecture) and a foreign language (English) was going to be very difficult for him and that collaboration was improbable.
This unease is compounded by Eisenman later in the process by asking Derrida if he can draw a Chora. Derrida clearly has problems with this and with Eisenman's statement that "what I am searching for is a way to turn deconstruction from a mode of analysis into one of synthesis." This desire to turn deconstruction in a creative activity is something Eisenman sees in his previous projects, Caravaggio and Romeo and Juliet. There is a sense (supported by Kipnis comments in the documentation of this project) that Eisenman is looking for Derrida’s approval, his signature as he puts in on these earlier projects by reconstituting them here in a theoretical form with Derrida in attendance."
As far as I know, how to convert deconstruction into a generative framework never was/has been philosophically addressed, let alone resolved. imho, there is just a group of people that nonetheless continued trying to force it into that role out of ulterior motives…
As for the question about “wasn’t the architecture itself enough for the culture at large?” – if deconstructivist packaging was what they came up with as a general appeal to the culture around them, they should have hired a consultant instead. But I don’t think it was ever about that…
Reminds me of Barnett Newman’s quote about “Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds.” I don't so much ascribe to this in the case of theory and architecture, but it does seem relevant...
I read through your link to Ashner's work. And it is still pointless.
It's as intellectually sophisticated as any half-finished buildout you might find find on any mall or mcmansion jobsite in anywhere USA. Except this person obviously doesn't even understand light gauge framing. And no, putting it in a gallery doesn't make it art any more than if I had shat on the gallery floor. Pointless.
@peace77 - I thought Asher's installation was pretty interesting. From a deconstructive standpoint it shows the a presence of absence. It is pretty odd if you think about it. He made a ghost of all the past shows. I am not sure why he didn't erect completed walls though. Maybe so it seems more ghost-like? I would have either marked out where the walls were on the floor as a kind of documentation you had to either step over or walk around, or erect the actual walls. Half way between the two seems a little indecisive.
It reminds me a little of Whiteread's "House" though. I always thought "House" felt like a ghost of the people who lived there. But the walls of a gallery don't really soak up that much presence do they? They are loaded with all kinds of institutional and cultural framing, but not really imbued with peoples lives, identities, or personal stuff. So its not very spooky in that sense. A little dry.
Anyways it is interesting to see a history laid out in front of you like that I think.
@Derek Kaplan-- Appaerently with the Chora garden project Derrida and Eisenman went around and around in circles confusing the hell out of eachother. They could never come to a decision. Tschumi told a reporter that he didn't think they were even going to build anything, they just wanted to publish a book. In the end the project was something like 8 times over budget and was canned. Here is an excerpt from stuff that was going on between Derrida and Eisenman when they were working on the Chora garden:
Eisenman proposes to build a quarry from which visitors will pick up rocks and carry them to another part of the site. Derrida qestions whether it would be possible to force people to do this; he is concerned that the project might come to resemble a miniature golf course. Confusion between the two men develops as Derrida asks if Eisenman is being “concrete” (as opposed to speaking abstractly) to which Eisenman answers, “Yes, concrete,” in the belief that Derrida is asking what material he will use to build the garden.
It is pretty funny that with all that shit floating around in their heads and all the reading and writing and theorizing, when they finally get together they stumble around bumping their heads. Funny because it shows how language (and cultural) barriers are really a problem! We tend to forget that a lot. It also really shows that you have to create as you theorize. You can't theorize like crazy for a long time and expect the work to jump out when you finally decide to build something. It just doesn't happen.
@emergency exit wound,
Dates are not important. The exhibition was a formality for ideas that were circulating before 1988. And Arquitectonica were amongst those who got it 2nd hand and were not as successful. Please remember that when you reference delirious new york, which was a side trip for them.
Yes there were those ties with Rem, but I think in the end the language of decon influenced them more, it was always under the surface. In Miami that is what they are associated with, not culture of congestion theory. Use your eyes my friend, there is a visible similarity. Plus they were in deconstruction 3,either part 2 or 3, academy editions, AD
…….deconstruction…….part 3………..like 2nd hand
Other 2nd hand attempts are people like Odile Decq.
And at the corporate level, in Miami while were at it, some of Spillis Candela.
I'm talking about 2nd hand attempts, but if you want to derail into early intentions...i dont see the point
"The exhibition was a formality for ideas that were circulating before 1988." I ask this not leadingly, but because I don't know: how true is this? I know some of the people in the moma show had themselves been using deconstruction explicitly, but is it true of all of them, or even most? as some have alluded to above, the alternative is that the term was retroactively applied as a method of grouping work with aesthetic similarities by Wigley and P. Johnson, regardless of whether the architect had ever expressed any theoretical affiliation? this is what I would have assumed -- but I'm not that familiar with early writings of most of the people in that show...
Derek. You hit the nail on the head. Gehry specifically said that his work had nothing to do with deconsrtuctivism. The label got slapped on him for convenience to make the show.
@Derek
yeah I agree with you, the exhibition was completely about group aesthetics. Eisenman and Tschumi were the ones to take deconstruction in all academic seriousness, the rest to a lesser degree. It was as if they all found out how to say the same thing in different ways
The single biggest influence had to be constructivist art, which was a point i was trying to make, about 2nd rate design interpretations. Writings like Delirious New York pale in comparison to the influence constructivist thinking had within institutions like Cooper Union, the AA, and eventually the GSD.
Constructivism had nothing to do with Derrida. The real revolutionaries were Russians like Ivan Leonidov, and Malevich and after you see their work, Derrida seems like an after-thought, or waste of time.
There were others like Günther Domenig who seemed to be getting somewhere with the aesthetic, and they were not in the exhibition. But I'm not sure why.
Its kind of refreshing to talk about this stuff again, like listening to 80's music.
because it seems like my historical analysis was right all along
like i originally said: "All of the above, referenced constructivist art, in some fashion. And that made it easier to pitch to students like the ones that started Arquitectonica and other corporate architecture firms."
What was really happening was neo-constructivism, and the exhibition was just a group show for what was already out there.
Joseph Rykwert's "On First Hearing about Hermeneutics" (October, Summer 1984) begins with a quotation from Joyce's Ulysses: Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well.
Did deconstruction turn into blobitecture some time in the 90's?
I'm not an architect but I will soon be giving a lecture on deconstruction in architecture, fashion and art. I am actually an artist with about $200,000 sunk into getting my MFA and I have found myself stuck in a foreign country teaching fashion illustration. Good planning. I have the lecture pretty much done. But I need a conclusion. I need to figure out if it helped move anything else forward. Seems like a black hole instead. Did it influence anything else? Did fracturing form help parametric design in architecture along? Maybe the best thing it did was push people towards better urban planning or some kind of reinvented modernism (out of disdain for Eisenman).
Give me a hand here. Ideas? I want to close the book on this crap. If I listen to one more Libeskind interview I am going to blow my fooking brains out.
deconstruction free'd us from any historical commitment, thus allowing computer technique to takeover.
all of eisenmans, liebeskinds, gehry's shit was solved by young guys who knew computers.
in a joint interview at Ohio state, Eisenman denied the computer, but the wise Sanford Kwinter recognized it's importance.
it's an absurd accident.
Frank Kafka
suf's comment seems right, to an extent. but as part of freedom from 'historical commitment', i'd make a special point of freedom from both recognized typology and recognized construction industry standards/techniques. it's not just the shedding of historical garb and stylistic approach that was triggered during the 80s and 90s, it was also the dropping of any pretense that a building had to look like a building (much less communicate what type of building), had to appear to honor gravity, had to be built in ways that the construction industry commonly practiced, or even had to accommodate particular uses in a meaningful way.
there was a huge freedom for architecture to become more like product design in that it could look like anything, but also less like product design in that it sometimes became less efficiently responsive to the things it had to do.
while overall i think this was a good evolution, it has its challenges: when you can do anything, what *should* you do? we are often better designers when we have more constraints...
It was a branded event. Who actually fits in the criteria is open for debate. Personally, I think it opened the door to more formal investigations of architecture from many unknowns and those possibilities are still evident today (let's just forget the blob era ever existed, please).
So, imho, it did push architecture into a new realm (but again, the term is a bad umbrella of many things that were occurring at the same time). I loved it. It brought recognition to many of the big names out there now (even though they aren't, necessarily, deconstructivists, like Hadid and Gehry).
To your point, I think it catapulted Hadid, Gehry, Libeskind, Mayne and others to the forefront of architecture, giving them the foundation to have great success. So yeah, it had a huge impact on the profession. For me, I think it was the single most positive influence to architecture in my lifetime.
I always saw it as a byproduct of postmodernism, though it wasn't just that. An extension of "anything goes," maybe a sub-category. So to understand deconstructivism, I would say you need to look at postmodernism, Russian constructivism, and Derrida.
And the above comments about historical references really refer to the origins of post-modernism, which is also where Gehry's earlier work belongs. As most architects keep practicing and evolving, so does their work. So Gehry's architecture eventually evolved into the bloby stuff, which became very appealing and popular to the masses and he ended up getting stuck doing more of due to demand. Another camp that evolved from the three references above is the more pragmatic/programmatic architecture, i.e. the school of Koolhaas.
In order to build Bilboa, they implemented software used to build aircraft, which became a new architectural tool that people started exploring, and we ended up with a bunch of blobs as a result. As this technology advanced, some people forgot that it was a tool, and started using it to actually derive architectural ideas. That's how I would define the origin of parametric design.
Parametric design helps construct, and questionably (very questionably) justify these forms by the architects who subscribe, not the other way around. So I personally think parametric design is a tool that helped some of these architects further explore and pursue the ideas that were always at the core of their Architectural agendas.
This is my short version, there were many other factors and contributors and exceptions. i think the most important answer to your question is to remember that all of these architects sort of created their own vocabulary out of some common theory, so you can't simply say this became that. That common theory is still very much alive in various forms and shapes. And modernism never went away. There are a lot of parallel lines in architecture.
I have never come across the phrase "freed from historical commitment" and it is great that Steven Ward clarified a little by saying "freedom from both recognized typology and recognized construction industry standards/techniques." What other things do you think deconstructivist architects freed themselves from? I always get the idea that they freed themselves from a lot more than that.
"freedom from both recognized typology and recognized construction industry standards/techniques."
"...heed Tafuri's warning that "once the 'form is made free', the geometric universe becomes an uncontrollable 'adventure." (see Tafuri's "European Graffiti." Five x Five = Twenty-five, 1976)
peter's canon
2008.08.22 22:05
Just did a side by side chronological overview of the work of Gehry and Eisenman, and in terms of architectonic, geometrical experimentation, Gehry manifests a greater and more mature repertoire.
Eisenman goes through a lot of intellectual and theoretical rigor to ultimately arrive at his geometry, but Gehry simply demonstrates that the intellectual and theoretical rigor isn't even necessary when it come to unprecedented architectonic geometries.
The only reason Eisenman's approach gets respect is because it fits well into 'higher' education. To have students pay large amounts of money to then learn that, "Hey, just look at Gehry, you can design pretty much anyway you want these days." just wouldn't go over well.
first off, you need to clarify some terms. Not all blobs and fish-shaped Ghery buildings are deconstructivist. They have no theory associated with the design, they are just sculptural forms. Deconstructivist buildings have theory/explanation to every shape, color, material or space, look at Eisenmann or Tschumi, the theory that came with their buildings is vaster than the building itself. The only thing you can call 'deconstructivist' today is probably Libeskind (jewish museum) or Coop. When it comes to Gehry or Hadid you can speak of sculptural expressionist-like work and parametric design is today's avant-garde, but not deconstructivist. As a matter of fact Zaha hates to be called deconstructivist.
COSMIN_BUTA-- Yes, for my presentation I have been trying to focus on architects who specifically use terminology related to deconstruction (trace, undecidability, binaries) in interviews and writing. Libeskind and Eisenman for the most part. Although I think Gehry may have been on board for a few minutes in the beginnings. It is slippery territory because of the title given to this group of architects by a critic, and the following 1989 Deconstructivist Architecture show at the MOMA.
The label "deconstructivist" causes problems because it implies a style. The deconstructivist labeling of Hadid, Gehry, Koolhaus and others came from this labeling which implied a recognized style or new aesthetic. Incidentally, to this day, no architect from the 1989 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition accepts the labeling. It isn't a style or an aesthetic.
There is the same problem over in fashion design. Martin Margiela and a couple others from the Belgian Five are the only ones who could properly be called deconstructivist and even they have no comment on the labeling. The designs of Comme des Garcons is constantly labeled as deconstruction fashion but Rei Kawakubo fervently denies any association. She is in the same boat as a lot of these architects who are not deconstructivist. Mixed into their designs is a little of this and a little of that (deconstruction included of course).
The best thing to do is say "this architect incorporates elements of Derrida's deconstruction into his/her design process". But that is pretty messy.
exit's comments from 2008 were right on then and, for the same reasons probably, gehry is maybe the more respected of the two now: the fact that his work has pushed boundaries of construction technique and process *without* reference to theory is more accepted in the current climate.
definitely true that there was only 'deconstructivist' architecture in that a couple of critics at a certain time noticed certain commonalities in the work of several architects. it was not a movement, just a tendency, which is also why its legacy might be very hard to pin down. if the group never agreed to be in a club, how can you determine what influence they had together?
what you may be looking at is what the recognition of this group of projects meant (and inspired?) in the period in which the profession at large was generally making very conventional construction - sometimes straightforward modern, sometimes with some historical appendages. a generation of architects saw the group identified by wigley et al each trying out individual new vocabularies for architecture and realized that they could do the same.
the blob trend was maybe one thing to arise from this, but it was also an exploration of what was possible with digital tools. positing a direct evolution is tough.
A lot can be attributed to the dissemination of all the pretty diagrams (I fondly recall getting that first El Corquis of Hadid, before Vitra had been built). There were so many Decon books it was easier for a student to pile up on the latest and greatest.
Koolhaas followed this momentum when he produced SMLXL.
Without all these books, and I still have stacks of them, I don't think it would have gotten anywhere (or at least not be something as grand).
Blobs were a direct result of software. Nothing more, imho, just a result of animation software that became affordable (or free). Once Maya was released, blobs were everywhere (I recall when it was released and all the hoopla from Lynn and company, although he'd been using, what was it, SGI's and Power Animator?).
The blobbers also took advantage of the mass publication system and saturated the student market instantly, promising mass customization, etc., etc. The blob movement was a direct result of #1 Software availability on regular PCs and #2 Marketing tons of new books, articles, silly theory, etc. Thankfully, that movement didn't get much farther than academia!
So, really, I don't think much of what actually mattered had anything to do with specific thought or intent, just great marketing.
seems like an important question is/was: what does deconstruction actually have to do with architecture? judging from the public "letters" between derrida and eisenman, it certainly wasn't clear to derrida.
imho, it's another misappropriation symptomatic of a general crisis of legitimacy, probably the most lasting aftermath of writings of postmodern architecture. just as some architects responded by reached outside of architecture to quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc, to borrow the epistemic solidity of other fields, others reached to continental philosophy.
which isn't to say that these other areas have nothing to offer architectural thinking, but unfortunately it rarely went beyond some sort of clumsy transliteration from text to form...
When I think of deconstruction aesthetics Michael Asher comes to mind.
http://www.smmoa.org/index.php/exhibitions/details/191
eric chavkin
Wow. That Ashner installation is incredibly pointless.
to call asher's installation 'incredibly pointless' is like saying i will condemn everything i don't know anything about. don't be so lazy to look up further. you might not like his work but historically michael asher's works are total opposite of pointless.
eric, i don't connect his work, specially this show, with deconstruction.. maybe you have meant deconstructing the text and the narrative of the story. if anything, it is a critique of museum operations. santa monica museum does not have any permanent collections. artist is building a permanent collection for the SMMOA that is in itself has a life span (the duration of the show itself, a paradox) which is much more interesting and close to home than exposed metal studs. could the artist do this by drawing the floor plans of past installations on the floor? i am not a mind reader, but they already exist as floor plans.
there were few things written about this piece.
drawmore.flounces,
This is a tricky issue, I agree with Derek Kaplan: Derrida's construction is essentially an analytical tool that he used to pick apart texts by authors such as Nietzsche. I have always found the use of the term by architects for the synthetic work of making buildings to be gratuitous, instead it merely denotes an architectural style characteristic of a particular period.
Thank you Eric for the reminder about the Michael Asher show; as you say, it approaches an art/architecture of deconstruction in that it reflects on the nature of the museum exhibition and the history of the institution.
Various forces were at play in formalizing the Decon exhibition,
Zaha - grew tired of drawing right angles
Gehry - hung out with artists because he was going thru a rough marriage
Rem - became interested in architectural mutants
Eisenman - frustrated by his habit of over-intellectualizing everything, produced some very complicated drawings and then decided to become friends with Derrida, in order to lend himself some credibility.
Tschumi - was the one interested in violence..
LIbeskind - was a disciple of Eisenman, and fully absorbed contructivist art from Cooper Union in the 70's
Coop Himmelblau - were just crazy
Philip Johnson - was the rich guy, and while still feeling guilty from his Nazi days, decided to team up with Eisenman. They would meet in bars and talk about who the next stars were going to be. Among others, they ruled out SITE architects for the decon exhibition
All of the above, referenced constructivist art, in some fashion. And that made it easier to pitch to students like the ones that started Arquitectonica and other corporate architecture firms.
Decon arch was supposed to be about psychoanalyzing a geometry and allowing it to exist as an un-oppressed shard, but the adventure has ended, it's now a page in history. For a new day is upon us. The so-called blob-era is a vague generalization of what's been happening since, blob is a term which is championed mostly by conformist designers
exactly, nick. Deconstruction is somewhere between decay and reverse engineering, but applied to latent historical genealogies in texts. to recast it in the role of a generative creative platform, not just in architecture but in any context, just seems premised on either 1) a mistake, or 2) such extreme interpretive liberties that one has to question why the name is kept...
had never seen that asher work, so thanks e.c. for the reference...
Arquitectonica started their firm in October 1977.
Their student days were long over by the time Deconstruction was being 'pitched'.
Arquitectonica, The Atlantis, completed 1982.
very good, and you would know who their teachers were
teachers who either ended up in the decon exhibition, or had loose ties to it.
hence a 'pitch' was involved
appear to honor gravity
Just to nitpick on Steven's comment...
B.. but gravity is one of four universal constants in the entire universe! It's one of four things that have ever existed and will continue to exist. Gravity will last longer than the sun burns and longer than our nearest stars stop shining.
And even if our galaxy collapses and turns into a super massive blackhole, gravity will always be there. As it crushes our tiny planet into a speck of cosmic goop, after its immense forces grind our bones into nothingness and rip the flesh from our corpses, gravity will be there forever binding us to that singularity.
Why wouldn't you want to worship and also fear this force?
jjr, notice my language: '...had to appear to honor gravity...'
but gravity is one of four universal constants in the entire universe! It's one of four things that have ever existed and will continue to exist. Gravity will last longer than the sun burns and longer than our nearest stars stop shining.
...or until we've fully figured out quantum physics.
"blobitecture?" IMO - look back to bucky fuller...
F.T.B., please tell us when and where Arquitectonica went to school and who their teachers were. I know Fort-Brescia went to Princeton and Harvard, and Spear went to Brown and Columbia and briefly MIT, but I'm not exactly sure when, so go ahead and fill in the rest.
When I look at the early graphics of Arquitectonica, I'm immediately reminded of Zenghelis and Koolhaas, hence, it appears the real inspiration came from the (new) architecture of Delirious New York, which isn't exactly a book pitching Deconstruction.
Koolhaas collaborated with Spear on the Spear Villa in 1974.
OMA (Koolhaas, E. Zenghelis, Z. Zenghelis, Vriesendrop) was founded 1 January 1975.
JJR - that's why creating things that seem to defy gravity are so captivating. Give me a cantilever!! :-)
emergency exit wound,
Having seen Bernardo's portfolio in the late 70's, when he had long hair and wanted to teach in south florida, he could have been in the deconstructivist architecture exhibition. He didnt necessarily touch upon deconstruction-the philosphy, but his drawings were Libeskind-ish with a Lappidus touch
My original humble opinion was that the many, once exciting ideas formalized in the deconstructivist architecture exhibition were diluted once they went 2nd hand, and IMO Arquitectonica were among those who got it 2nd hand and ran with it.
According to Fort-Brescia, "I came down to Florida, originally to teach at the University of Miami where I taught for two years until I decided what I really wanted to do was practice and so at that point I switched." Assuming the switch point was October 1977 (or just before that), then you, F.T.B., saw Fort-Brescia's portfolio sometime early-mid 1975. And who were his teachers again?
So, your last statement above suggests that Arquitectonica diluted the ideas presented in the 1988 Deconstructivism exhibit, but Arquitectonica was already diluting those ideas in the mid-late 1970s? And this is based on your seeing Fort-Bresicia's portfolio something like 36 years ago?
For a very good representation of Arquitectonica's earliest work see GA Document 7, August, 1983 (and compare these early projects to the OMA projects presented within Delirious New York).
A fascinating discussion. A couple of phrases caught my eye.
"Derrida's construction is essentially an analytical tool" Architects used these ideas for self-analysis, to justify formal approaches that fell outside linear processes, and to support intuitive, non-linear, and often non-tectonic results.
"crisis of legitimacy" which followed the 'crisis of meaning' that resulted in the first great wave of Post Modernism, in the Neo-Classical wave of the late '70s and '80s. As corporate Modernism became increasingly unable to provide solutions for smaller grained architectural problems, a nostalgia inducing approach was taken to attempt connect the Architect with the individual. The problem was that it took the form of a specific stylistic language that could be associated with pre-modern institutions as impersonal and elitist as the functional programs monopolized by late modernism.
In the absence of meaning that would connect as a relevant cultural movement, architects looked to other modes of analysis and meaning to lend legitimacy to Architecture.
All of which seemed to be a separate impulse form the business of form making, and had more to do with branding the Architect than with meaning.
Is it that "Architecture as Architecture" is not sufficiently meaningful to be legitimate in the larger culture? As an analogy, does some understanding of musical theory enhance the non-musicians enjoyment of a Symphony?
And for "Architecture as Architecture", see Colin Rowe's "Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" as an example.
Is it that "Architecture as Architecture" is not sufficiently meaningful to be legitimate in the larger culture? As an analogy, does some understanding of musical theory enhance the non-musicians enjoyment of a Symphony?
The difference between architecture and symphonies is that symphonies has no physical form or utilitarian value. That is, a symphony is purely an intellectual and emotional pursuit.
Unless it is a folly, architecture still has a tangible physical value and a utilitarian aspect that much be respected— even if it doesn't look like a building, it should still function as a building.
You can really stretch out the meaning of "function" to be any number of things— art museums are the cultural elite versions of U-Store-It, a mostly empty place devoid of secondary and tertiary demands for the infinite storage of all things yesteryear. Some places, like the Barcelona Pavilion, store ideas— a veritable prison of image and pride.
Architecture as architecture is great if it fulfills the basic reasoning for it to exist; to provide shelter to its intended uses and inhabitants. But overriding those "primal urges" a building has to exist in the name of vanity and expression is equivalent to blowing random notes on a pan flute and calling it a cantata.
@ Aldorossi: “A fascinating discussion.” Seconded, this one has been/is a fun one. this sort of thread is my favorite part of archinect...
“Architects used these ideas for self-analysis, to justify formal approaches that fell outside linear processes, and to support intuitive, non-linear, and often non-tectonic results.” To the degree that the first part about self-analysis is true, that it is used as a means of adding a more complex self-reflexivity within their own design thinking, more power to them. I guess I just haven’t seen much of that. The only meaningful intersection between deconstruction and architecture that I have seen is the “collaboration” between Eisenman and Derrida, and everything you say after “to justify” fits squarely into this problem that came up during it (discussed above):
“…At the outset of this project Derrida makes it clear that working in a foreign field (architecture) and a foreign language (English) was going to be very difficult for him and that collaboration was improbable.
This unease is compounded by Eisenman later in the process by asking Derrida if he can draw a Chora. Derrida clearly has problems with this and with Eisenman's statement that "what I am searching for is a way to turn deconstruction from a mode of analysis into one of synthesis." This desire to turn deconstruction in a creative activity is something Eisenman sees in his previous projects, Caravaggio and Romeo and Juliet. There is a sense (supported by Kipnis comments in the documentation of this project) that Eisenman is looking for Derrida’s approval, his signature as he puts in on these earlier projects by reconstituting them here in a theoretical form with Derrida in attendance."
reference, page 9.
As far as I know, how to convert deconstruction into a generative framework never was/has been philosophically addressed, let alone resolved. imho, there is just a group of people that nonetheless continued trying to force it into that role out of ulterior motives…
As for the question about “wasn’t the architecture itself enough for the culture at large?” – if deconstructivist packaging was what they came up with as a general appeal to the culture around them, they should have hired a consultant instead. But I don’t think it was ever about that…
Reminds me of Barnett Newman’s quote about “Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds.” I don't so much ascribe to this in the case of theory and architecture, but it does seem relevant...
@Orhan.
I read through your link to Ashner's work. And it is still pointless.
It's as intellectually sophisticated as any half-finished buildout you might find find on any mall or mcmansion jobsite in anywhere USA. Except this person obviously doesn't even understand light gauge framing. And no, putting it in a gallery doesn't make it art any more than if I had shat on the gallery floor. Pointless.
Too many galleries. Not enough art.
@peace77 - I thought Asher's installation was pretty interesting. From a deconstructive standpoint it shows the a presence of absence. It is pretty odd if you think about it. He made a ghost of all the past shows. I am not sure why he didn't erect completed walls though. Maybe so it seems more ghost-like? I would have either marked out where the walls were on the floor as a kind of documentation you had to either step over or walk around, or erect the actual walls. Half way between the two seems a little indecisive.
It reminds me a little of Whiteread's "House" though. I always thought "House" felt like a ghost of the people who lived there. But the walls of a gallery don't really soak up that much presence do they? They are loaded with all kinds of institutional and cultural framing, but not really imbued with peoples lives, identities, or personal stuff. So its not very spooky in that sense. A little dry.
Anyways it is interesting to see a history laid out in front of you like that I think.
@Derek Kaplan-- Appaerently with the Chora garden project Derrida and Eisenman went around and around in circles confusing the hell out of eachother. They could never come to a decision. Tschumi told a reporter that he didn't think they were even going to build anything, they just wanted to publish a book. In the end the project was something like 8 times over budget and was canned. Here is an excerpt from stuff that was going on between Derrida and Eisenman when they were working on the Chora garden:
Eisenman proposes to build a quarry from which visitors will pick up rocks and carry them to another part of the site. Derrida qestions whether it would be possible to force people to do this; he is concerned that the project might come to resemble a miniature golf course. Confusion between the two men develops as Derrida asks if Eisenman is being “concrete” (as opposed to speaking abstractly) to which Eisenman answers, “Yes, concrete,” in the belief that Derrida is asking what material he will use to build the garden.
It is pretty funny that with all that shit floating around in their heads and all the reading and writing and theorizing, when they finally get together they stumble around bumping their heads. Funny because it shows how language (and cultural) barriers are really a problem! We tend to forget that a lot. It also really shows that you have to create as you theorize. You can't theorize like crazy for a long time and expect the work to jump out when you finally decide to build something. It just doesn't happen.
@emergency exit wound,
Dates are not important. The exhibition was a formality for ideas that were circulating before 1988. And Arquitectonica were amongst those who got it 2nd hand and were not as successful. Please remember that when you reference delirious new york, which was a side trip for them.
Yes there were those ties with Rem, but I think in the end the language of decon influenced them more, it was always under the surface. In Miami that is what they are associated with, not culture of congestion theory. Use your eyes my friend, there is a visible similarity. Plus they were in deconstruction 3,either part 2 or 3, academy editions, AD
…….deconstruction…….part 3………..like 2nd hand
Other 2nd hand attempts are people like Odile Decq.
And at the corporate level, in Miami while were at it, some of Spillis Candela.
I'm talking about 2nd hand attempts, but if you want to derail into early intentions...i dont see the point
Yes, dates are not important for sloppy historical analysis. And who were Fort-Brescia's teachers again?
cant promise i'll let you know, just dont forget
…….deconstruction…….part 3………..like 2nd hand
and by the way, the Atlantis is straight out of 'education of an architect'
who sloppy papi?
deconstructivism was a precursor for the Matrix
I think it's your historical analysis that's 2nd hand, sloppy seconds even.
fair enough, but i prefer to think of it as network thinking
@ F.T.B.
"The exhibition was a formality for ideas that were circulating before 1988." I ask this not leadingly, but because I don't know: how true is this? I know some of the people in the moma show had themselves been using deconstruction explicitly, but is it true of all of them, or even most? as some have alluded to above, the alternative is that the term was retroactively applied as a method of grouping work with aesthetic similarities by Wigley and P. Johnson, regardless of whether the architect had ever expressed any theoretical affiliation? this is what I would have assumed -- but I'm not that familiar with early writings of most of the people in that show...
Derek. You hit the nail on the head. Gehry specifically said that his work had nothing to do with deconsrtuctivism. The label got slapped on him for convenience to make the show.
@ cashmere
Baudrillard is the premise of the matrix. Though Baudrillard disagrees.
@Derek
yeah I agree with you, the exhibition was completely about group aesthetics. Eisenman and Tschumi were the ones to take deconstruction in all academic seriousness, the rest to a lesser degree. It was as if they all found out how to say the same thing in different ways
The single biggest influence had to be constructivist art, which was a point i was trying to make, about 2nd rate design interpretations. Writings like Delirious New York pale in comparison to the influence constructivist thinking had within institutions like Cooper Union, the AA, and eventually the GSD.
Constructivism had nothing to do with Derrida. The real revolutionaries were Russians like Ivan Leonidov, and Malevich and after you see their work, Derrida seems like an after-thought, or waste of time.
There were others like Günther Domenig who seemed to be getting somewhere with the aesthetic, and they were not in the exhibition. But I'm not sure why.
Its kind of refreshing to talk about this stuff again, like listening to 80's music.
Wikipedia actually provides decent entries for both Constructivism and Deconstructivism and even Blobitecture. Otherwise, welcome to the Hotel Anecdotal.
please elaborate,
because it seems like my historical analysis was right all along
like i originally said:
"All of the above, referenced constructivist art, in some fashion. And that made it easier to pitch to students like the ones that started Arquitectonica and other corporate architecture firms."
What was really happening was neo-constructivism, and the exhibition was just a group show for what was already out there.
Joseph Rykwert's "On First Hearing about Hermeneutics" (October, Summer 1984) begins with a quotation from Joyce's Ulysses: Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well.