Honestly, oe, if you want to flex your intellectual muscle you may want to start distancing yourself from deconstruction... In my opinion, it was never anything more than a convenient metaphor for architects to "tear the roof off the motherfucker", for lack of a more descriptive phrase. How can architecture express deconstruction beyond a metaphorical relationship??? This has always been the problem. However, the seductive forms, collisions, swoops, curves, tranforomations, and oppositions remain a big influence on the architecture of today. Rem, Zaha, and even Gehry (who was originally though of as a deconstructivist, but always rejected the label) do not expouse decontructionist (or ivist) philiosophy! And you'll notice that more recent work is more difficult to label as deconstruction--and that the more obvious deconstructivist works (like La Villette) are starting to look a bit dated.
To clear up the decontructionist/deconstructivist confusion, I think the term "deconstructivist" is a hybrid born from the old archtictectural movement of "Russian Constructivism" and deconstruction... This explains why only architects use the term.
Well I really didnt expect the label of deconstructivism to be so controvercial. If you compare the work to all the movements that have come before it it seems pretty clear.
In anycase, I am trying to move beyond it. I think thats what this thread was supposed to be about...
Im just wrapping up my thesis right now, and writing about it for project statements has been proving a real challenge. Ive really burned through a lot of movements in the last 4 months, and this has sortof been my last dragon to slay.
j >> i'll share something with you guys:
it's all been a joke. all the ideas relating deconstruction to architecture were in jest - an inside joke played on the world by a handful of architects.
No, I'd say, the way deconstruction has been practised has been a sore joke - deconstruction per se isn't an ugly concept.
Decon. argues that representation should be looked at as just one of many "perspectival" alternatives.
An alternative to representationalism is the Nietzschean theory of Perspectivism - "Insofar as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning, the world is knowable, but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings."
So knowledge entails some form of interpretation; and the play of interpretation is a play of different perspectives.
There are two things in operation here.
Perspective bears the uniqueness of our spatial-sensory location, with our interpretation being an organization of various, pluralistic, multiple perspectives.
It argues for affirming a unique actualized presence and the virtual presence of others.
There is a displaced focus, and, the actualization of other foci to give the enigmatic features of life recognition.
Deconstructivist architecture so far has made a literalization of such a theory and reduced the role of arch. as a medium of simply illustrating fractures.
They made buildings with literal folds, which is just laughable!
The instability of form, etc. needn't necessarily be a dispersive project like these decons. have practised, it can also be a structuralist, organizing one.
year ago in my studio I wanted to make a model that is both deconstrive and ordered, but my professor was just laughing at me... Is there some kind of a rule that you cannot combine two theories together? just stick to one? wth?
pencebor>> year ago in my studio I wanted to make a model that is both deconstrive and ordered, but my professor was just laughing at me... Is there some kind of a rule that you cannot combine two theories together? just stick to one? wth?
That's too bad; I hope you continue to try.
Classic decon. thought was already practised in ancient India but minorly in the form of ornamentation on arch. as far as I know, where a stone idol depicting the face of the sun one side would when circumambulated take on the form of a lion (Vishnu - Narasimha).
(In my opinion, it can't get more Bergsonian-Deleuze than that... - the temporalization of difference, etc.)
Such transformations of form can also expose fragility, multiple foci, and the void without the crude literalizations of the 'break' with gaps and folds and twists and what not. But that's just one kind of example.
So yes, I think, the potentials are still there for nobler and beautiful architecture.
Read Louis Martin's "Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s Architectural Theory,†Assemblage 11 (1990): 23-35.
It talks about how Tschumi ripped Bataille and Thomas Kuhn off. Also see the introduction to Denis Hollier's Against Architecture -- which is Hollier's excoriation of Tschumi's admitted plagiarism.
"metamechanic ... I would say that Tschumi's events are more informed by Bataille and Barthes than Deleuze. " so, not just you.
That bataille link will be interesting. Tschmui's systems seem uneconomical and unanthropological...abstract, self referential, a syntax of uninhabited empty space...and rhetorical leftist insignias. Which is ok. But Bataille struck me as being very specific and grounded, even cthonic. His mind must find a human mess. Nietzsche-like but without the melodrama and bipolarity. oh and more cthonic. Nietzche is airy.
I also confess, I steered away from Hollier's book after the first couple of pages. It was too involved in being literary and it wasn't really nice literary. And what an unelightened/ing title.
We at the AIA Department of Standardization are pleased to inform this our illustrious and confident architectural community that as of June 1, 2006 all architectural philosophy (including Semiology, Deconstructionology, Heideggarology, Nietzscheology, Field Theoryology, Pattern Languageology, etc.) will fall under the Sub Compartment of Mental Standardization to the Department of Standardization. It is our pleasure, we the Department of Standardization, as we are all architects of the utmost and most pronounced standardization, to provide you with this our new voice of standardization of our highest of professions. Please direct all philosophical questions to your area AIA president. Again allow three weeks for delivery. Together in executive mental standardization!!!!
cellardoor ... yes indeed, I am only paraphasing Louis Martin. Like you, I am a little baffled by the attention Tschumi receives for his writings (or at least, I share some of your misgivings about Tschumi). As for Bataille, I love his weirdness - a human mess indeed. Hollier's book really did nothing to clarify Bataille's book. I found Hollier's book strange yet alluring. Perhaps I'll return to it someday.
meta ... I'm pretty much in agreement with you, though I wonder if plagiarizing, or borrowing, or whatever one chooses to call it, does serve some good in that it gets people talking about things.
I mean, without Tschumi's ouvre, Hollier and Martin would not have any grists to mill about Parc de la Villette. I could be wrong. But read the Martin article ... it kinda changed my then- and informed my now-present attitude towards "borrowing" from other disciplines.
"As for Bataille, I love his weirdness - a human mess indeed"
I didn't get the impression that he was weird.
Certainly he had the glamour of being an almost-catholic-priest librarian slut dilittante with a mock macabre streak. But then again, I'm sure Foucault concieved of his 'hetero'topias cruising for boys in public baths and dark streets..and probably had a few heated sessions with Barthes there. Now, whats weird or not french about that?
Yes...my point. Where Derrida is more concerened with abstract territory (his concern with khora) and is not just content but process of thought (he surveys ideas) and I find a more secure link there to Tschumi's work even if his writings state otherwise, Bataille is cthonic. Not only because he is all earthy and attached in his thinking, but also because 'khthonie' travels back to pre-olympian sacrifice where the victim was thrown into the earth in a sacred agricultural economy ending up in fertility gods. A very bataille sort of subject matter.Death, sex, and more sex. The Olympians (whom Neitzsche was a disciple of) offered the victim towards the heavens, the upward movement that would soon turn into the direction of the soul as the khthonios sacrifice turned into the direction of the body. The Olympians even turned gaia, the closest thing they have to materiality, into a clearly drawn character whose outlined characer was more significant than its material..the one moment that it does give way to soily materialism is with Cadmus and Adonis,both phonecian (and one with babylonian echos) and not a greek. ...it was robert calasso who said that the hellenic greeks were preoccupied with the outline and with drawing foreground out of a messy background. So, this is precisely why Bataille is cthonic-minded, Derrida choric and Neitszche..mmm..aerotic (as he ponders over the Olympians, and climbing trees to feel the danger of winds, and even disease and pneumonia (i recall) air-borne.
So, it was not a word of the day...a word of eras. ok. i will go throw up now.
We at the newly reorganized Department of Standardization share your concern with playgerism of writing and building facades and after extensive study in the workshops of the Department of Standardization, security meetings with the presidents of all area AIA, peer group mental standardization sub committees, and archival standardized form researches of pre AIA dominance a new office has been established by this department’s authority. Under the reorganization statement by the president mark June 7, 2006, under the Department of Standardization, Sub Department Standardization Department Sub Department: High Research for the Advancement of the Philosophical International Building Code Thought Patterns, Sub Department Fashion and Styles, Sub Department Philosophy Structures, Committee of De Constrictionology, Office for the Advancement of the Mental Thinking of Jack Deride, this the Assistant Secretary for the Drawer of Playgerism of Words and Building Facades.
We at the Standardization Department have been studying the phenomenon of philosophical studies in the architectural standardization for many years and have found with resolute certainty and not only that but with the utmost conviction that trends, styles and fashion of philosophy have no foundation. The past 30-40 years have clearly shown us, as we architects clearly see, an undeniable lack of progress within philosophy as the architectural datum of procedural standardization, semenology, field theoryology, pattern languageology, de constrictionology justly to name a few. Now, all architectural philosophy and the lower branches of mental derivations, as previously noted will henceforth be directed to the above reorganized position. All questions will require AIA form ZZ stroke BA@ stroke stroke (%>>pP stroke point 9822 point, page 389. This form must be filled out in triplicate and sent to the Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Archived Forms of The Department of Standardization and to your area AIA president. All department, sub departments, committees, secretaries, and assistant secretaries, and your area AIA president will review your form and consider the appropriate action. We work for your standardization as architects standardize by honor of our justification by will in our world community at large!
We thank you for your highly learned, mental, standardizational adherence to the architectural advancement of unified architectural mental thinking as we architects all have been justly privileged to advance on this our community of our standardized respecting selection. We architects look to our standardized advancement on this authority!!!!!
We at the Department of Standardization welcome, as all architects by our much deserved architectural thought patterns, your advancement of the standardization of trends and fashion. Advance standardization by will in authority!!!!!
I must further advance the standardization of our profession to a more perfect unification.
Standardization the great liberator.
I have resolute understanding and reasoning power.
I am a grand selector of impeccable distinction.
I will show the world my proper place as a decision maker in the highest regard.
This is my duty.
I will guide society to shining tomorrow.
I am the power at large.
I must take charge in these matters!!!
Let us work together and shoulder the load, we can do it!
Let's not back down know!!!
My training has given me the insight to make the right decisions at the right time at the right place.
I will not allow weakness of mind to ruin a bright career.
I will show the world my architectural leadership and executive charisma.
It is an advantage granted by my great intellectual endowment as Architect.
I shall continue to provide leadership to the world in these many facets of human standardization.
I have the power, the rightful knowledge, and yes, the hard fought insight to set these long needed standards in stone.
I stand as I have been granted, to lead the world with the vision of standard unification!!!!!
Take charge as you will!!!!
207moak:
We at the Department of Standardization welcome and encourage the further standardization by our rightful architectural mental thinking in all areas of our worldwide standardization. Unification in Standardization by rightful architectural will!!!!
Deconstructivism
nevermore, missing from your list:
deleuze - defenestrated
lamarck - phenohype
latour - pasteurized (too easy i know)
It's not that I condone fascism,
or any "ism"
A person should not believe in an
"ism", he should believe in himself
I quote John Lennon: "I don't believe
in Beatles I just believe in me
A good point there
After all, he was the walrus
I could be the walrus,
I'd still have to bum rides off people
I've said it before and I'll say it again: life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in while, you could miss it.
Honestly, oe, if you want to flex your intellectual muscle you may want to start distancing yourself from deconstruction... In my opinion, it was never anything more than a convenient metaphor for architects to "tear the roof off the motherfucker", for lack of a more descriptive phrase. How can architecture express deconstruction beyond a metaphorical relationship??? This has always been the problem. However, the seductive forms, collisions, swoops, curves, tranforomations, and oppositions remain a big influence on the architecture of today. Rem, Zaha, and even Gehry (who was originally though of as a deconstructivist, but always rejected the label) do not expouse decontructionist (or ivist) philiosophy! And you'll notice that more recent work is more difficult to label as deconstruction--and that the more obvious deconstructivist works (like La Villette) are starting to look a bit dated.
To clear up the decontructionist/deconstructivist confusion, I think the term "deconstructivist" is a hybrid born from the old archtictectural movement of "Russian Constructivism" and deconstruction... This explains why only architects use the term.
Well I really didnt expect the label of deconstructivism to be so controvercial. If you compare the work to all the movements that have come before it it seems pretty clear.
In anycase, I am trying to move beyond it. I think thats what this thread was supposed to be about...
Im just wrapping up my thesis right now, and writing about it for project statements has been proving a real challenge. Ive really burned through a lot of movements in the last 4 months, and this has sortof been my last dragon to slay.
ha ha yea I guess.
See you on the beach,
j >> i'll share something with you guys:
it's all been a joke. all the ideas relating deconstruction to architecture were in jest - an inside joke played on the world by a handful of architects.
No, I'd say, the way deconstruction has been practised has been a sore joke - deconstruction per se isn't an ugly concept.
Decon. argues that representation should be looked at as just one of many "perspectival" alternatives.
An alternative to representationalism is the Nietzschean theory of Perspectivism - "Insofar as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning, the world is knowable, but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings."
So knowledge entails some form of interpretation; and the play of interpretation is a play of different perspectives.
There are two things in operation here.
Perspective bears the uniqueness of our spatial-sensory location, with our interpretation being an organization of various, pluralistic, multiple perspectives.
It argues for affirming a unique actualized presence and the virtual presence of others.
There is a displaced focus, and, the actualization of other foci to give the enigmatic features of life recognition.
Deconstructivist architecture so far has made a literalization of such a theory and reduced the role of arch. as a medium of simply illustrating fractures.
They made buildings with literal folds, which is just laughable!
The instability of form, etc. needn't necessarily be a dispersive project like these decons. have practised, it can also be a structuralist, organizing one.
Fractures, dismantlings, discontinuities, movement, countless meanings, multiple-takes, can also be shown without such crude literalizations with folds. Consider 'Duet' or 'Encore' by Fukuda -
http://psylux.psych.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/art_of_shigeo_fukuda.html
or his 3-D Belvedere
http://neuro.caltech.edu/~seckel/mod/fukuda.htm#
The idea is a classic decon.
when properly understood.
The potentials for a more authentic decon. architecture has not even begun to be tapped yet.
The Public >> I once considered writing a masters thesis relating The Diamond Sutra to Derrida's decon...
Thoughts of the Middle-Most; Comparison: Parallels and Differences -
http://apps.fairfield.edu/ijfb/Full_Text.cfm?R_ID=2730
sounds like monadology to me...
vado, oh my Gott !
year ago in my studio I wanted to make a model that is both deconstrive and ordered, but my professor was just laughing at me... Is there some kind of a rule that you cannot combine two theories together? just stick to one? wth?
*deconstrive* = deconstructive
:)
pencebor>> year ago in my studio I wanted to make a model that is both deconstrive and ordered, but my professor was just laughing at me... Is there some kind of a rule that you cannot combine two theories together? just stick to one? wth?
That's too bad; I hope you continue to try.
Classic decon. thought was already practised in ancient India but minorly in the form of ornamentation on arch. as far as I know, where a stone idol depicting the face of the sun one side would when circumambulated take on the form of a lion (Vishnu - Narasimha).
(In my opinion, it can't get more Bergsonian-Deleuze than that... - the temporalization of difference, etc.)
Such transformations of form can also expose fragility, multiple foci, and the void without the crude literalizations of the 'break' with gaps and folds and twists and what not. But that's just one kind of example.
So yes, I think, the potentials are still there for nobler and beautiful architecture.
-isms are sloppy thinking that are useful when you want to avoid actually addressing any of the issues.
...too cranky for grammar.
metamechanic ... I would say that Tschumi's events are more informed by Bataille and Barthes than Deleuze.
how so, smokey?
Read Louis Martin's "Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s Architectural Theory,†Assemblage 11 (1990): 23-35.
It talks about how Tschumi ripped Bataille and Thomas Kuhn off. Also see the introduction to Denis Hollier's Against Architecture -- which is Hollier's excoriation of Tschumi's admitted plagiarism.
ok cheers
"metamechanic ... I would say that Tschumi's events are more informed by Bataille and Barthes than Deleuze. " so, not just you.
That bataille link will be interesting. Tschmui's systems seem uneconomical and unanthropological...abstract, self referential, a syntax of uninhabited empty space...and rhetorical leftist insignias. Which is ok. But Bataille struck me as being very specific and grounded, even cthonic. His mind must find a human mess. Nietzsche-like but without the melodrama and bipolarity. oh and more cthonic. Nietzche is airy.
I also confess, I steered away from Hollier's book after the first couple of pages. It was too involved in being literary and it wasn't really nice literary. And what an unelightened/ing title.
We at the AIA Department of Standardization are pleased to inform this our illustrious and confident architectural community that as of June 1, 2006 all architectural philosophy (including Semiology, Deconstructionology, Heideggarology, Nietzscheology, Field Theoryology, Pattern Languageology, etc.) will fall under the Sub Compartment of Mental Standardization to the Department of Standardization. It is our pleasure, we the Department of Standardization, as we are all architects of the utmost and most pronounced standardization, to provide you with this our new voice of standardization of our highest of professions. Please direct all philosophical questions to your area AIA president. Again allow three weeks for delivery. Together in executive mental standardization!!!!
cellardoor ... yes indeed, I am only paraphasing Louis Martin. Like you, I am a little baffled by the attention Tschumi receives for his writings (or at least, I share some of your misgivings about Tschumi). As for Bataille, I love his weirdness - a human mess indeed. Hollier's book really did nothing to clarify Bataille's book. I found Hollier's book strange yet alluring. Perhaps I'll return to it someday.
chthonic indeed!
meta ... I'm pretty much in agreement with you, though I wonder if plagiarizing, or borrowing, or whatever one chooses to call it, does serve some good in that it gets people talking about things.
I mean, without Tschumi's ouvre, Hollier and Martin would not have any grists to mill about Parc de la Villette. I could be wrong. But read the Martin article ... it kinda changed my then- and informed my now-present attitude towards "borrowing" from other disciplines.
"As for Bataille, I love his weirdness - a human mess indeed"
I didn't get the impression that he was weird.
Certainly he had the glamour of being an almost-catholic-priest librarian slut dilittante with a mock macabre streak. But then again, I'm sure Foucault concieved of his 'hetero'topias cruising for boys in public baths and dark streets..and probably had a few heated sessions with Barthes there. Now, whats weird or not french about that?
Yes...my point. Where Derrida is more concerened with abstract territory (his concern with khora) and is not just content but process of thought (he surveys ideas) and I find a more secure link there to Tschumi's work even if his writings state otherwise, Bataille is cthonic. Not only because he is all earthy and attached in his thinking, but also because 'khthonie' travels back to pre-olympian sacrifice where the victim was thrown into the earth in a sacred agricultural economy ending up in fertility gods. A very bataille sort of subject matter.Death, sex, and more sex. The Olympians (whom Neitzsche was a disciple of) offered the victim towards the heavens, the upward movement that would soon turn into the direction of the soul as the khthonios sacrifice turned into the direction of the body. The Olympians even turned gaia, the closest thing they have to materiality, into a clearly drawn character whose outlined characer was more significant than its material..the one moment that it does give way to soily materialism is with Cadmus and Adonis,both phonecian (and one with babylonian echos) and not a greek. ...it was robert calasso who said that the hellenic greeks were preoccupied with the outline and with drawing foreground out of a messy background. So, this is precisely why Bataille is cthonic-minded, Derrida choric and Neitszche..mmm..aerotic (as he ponders over the Olympians, and climbing trees to feel the danger of winds, and even disease and pneumonia (i recall) air-borne.
So, it was not a word of the day...a word of eras. ok. i will go throw up now.
metamechanic:
We at the newly reorganized Department of Standardization share your concern with playgerism of writing and building facades and after extensive study in the workshops of the Department of Standardization, security meetings with the presidents of all area AIA, peer group mental standardization sub committees, and archival standardized form researches of pre AIA dominance a new office has been established by this department’s authority. Under the reorganization statement by the president mark June 7, 2006, under the Department of Standardization, Sub Department Standardization Department Sub Department: High Research for the Advancement of the Philosophical International Building Code Thought Patterns, Sub Department Fashion and Styles, Sub Department Philosophy Structures, Committee of De Constrictionology, Office for the Advancement of the Mental Thinking of Jack Deride, this the Assistant Secretary for the Drawer of Playgerism of Words and Building Facades.
We at the Standardization Department have been studying the phenomenon of philosophical studies in the architectural standardization for many years and have found with resolute certainty and not only that but with the utmost conviction that trends, styles and fashion of philosophy have no foundation. The past 30-40 years have clearly shown us, as we architects clearly see, an undeniable lack of progress within philosophy as the architectural datum of procedural standardization, semenology, field theoryology, pattern languageology, de constrictionology justly to name a few. Now, all architectural philosophy and the lower branches of mental derivations, as previously noted will henceforth be directed to the above reorganized position. All questions will require AIA form ZZ stroke BA@ stroke stroke (%>>pP stroke point 9822 point, page 389. This form must be filled out in triplicate and sent to the Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Archived Forms of The Department of Standardization and to your area AIA president. All department, sub departments, committees, secretaries, and assistant secretaries, and your area AIA president will review your form and consider the appropriate action. We work for your standardization as architects standardize by honor of our justification by will in our world community at large!
We thank you for your highly learned, mental, standardizational adherence to the architectural advancement of unified architectural mental thinking as we architects all have been justly privileged to advance on this our community of our standardized respecting selection. We architects look to our standardized advancement on this authority!!!!!
That post is so 1982.
The Public:
We at the Department of Standardization welcome, as all architects by our much deserved architectural thought patterns, your advancement of the standardization of trends and fashion. Advance standardization by will in authority!!!!!
I must further advance the standardization of our profession to a more perfect unification.
Standardization the great liberator.
I have resolute understanding and reasoning power.
I am a grand selector of impeccable distinction.
I will show the world my proper place as a decision maker in the highest regard.
This is my duty.
I will guide society to shining tomorrow.
I am the power at large.
I must take charge in these matters!!!
Let us work together and shoulder the load, we can do it!
Let's not back down know!!!
My training has given me the insight to make the right decisions at the right time at the right place.
I will not allow weakness of mind to ruin a bright career.
I will show the world my architectural leadership and executive charisma.
It is an advantage granted by my great intellectual endowment as Architect.
I shall continue to provide leadership to the world in these many facets of human standardization.
I have the power, the rightful knowledge, and yes, the hard fought insight to set these long needed standards in stone.
I stand as I have been granted, to lead the world with the vision of standard unification!!!!!
Take charge as you will!!!!
207moak:
We at the Department of Standardization welcome and encourage the further standardization by our rightful architectural mental thinking in all areas of our worldwide standardization. Unification in Standardization by rightful architectural will!!!!
metamechanic:
Thank you for enquiring.
Yes, cf are my initials: Ca'Canny Fabian
Yours in rightful standardization!
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