jencks blows.
for seminal get the johnson / wiggles moma show book.
for seminal read derrida's grammatology (a small chunk will do).

of course, with no english libraries around im sure that dont help much and i aint got no scans of said verbiage.
my sincere apologies.

and remember: no wholesome, godfearing, pure red blooded christian american who has the best interests of tradition and the survival of mankind in their heart likes decon or has any use for its unnecessary questions about what is obvious and natural.

biblio dixit. papa dixit.
but god bless the child thats got his own.

i looked for the jencks, but we only have digital access back to 2004... i just emailed you the preface and introduction from johnson/wigley's exhibition catalog as well as the section on libeskind... i'd also try to find a copy of wigley's "the architecture of deconstruction: derrida's haunt"

Ahhhh, architphil, now I see who you are :) Thanks for your email... I know, I have some databases that only have journals UNTIL 2000, and others that only go BACK until 2005... so annoying.

I am not in an English-speaking country, so unfortunately I have severely limited access to books...

Apparently Philip Johnson came up with the term "Deconstructivism" for the MOMA exhibition in 1998... Anyone know of any treatise written by him about this?

its in this book braw,

http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructivist-Architecture-Museum-Modern-York/dp/087070298X

Still looking for JENCKS article...

Eisenman - The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End
Kipnis - Twisting the Separatrix
McLeod - Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era
Wigley - Deconstructivist Architecture
Wigley - The Translation of Architecture, the production of Babel


if you are familiar with derrida's philosophy, you might be able to understand twisting the separatrix, and the translation of architecture.
i quit reading them.


wigley's deconstructivist architecture (intro) is in the book written for the MOMA exhibition in 1998

and the other articles are in architectural theory since 1968

shoot me an email if you need any article
I have PDFs

the michael hays book that sparch refers to, is on AARG for articles and books, that you don't have the money to buy or that are out of print. this is where i "shop."

b[s] - thanks for the AARG link.

charles jencks is like new urbanism - its where idea go to die.

Archinect senior editor John Jourden interviewed Jencks in 2005.
link

Sparch- I would love PDFs of the Eisenman article, as well as the Wigley one on the Translation of Architecture. Also, the McLeod one would be cool... is it specifically linking architecture to politics or just talking about the transitions that happened to occur during Reagan's time?
Thank you for offering!

I got emailed the Jencks article, thanks all....

Any other good sources, would love to hear... Did Zaha ever write anything about her own philosophy?

That is a good interview Orhan. Hadn't read that before. Just a little before my Archinect time.

I thought I might put this question to some of you as well-

Deconstructivism is within the general framework of Post-Modernism, correct?

So how can I tell if any said Post-Modern building is a Deconstructivist one?

Is it leaking?

yes, thanks for the link orhan and for the interview john jourden....although, to be fair to Sbeth85, its not related to deconstrutivism. anyway, reading that 2005 interview now, there's quite a definite feeling that it belongs to a different era, apropos the financial crisis and all. everyone is so busy now with rearrangements and cuts of all sorts and the ceiling has plummeted downwards along with the ground level. the pre-crisis touted iconicity of the "tallest building on earth" has become for many an ironic commentary on the hubris incurred by the tunnel vision of iconic-minded architecture. if jenks noted that the previous era was one of weak belief, then this era is definitely one of strong doubt having followed a mountainous interlude bump of shocked disbelief.

Sbeth85;

That is (still) an interesting question. There is quite a lot of ambiguity surrounding the term deconstructivism. As an excercise, when did Zaha stop being Deconstructivist and start being Zaha Hadid Inc....Or is she still a Deconstructivist architect? Or did Deconstructivism deconstruct itself, as a term and category, by the onset of the nineties...even if its formal rubrics and quirkiness survived the linguistic death? is Tschumi still Deconstructivist? ...and is Deconstructivism really only a skewing of Constructivism, as it is classically understood...or is it so by virtue of being "contaminated" by Derrida's deconstruction? Peter Eisenman's intricate intellectual/ized work certainly differed from Coop Himmelblau's intuitive work....Was Deconstructivism essentially a common will to skew modernist's architectural orthography brought to fruition by an 1980's architectural Dark-Wavesque subversiveness , rather than sharing a common method or even sensibility?

It might be more interesting and less generic to deal with the topic from the standpoint of how we perceive it now

The term "deconstructivism" was coined by Phillip Johnson for 3 reasons:
1) he wanted something catchy to name the show that he was helping to organize at MOMA, presenting works by architects that he felt were leading a new direction after the drivel that was known as "post-modernism in architecture".
2) much attention was being paid to Continental Philosophy in the form of "post-structuralist" or "deconstruction" as coined by Derrida. these critical, philosophical texts and debates were influencing the theory and critical discussions within some schools of architecture.
3) given that much of the work Johnson was attracted to had a great deal of shifted, off-set, angular geometry, he conflated the terms "deconstruction" and "constructivism" to give us "deconstructivism".

Given that architects such as Zaha and Libeskind were more influenced Suprematism than Constructivism, that Gehry had no interest at all in the philosophical or theoretical underpinnings of any of this, that Eisenmann was fixated on Derrida's work but not necessarily the fractured geometries (wanting to have more "logic"), that Tschumi was more interested in Guy Debord and what happened before 1968, than after, and Coop just did stuff - well the whole conceit of the exhibition and the term "deconstructivism" is a manufactured moment, rather than a revealing of a tendency.

i don't think it would be honest to reduce it to an opportunistic propoganda hoax either. lets not forget mark wigley was involved in curating the MOMA exhibition as well. there was if not a common sensibility behind it, then at least some common thought and sentiment. all categorizations and exhibitions are manufactured to some extent anyways.

true, zaha hadid was influenced directly by the artistry of suprematism (malevich) but then so was constructivism and so was she by constructivism as a gravitational counterpart to the graphical ehpemerality of suprematism.read below:

How, then, to reground structures that have become so unmoored? This is where her engagement with Constructivism comes into play; in effect Hadid deployed it as a materialist counterweight to the airborne idealism of Malevich and his followers. "The opposition between Malevich's Red Square and [Vladimir] Tatlin's Corner Relief" governed her work from her designs for Koolhaas and Zenghelis in the late '70s (in their fledgling Office for Metropolitan Architecture), designs that strive to hybridize the different languages of Suprematism and Constructivism. (10) Hadid pursued this synthesis in her own office after 1979, especially in The Peak of 1982-83, her winning entry in a Hong Kong competition that first brought her recognition in the architectural community. She describes this cliff-top resort (which was not built) as "a Suprematist geology," a paradoxical phrase that points to the tension between the principles represented by Malevich and Tatlin. (11) Hal Foster in http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_1_45/ai_n19492569/pg_2/?tag=content;col1

i don't really understand what is meant by: Eisenmann was fixated on Derrida's work but not necessarily the fractured geometries (wanting to have more "logic") his architecture was fractured..from the inside out (which would posit a formalist methodology as an analogy to Derrida's work in the literary field). if not an overt orchestration of fractures, then definitely a fragmentation of modernist architectural syntax.

tschumi's parc de la villete's exhibitionary delayering, or dismantling of architecture and urbanism, into systems of points, lines and surfaces disclosing the perveresely ambiguous infrastructural fortuities between form and function as well as between form and the choice of form while not derived from derrida's ideas well resonates with the milieu surrounding them. lets also not forget that derrida himself was not born christ into a pagan land..there were already expectant jews and pagans around him :o). a zeitgiest so to speak.


i guess i object to the priming layer of cynicsm behind calling it a "manufactured moment" and claiming that it was peter johnsons fictional monster. the term is certainly manufactured. but i think the moment was orchestrated, like any that concerns an exhibition of any other art movement. the same cynicism can be directed towards a lot of other "art movements". my thoughts on the matter are that there is substance to their grouping, but it wasn't necessarily an aesthetic or sensibility that was in common to these works at that time. perhaps what was, was:

1- a shared post-structuralist philosophical and post-modernist artistic milieu that formed the zeitgeist background.
2- a common will to break/jolt the syntagms of modernism
3- a manifold postmodern freedom gained thanks to venturi and postmodernism that opened, for the people who still maintained modernist (corbusian/meisian/ bauhaus/constructivist/etc)sensibilities, a paradigmatic chasm in modernism itself.
4- a gung ho youthfulness connected to the immense changes that happened throughout the eighties.

i don't think, therefore, that dismissive cyncism is warranted. also, people who dismiss work from that era as mere"paper architecture", subversive for its own sake, disconnected from the real world are/were themselves disconnected from the real world. this was a paradigmatic gestation period for so much of what is happening now...good or bad. a less dismissive cynicism would deem these people, zaha rem gehry libesking tschumi...etc, as the overlords of architecture operating within a capitalist system, whether they are/were critical of that or not. this is not surprising, the 1980's was a great leap for global capitalism. what paper is more architectural than money; it builds all.

well, not claiming that it was peter johnson's fictional monster...but alluding.

and...libeskind.

Sbeth85, googley radomly: http://www.imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/bartvanderstraeten.htm

Tammaz - there was no dismissive cynicism in my comment - just stating the facts.

Phillip Johnson, as he did many times before (and after) latched on to formal and critical developments occurring in architecture to which he had know real knowledge, but which he saw as a means to remain relevant. The decision - P. Johnson's - to elide deconstruction with constructivism was a marketing ploy.

Saying this is not engaging in any form of cynicism, but in putting forward the historical condition.

If there is a latent sense of disillusion with the process, it is exactly because there were (and remain) many merits in the works of the architects. The exhibition and the simplistic codification of what became known as "deconstructivism" helped to speed its demise. It conflated (as most group exhibitions do) disparate architectural trajectories and provided an easy name that could then be abused and commercialised. As someone above mentioned, once Charles Jencks had given the term its elevation to a style, then the whole direction became a caricature of its potential influence.

i didn't imply and i would never dismiss the productive development of architecture based on theory and critical analysis. In fact, for me, this was the greatest potential in the work of these individuals, but when their formal experiments became seen as a "style" or "movement", this was then the moment when it all began to lose focus and relevance - something that other architects (and the public press) saw as a formal choice of image and form - not as a critical attitude or position.

in terms of the different differences:

1) interest and/or understanding in post-structuralist, deconstruction theory as developed by Derrida:
Eisenman - 95%
Libeskind - 90%
Tschumi - 80%
Zaha - 45%
Gehry - 0%
COOP - 15%
Rem - 20%

2) fractured geometries
Eisenman - 80%
Libeskind - 90%
Tschumi - 60%
Zaha - 80%
Gehry - 80%
COOP - 85%
Rem - 20%

3) will to break/jolt the syntagms of modernism
Eisenman - 90%
Libeskind - 90%
Tschumi - 90%
Zaha - 90%
Gehry - 90%
COOP - 90%
Rem - 90%

speed what's demise? deconstructivism itself? but you're claiming that, behind the assumed umbrella term, there was no substanial content to it. Therefore, it is strange that you would point out to the death of something that wasn't there in the first place. i'm thinking here that you are yo-yo-ing between accepting deconstructivism as a recognizable movement (that can has a mentionable life..therefore a mentionable death) and as a bit of a spotaneous self-combusting propoganda stunt (whichdoesn't have a mentionable death, being a momentary spurt). i do think it was an orchestrated outbreak of the architectural underground..and once above ground, it can no longer operate on the same premise. this is the case with all art or architecture movements. but the work itself is not to blamed, unless the architect proves that her work is complicit with its own self-banalization and self-propoganda (this explains why some people, whether justly or unjustly, criticize Libeskind for an architecture that explains itself in his jewish musuem as an expresson of tragedy and void..and yet infuses so much of his other regular commercial work with the same aesthetic. for my part, i see it the other way around quite possible as well ... perhaps, Libeskind, sentimentally, never got over the ideas of tragedy and void..perhaps he simply is an honest victim of his obsession and the singular iconicity incurred by this obsession and hence his incessant architectural signature and our world has taken note to fetishize and brand his victimization)

but when their formal experiments became seen as a "style" or "movement", this was then the moment when it all began to lose focus and relevance

well, it was also what allowed these architects to progress to a stage where they themselves became syntagmatic, rather than spuriously paradigmatic. this is quite normal for hungry architects and hungry people who want some recognition and ..yes why not...some money.

orhan recently linked to an interview with charles jenks (2005?) who talks about or alludes to the prowress of fashion and how some architects, like rem for instance, try to outrace, outwit it, so as keep their head over the surface of banality. the way i see it, to be fashionably relevant, you have to be within the spectrum from "classics" (siza, at one end to "avant garde" at the other. should you aim for the extreme of the "avant garde" then you also create a future problem for yourself...how will you be able to overcome it without becoming a parody? well, either you run like a cunning fox (rem is a vulpine architect?) or you become a great elephant, statuesque, you build yourself into an institutional powerhouse... (zaha, gehry..etc). that other people start to copy their "style"" is indicative of their elephantness....whereas, it is really more difficult to duplicate rem...'fastness and mobility are his forte.

Tammuz and DLB-
Way to get into this :) You both have definitely given me a LOT of fodder to deal with...

But I guess you guys are both discussing my concern, that in the MOMA article Philip Johnson specifically says that there is NO ONE CREED, he just kinda lumps all these people together because of the cool geometries...

And then as you were saying, DLB, you got Gehry who thinks it's all BS, Eisenman is obsessed with Derrida, some of these people operate more intellectually, some more intuitively- so what is the common binding factor? IS there one? I guess the overall categorization is just- "Does it LOOK unstable/crazy"... but that's also an incredibly superficial label....

I thought I'd know how to address this topic, but it's becoming more and more fractured... oh, btw,
by 'fractured geometries' do you mean Mandelbrot systems?

I have the Eisenman stuff, some of Derrida's, Jencks... and at the same time I feel like I'm no closer to getting a handle on this topic, since everything keeps shifting around...

Tammuz- the article you sent is great, I love how it talks about each architect separately.

expressionism can look "crazy", though not necessarily unstable at all, as well. gunther domenig's steinhaus for instance.

is it really superficial? we always judge architecture by the way it looks.