When architects presented the skewed, poetic distortions of modernism at the Museum of Modern Art, their work enriched a pluralistic design scene but revealed the confused politics and aims of avant-garde architecture.
The exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture was the belated public debut of a tendency that had been developing for several years. Postmodernism, using past styles to break modernism’s stifling insistence on logic and function, was the leading architectural force of the 1980’s. During the years in which postmodernism took shape, however, some architects used theoretical projects to advance a less simple approach. Like the postmodernists, they denied modernism’s simplistic “form follows function” rules, welcomed visual and conceptual complexity, and stressed architecture’s confused social situation. They kept modernism’s abstract forms, industrial materials, and visible structural elements, however. These were combined in unsettling, seemingly chaotic ways—attacking just those qualities of stability, harmony, and intelligibility that the public valued in postmodernism.
The approach was most intensely pursued at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies
Starting in 1985, several people—the Chicago architects Paul Florian
Johnson approached Stuart Wrede, the acting director of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, and asked that he be allowed to mount a show on the deconstructivists at the museum. Johnson had set up the department in 1932 to propagandize for modernism and was now a museum trustee. It amused the eighty-one-year-old architect to end his career with a last statement at the museum department he had founded. He made it clear that Wrede’s handling of the show might determine whether Johnson would support him for the post of permanent director of the department.
Deconstructivist Architecture ran at MOMA from June 23 until August 30, 1988. It presented works by Eisenman, Gehry, and five others—the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas,
In his text for the exhibition catalog for Deconstructivist Architecture, Princeton academic Mark Wigley argued that this chaotic aesthetic came from a unified theory and a common art-historical source. “Deconstructivism” was a pun on both. Architects had always limited themselves by striving for purity and harmony in their work. In deconstructionist literary criticism, a movement associated with the French thinker Jacques Derrida,
The show was widely publicized but almost universally condemned—less for the work than for Johnson’s and Wigley’s blanket arguments. Literary deconstruction was so fashionable among intellectuals that its use to justify a new style seemed cynical. The link to constructivism looked contrived to make deconstructivism palatable by giving it an art-historical pedigree. The idea of an architecture that spurned coherence and usefulness sounded like an extreme version of postmodernism’s ironies and contradictions but without any of its attempts at human context. Finally, Johnson’s own disruptive behavior—dropping his postmodernist allegiances and playing the MOMA show as a power game—looked like a surrender to nihilism.
Some of the show’s designs, said critics, were exciting and important. Johnson’s show infected them all with fashionmongering and the abuse of cultural power. MOMA’s decision to make Wrede permanent director of architecture was almost the only positive result of the show.
Despite poor responses to the deconstructivist show itself, many of the design approaches in the show were welcomed as reactions against postmodernism. The building boom of the 1980’s had seen many of postmodernism’s gestures toward scale and context become trivialized. Although the deconstructivist tendencies seemed unnecessarily ugly next to postmodernism’s more ingratiating shapes, they still represented an attempt to invent forms and think through their fundamentals instead of a manipulation of old ones to ironic intent. Reactions to particular designers in the exhibition varied. Whereas Eisenman’s unreadably complex abstract grids seemed to embrace futility and frustration too naïvely, Gehry’s junky assemblages—owing much more to abstract sculpture and the everyday environment than to Derrida—looked like personal architectural poetry.
The deconstructivist show’s failure was a sign that connections between avant-garde design and the architectural establishment had frayed beyond repair. Broadly speaking, the experiments in the show resisted the vision of modernism presented by Johnson and MOMA in 1932. Many of the great modernists of the 1920’s had been poetic dreamers and utopians, not simply functionalists. In Johnson’s first show, Modern Architecture,
One response was the postmodernist movement, which Johnson also boosted as a fashion, yet as advanced art became increasingly difficult conceptually and unappealing visually, so that it could not easily become another beautiful plaything for collectors, many architects (notably the Italian collective Superstudio) argued that architecture must become just as difficult to co-opt. It was more important to critique the establishment’s architect/client system than to be a successful practitioner. Sharing the cultural upheavals and renewed political utopianism of the 1960’s, the architects later associated with deconstructivism took this route.
The personal visions that Johnson and Wigley lumped together in Deconstructivist Architecture were different ways of turning technology and abstraction into springboards for the imagination, keeping the individual freedom at the heart of modernism alive. Tschumi revived constructivism as a symbol of the lost hopes of the 1920’s, and Eisenman quoted Derrida to defend his unintelligibly complex productions. Koolhaas was interested in the playfulness of the “low-culture,” drive-in modernism of the 1950’s. Gehry showed the egalitarian potential of technology in his antielegant style, an “architecture without architects.” Liebeskind and Coop Himmelblau hoped their tangles of beams and lines would create liberating effects of taut, energized, ever-expanding space.
These approaches were difficult to bring into the mainstream because they were attempts to avoid the dead-end restrictions of a “style.” At the IAUS, distortion of mainstream forms for distortion’s sake could be appreciated as a critical statement. In actual buildings, how could such distortions be kept from looking like attention-grabbing stunts? One legacy of the 1960’s art scene was the idea of bringing antiart objects into the art world by attaching aesthetic manifestos to them. Eisenman’s application of deconstructionist theory to his buildings, for example, let him be more avant-garde than “mainstream” figures such as Richard Meier,
This was the pitfall of Deconstructivist Architecture. Philip Johnson based much of his influence on reconciling avant-gardism with conventional taste, explaining how forms with radical agendas could be safely appreciated as beautiful buildings. By 1988, after postmodernism’s compromises, the design world was too self-conscious about theory’s relation to practice to believe such claims. In MOMA’s deconstructivist show, Johnson’s showmanship became a posture of attack for its own sake, but without real faith in a style that had been invented, explained, and accepted by others. The angry reaction revealed a hunger for more serious explanations of radical architecture and kept deconstructivism from becoming the fad that postmodernism had been.
Deconstructivism fell short as the avant-garde statement it was meant to be, yet it continued the questioning of architecture’s cultural place that postmodernism began; it also echoed the growing acceptance of disorder in culture, seen in such other forms as appropriationist art and rap music. In the widening architectural pluralism of the 1990’s, deconstructivism complemented Tod Williams
It proved easier to move from imaginary projects to built work than critics had expected, but deconstructivism’s rarefied appeal and the recession of the early 1990’s kept its commissions at a generally “boutique” scale (single-family homes, cultural facilities, and interiors). Nevertheless, by moving away from the decorativeness of postmodernism and engaging with modernism’s original hopes, however self-consciously, deconstructivism was evidence of a new search for the fundamentals of modern design.
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Betsky, Aaron. Violated Perfection: The Architectural Fragmentation of Modernism. New York: Rizzoli, 1990. Brief illustrated work focuses on deconstructivism as a variant of modernism. Helpfully relates deconstructivism to postmodernist theory and downplays literary deconstruction. Includes index. -
Broadbent, Geoffrey. Deconstruction: A Student Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Presents a brief overview that sympathetically explains the Eisenman-Tschumi-Derrida wing of deconstructivism. Valuable for its inclusion of much European and Japanese work. Includes bibliographic references. -
Davidson, Cynthia, ed. Eisenman/Krier: Two Ideologies. New York: Monacelli Press, 2004. Collection of essays from a Yale School of Architecture symposium illustrates the opposing views on architecture represented by the modern designs of Peter Eisenman and the classic designs of Leon Krier. Contributors include historians and critics. -
Jencks, Charles, et al. Deconstructivism. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Collection features an explanatory essay by the leading critic and historian of post-1970 radical architecture as well as an interview with Peter Eisenman and a discussion of such related figures and firms as Emilio Ambasz and Morphosis. Wide-ranging volume provides in-depth discussion of individual figures. -
Norris, Christopher, and Andrew Benjamin. What Is Deconstruction? 1988. Reprint. London: Academy Editions, 1996. Brief volume succinctly explains deconstruction and presents examples, including illustrations of deconstructivist architectural works. Include bibliographic references. -
Sorkin, Michael. Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings. New York: Verso, 1991. Reviews of the 1980’s New York architectural scene by a radical architect sympathetic to many of the deconstructivist designers but hostile to MOMA. Biased and journalistic, but valuable for its outside perspective on the deconstructivist architects and their show. -
Wigley, Mark, and Philip Johnson. Deconstructivist Architecture. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. Catalog for the MOMA show includes beautiful drawings but is very selective in its choice of architects and poorly thought out as an explanation of the movement. Johnson’s preface, in which he essentially dismisses the intentions of the architects and the show itself, is a revealing document.
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