University of Khartoum Faculty of Architecture M.Sc.

of Architectural Design Batch 01 History and Theory of Architecture

DECONSTRUCTIVISM: Origins and Purpose

Derrida...asked me why architects should be interested in his work, since, he observed, "deconstruction is anti-form, anti-hierarchy, and anti-structure-the opposite of all that architecture stands for." "Precisely for this reason," was my response. -Bernard Tschumi

Maha Bani 12/09/2013 U. of K.

Abstract The history of design can be seen as a series of influential styles or movements which shift the thinking of designers along new lines and which result in changes in the internal and external appearance of buildings. Every design choice is based to some extent on what has been done before. To clearly understand why these forms look the way they do and why they came into existence is a matter of history. [1] This paper deals with the subject of Deconstructivism as it is applied in architecture. This is one of the ranges of styles which have arisen in the diversification of architecture which has taken place since the 1970s.

1.0 Introduction
History of architecture seems to vary according to the number of styles which are available for use at any given time. While there are always a number of styles available at any time, in some periods there is a single dominant style used for most of the buildings built during that specific time. At the end of the 19th century for instance, there were several equally-valid styles, including many variations on Classicism such as NeoBaroque, Neo-Renaissance, NeoGreek, and so on. However, by the 1930s, this diversity of stylistic possibilities had all but been reduced to a single dominant style: Modern Architecture.

1.1 The Modern Movement After the Second World War this style became known as the International Style for the simple reason that it was, by then, considered to be the only appropriate or even legitimate style that could be used for any building type and for any society. It had become present everywhere but at the moment of its greatest success; the style was subject to a fire of social and architectural criticism for its numerous perceived failings. This reaction against Modern Architecture and Design began in the 1970s. The Modern Movement style therefore had succeeded in producing some of the most hostile environments ever deliberately designed by Man. By the 1970s, Modern functionalist design concepts were obviously no longer enough and

designers had begun to experiment with other approaches. 1.2 The Postmodern Diversity There had to be something more complex and interesting to say about design other than the Standard International Modern of colorless, textureless, over-simplified images and environments which made the Modern movement seem truly alien Postmodernity in architecture is generally thought to be heralded by the return of "wit, ornament and reference" to architecture in response to the formalism of the International Style of modernism. The functional and formalized shapes and spaces of the modernist movement are replaced by colliding styles, form adoption for its own sake, and new ways of viewing familiar styles and space abound. The result of these replacements in style was the splitting up of the Modern design into a number of substyles - each looking at a different way to handle complexity in design. Each trying in its own way to reveal the richness of environmental experiences that Modernism had tried to suppress. Each of these newly emergent styles could be considered to represent one of the repressed aspects of Modernism.

1.3 Postmodern stylesfragments [2]

recovered

Historicism (History/tradition) Neo-Modern (The promise of the Modern) Pop-Design (popular/familiar elements) Hi-Tech (The promise of technology) Regionalism (cultural identity) Deconstructivism (complexity) Eclectic (Rich mix of elements)

2.0 Deconstructivism
2.1 Origins (Psychology) The real origins of Deconstructivism lie in the work of the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (c.1890). Before he revolutionized psychology in the 19th century, mental illness was assumed to be the product of some inbuilt defect in the patient or even of demonic possession. Freud, in working with mentally ill patients realized that in many cases their illness was the product of events in their childhood, their background and their past experiences. The patients had changed their behavior from its normal course of development in

order to cope with the pain of these events. He also noted that in order to deal with these painful memories the patients REPRESSED them; pushed them out of their conscious mind tried to forget them. Freuds view was that if he could get the patients to reveal these traumatic events to themselves, they would in a sense cure themselves. By noting the way they avoided certain subjects and the phrases and figures of speech that they continually used, the psychologist could target those areas for analysis. In other words Freud set out to 'deconstruct' the speech of his patients in order to find the repressed source of their anxiety which, once identified and opened up for discussion would resolve the problem. 2.2 Philosophy In the 1960s the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida who had studied the work of Freud, developed and began to apply this deconstructive technique to the study of philosophical texts. He wanted to reveal the repressed ideas which underlay the apparently smooth,

elegant and well-constructed arguments put forward by other philosophers. Also to find the inconsistencies in their ideas by analyzing the way they wrote them because he believed that no theory could pretend to be absolutely consistent, logical or present itself as a self-contained and whole system. If it did, it could only do so by hiding or repressing something which did not fit its view of things. 2.3 Design 2.3.1 Characteristics Explodes architectural form into loose collections of related fragments (Fragmentation) An interest in manipulating a structure's surface or skin Non-rectilinear shapes which appear to distort and dislocate elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. Destroys the dominance of the right angle and the cube by using the diagonal line and the `slice' of space. Uses ideas and images from Russian Revolutionary architecture and design Russian Constructivism

(Constructivist architecture emerged from the wider constructivist art movement, which grew out of Russian Futurism. It was a form of modern architecture that flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early 1930s. It combined advanced technology and engineering with an avowedly Communist social purpose. Constructivist art had attempted to apply a threedimensional cubist vision to wholly abstract non-objective 'constructions' with a kinetic element)[3] Searches for more Dynamic spatial possibilities and experiences not explored (or forbidden) by the Modern Movement. Provokes shock, uncertainty, unease, disquiet, disruption, and distortion by challenging familiar ideas about space, order and regularity in the environment. Rejects the idea of the `perfect form' for a particular activity and rejects the familiar relationship between certain forms and certain activities.

2.3.2 Goals and Methods Deconstructivism

of

The main goal was to dissolve the fixed and determined forms of the Modern and reveal the dynamic formal possibilities that lay within the program offered by the institution and its context. At the same time there was a denial that architects could produce some perfectly authentic representation of the program and its context which by the nature of things were always unstable and in flux. It was a final rejection of the Functionalist tradition that had driven the Modern from its beginnings. In a sense the relationship between the program and its resulting form were coincidental: a chance meeting of the interacting activities of the institution, always in flux, with the state of the architectural language and technology at the time. There was an equally obsessive attempt to destroy the predominance of the right angle in architecture which was a sign of rationalist order and of the predetermined. To reveal those forms, possibilities and approaches that Modern Architecture had repressed in order to become

'perfect', they deconstructed the forms of Modern Architecture by creating apparently illogical clashes of grids, spaces and volumes which were breaking open the form of buildings. They used diagonal lines to destroy the perfect right-angled geometries of the Modern Movement, and left beams projecting, unfinished, incomplete, walls broken and slanted, windows turned at angles, rough materials, exposed construction methods and so on. All this to reveal what the Modern Movement had tried to suppress in the name of order: that buildings were complex and sometimes contradictory. They wanted to move beyond the traditional categories of architectural thought. 2.3.3 Collaborations: and Architecture Philosophy

Derrida to collaborate with New York architect Peter Eisenman on a garden for La Villette. Derrida was working on Plato's Timaeus, and it entered the project (Timaeus is the first Greek account of the creation of the natural world by a purposeful, divine craftsman-Creator. But Plato has a problem. He maintains that every object has both an idea/form - a purely intelligible, perfect and eternal model - and a changing sensible copy. The copy must have some place in which it can be created. Plato conjures one: a receptacle or Chora).

3.0 Deconstruction move

3.1 The Parc La Villette

on

the

Ideas such as these were arrived at by some European and American architects who were familiar with Derrida's work particularly the American architects Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman. In 1983, the architect Bernard Tschumi invited the philosopher

The Park was an official French government project. Like other projects of the 80s it was aesthetically, politically and economically controversial. The Presidential committee allocated a 125-acre site and $200m budget. The site was a former slaughterhouse and market, Baron Haussmann's 1867 scheme for modern, "efficient" meatprocessing in the north east corner of metropolitan Paris. Bordered by canals, railways and the Boulevard

Macdonald, it's at the heart of a working-class area with a large immigrant population. Largely completed by 1992, the Park is not so much a recreation of natural landscape as a 1km-long urban entertainment-leisure complex. [3] The Parc consists of 35 red follies, sport and recreation areas, playgrounds, a science and technology museum, and a music center. Tschumi was in charge of planning, in addition to the design of the follies, and superimposed three ordering systems: the points of the follies, the lines of the paths, and the planes of the sport areas. This network questions the order that is inherent to architecture with a superimposition that attempts to bring together three non-related systems. The process and arbitrary result ignore the basic tenets of architecture throughout historycomposition, hierarchy and order. Each folly is based on a cube and deconstructed, according to rules of transformation (repetition, distortion, superimposition, interruption and fragmentation), without any functional considerations.

Tschumi proposed an architecture of disjunction; which upsets architectural assumptions about systems. The Park has systems: of points, surfaces and lines. But they're superimposed so that they mutually distort and sometimes clash with each other. Paths intersect buildings, ramps and steps are cut off, etc. The systems avoid synthesis. There's no single coherent outcome; it can be called a contaminated architecture. Tschumi encouraged the architectural to collide with non-architectural ideas, elements, forms, etc, from cinema, literature and other cultural fields. "It encourages conflict over synthesis, fragmentation over unity, madness and play over careful management, and this scarcely sounds functional... Eisenman had been working deconstructively since the late 1970s, questioning architectural oppositions: interior/exterior, structure/decoration, etc. He came up with a polychoral design, citing three texts: His own earlier housing project for Cannaregio, Venice.

 Derrida's text on the chora, and his drawing, Tschumi's plan for the Park, quoted in miniature. "Choral Work" has an inclined steel ground plane with acid-etched lines tracing Tschumi's systems. Eisenman deployed his "quarrying" strategy: expose the foundations of a site, its history, and include them in the work. If they're not there, build them. So "Choral Work" includes constructed fragments of the old Paris city walls, in white marble; and underground, the 1867 abattoirs. 3.2 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition In the 1970s a group of American architects including Peter Eisenman started to emphasize and distort the grids and frameworks of his buildings. This was a process which became more dramatic and insistent over time up to the 1980s when Eisenmans buildings became recognizably 'Deconstructivist'. His work and writings and his discussions with Jacque Derrida on the process of deconstruction in architecture form the intellectual base of this movement.

The exhibition included drawings, models, and site-plans for projects by: Coop Himmelblau Peter Eisenman Frank Gehry, Zaha M. Hadid Rem Koolhaas Daniel Libeskind Bernard Tschumi

They became known as deconstructivist architects and their work marked the emergence of a new sensibility in architecture. The architects recognized the imperfectability of the modern world and seeked to address the "pleasures of unease. Obsessed with diagonals, arcs, and warped planes, they intentionally violated the cubes and right angles of modernism. Their projects continued the experimentation with structure initiated by the Russian Constructivists, but the goal of perfection of the 1920s is subverted. The traditional virtues of harmony, unity and clarity are displaced by disharmony, fracturing and mystery.

4.0 Deconstructivist Conclusion

Design

Modern Architecture had not allowed the expression of contradictions. That is, conflicts of function between different spaces. Everything had to look unified, smooth and well organized; A Whole Perfect Machine. The Deconstructivist approach sought to reveal these contradictions - to bring them into the open; to make them happen (even if they did not exist). If you look at a Deconstructivist building you will see different spaces intersecting one another in irregular ways. This is an attempt to reveal the character of each and every space and the occasional conflict and coincidence in the relationship between them. Another part of the Modern philosophy was that architecture and buildings were serious issues. Every part of the building had to be based on a functional problem and solution. This was a kind of 'scientific' approach to design.

The results of this were, in general, that many buildings in the 1950s and early 1960s looked faceless and boring. They were unable to express the joy, sensuality, tactility or pleasure which earlier architectures had shown. These human expressions and sensory needs had been repressed in favor of scientific rationality. Form, after all, in the Modern sense was merely an effect of function. It had no other emotional or sensory purpose of its own. Part of the Deconstructivist philosophy was therefore to detach architecture from 'function' as such and to allow a 'free play' of design. In a sense to make architecture/design a 'pure' art. It might solve some of the functional problems but that was not its main purpose.

5.0 References Claflen, G.L., Borrowing Architectural Theory: Fissures In The Simulation Of Coherence. , pp.19. Cruickshank, L. & Cruickshank, L., No Title. , pp.18. Europe, I., 1996. Copyright 1995-1996 by Jack M. Balkin. All Rights Reserved. Hadid, M. et al., 1996. Reflections on Deconstructive Architecture. , pp.4 9. Johnson, P. et al., 1988. The Museum of Modern Art. , (29). Lee, V., 2012. Jacques Derrida , Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books, in in. , (December), pp.133. National, T. & Art, C., 2012. The Gehry T owers Over Eisenhower The National Civic Art Society Report on Frank Gehry s Eisenhower Memorial. Staten, H., 1985. On Deconstruction. , 100(4), p.871. Stocker, B., 2006. Derrida on Deconstruction. Available at: http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.