While most of us were simply trying to stay cool this summer, or enjoy our vacations, or laugh off the campaign malarkey of presidential candidates, a considerable number of America`s architects were working themselves into a lather over something called Deconstructivism.
Unsurprisingly, the lather first flecked the dewlaps of New York`s architectural elite, a small group of practitioners, theorists, curators and camp-followers who love to light intellectual fuses, worship the arcane and get their names into heavyweight design journals.
The action began when it was learned that Philip Johnson was organizing an exhibition called ”Deconstructivist Architecture” for New York`s Museum of Modern Art.
”Deconstruction” was a term first applied to a French literary and philosophical movement. More to the point, ”Constructivism” was a kinky, asymmetric, mostly theoretical Russian architectural style of the 1920s and thus had a direct bearing on Johnson`s semantic coinage.
Johnson, of course, is the dean of American architects, the scholar who introduced the International Style to America at a MOMA exhibition in 1932 and the tastemaker who put the cachet of respectability on Postmodernism when he designed the AT&T building in Manhattan. One does not go up against him lightly.
Still, when news of the upcoming MOMA show leaked out, four young architects claimed that Johnson was purloining a concept they had already developed. The four were Paul Florian and Stephen Wierzbowski, Chicago design partners; Joseph Giovannini of New York; and Aaron Betsky of Los Angeles. All were saying, in effect, that they thought up Deconstructivism before Johnson did. The uproar that attended Johnson`s alleged grab never got national attention, but was well chronicled by critic Michael Sorkin in the Village Voice. In any case, Johnson moved ahead with the MOMA exhibition, aided by associate curator Mark Wigley, and the show ran from June through August-with lather flying in every direction as the show was critically dissected, praised and condemned.
Perhaps the most obviously valid criticism was simply that the exhibition was thin gruel: It consisted of a few models and a few drawings by Americans Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas of Holland, Zaha M. Hadid of London, Daniel Libeskind of Milan, New York-based Bernard Tschumi and the Viennese firm of Coop Himmelblau. The show catalogue was skimpy, too.
But wait a minute, you say. Exactly what the devil is Deconstructivism?
The answer to that is unavoidably gauzy, yet important to comprehend as clearly as possible. For all we know, Deconstructivism could be influencing the look of mass market shopping centers and tract housing in a year or two.
Deconstructivism is not a style, but rather an aggressive approach to design that skews, bends, distorts, fractures and scatters the orthodox geometric shapes routinely used in architectural form-making. It is a partly rebellious and deliberately disorderly gesture against the purity of form. You know it when you see it, if you are able to follow the exquisitely complex cerebration of Johnson and his gang of fellow theoreticians.
Architect Frank Gehry of Venice, Calif., has been designing such buildings for more than a decade, without putting any stylistic label on them. Gehry uses corrugated sheet metal, chain link screening and plywood to produce houses that look like they have just exploded. His California Aerospace Museum has a real Lockheed F-104 Starfighter jet sticking out of its side. Gehry was, of course, one of the featured attractions in Johnson`s MOMA show.
Another fracturer of forms is Peter Eisenman, of New York, who has designed an outre new arts center for the staid campus of Ohio State University. The Eisenman structure breaks through existing buildings, seems to have missing parts and is otherwise disquieting enough to delight Deconstructivists.
Once you have a notion of what the New York theoreticians are talking about, it is possible to detect seeming examples of Deconstructivism by a number of architects who were not represented in the MOMA show.
Chicago`s Helmut Jahn, for example, probably qualifies with his State of Illinois Center. Just look at its asymmetrical exterior shapes and eroded columns that march along Randolph and Clark Streets without supporting anything. More recently, Jahn made a Deconstructivist statement in the downtown library competition when he designed a row of miniature ”buildings” along the State Street mall, then pierced them with the columns of the main structure.
This may all seem fairly benign so far as its impact on the urban environment is concerned. Furthermore, even Johnson himself has insisted that his Deconstructionism exhibit probably captures nothing more than a fleeting moment in the continuum of architectural change.
”Deconstructivist architecture is not a new style,” Johnson wrote in the show catalogue. ”It represents no movement; it is not a creed . . . . It is a concatenation of similar strains from various parts of the world . . . . The confluence may indeed be temporary; but its reality, its vitality, its originality can hardly be denied.” Associate curator Wigley similarly predicted that ”the episode will be short-lived. The architects will proceed in different directions.”
Yet even if the show was, in effect, an Andy Warhol-style 15-minute special, it was not received calmly by some critics.
Writing in Architectural Record magazine, Roger Kimball declared that
”Wigley, like so many of his Deconstructivist confreres, pretends that simply asserting something makes it so; as if a couple of quirky, asymmetrical buildings and a dose of obscure theorizing really undermined anything except the credibility of their proponents.” The show, said Kimball, was ”99 parts hype and 1 part achievement” and an ”outrageous architectural prank by Johnson.”
A Newsweek writer took a look at the exhibition and zapped out some rather extravagant prose.
”What does this bizarre, disorienting architecture mean for the humans who might use it?” Newsweek asked. ”Is it a symptom of disintegration in our burned-out century, or is it a glimpse of a brilliant future? Is it a heartless, twisted vision of a world gone nuts, or a zany mirror of the ups and downs of life?” Without directly answering these quaintly phrased questions, Newsweek warned its readers to ”look out for voodoo architecture in the 1990s.”
”Voodoo” may be putting it a bit strongly, but the influence of Deconstructivism cannot be shaken off just because the show has closed and because Johnson may already be looking for some new way to be outrageous.
Architectural Design has just devoted one of it special issues to the subject. Just released is a new book about Fumihiko Maki, a Japanese architect fond of instability and fragmentation. Joseph Giovannini has written a Deconstructivism book to be published in the spring. Traveling design lecturers are adding the subject to their repertoires. Architecture students, ever enchanted by anything strange, are taking the kinky buildings to their breasts.
Obviously, we`re in for a lot more of this-and perhaps not just at the level of the elitists.
When Postmodernism entered American architecture in the 1970s, it was first practiced by only a handful of high-art designers and limited mostly to houses or fantasy projects that never did get built.
Since then, a commercialized and commonplace Postmodernism has produced good buildings as well as bad. It has made possible the sort of distinguished revivalism that enabled architect Thomas Beeby to win Chicago`s library competition with a Classical building. It has also led to a spate of crudely conceived structures marked by heavy-handed historicist detailing.
The high-art designers have thus been visually drowned out. The sometime irony and wit of their buildings is lost in a nation where plastic barrel vaults, split gables and hoky arches have become as ubiquitous as
cheeseburgers. The high-arters must turn to something new if they wish to arbitrarily stand out, and in the finite world of architecture, that is not easy.
For the time being, Deconstructivism offers an easy way to get attention. It is not going to suddenly go away, even if it does appear to be a temporary confluence of architectural strains (as Johnson puts it). And don`t be surprised if the fractured, blasted and bent look eventually goes into mass production. Stranger things have captured the fancy of mass marketers and the public, and MOMA`s powers of certification are no less effective now than when Johnson put his stamp of approval on the International Style more than a half century ago.
