From Postmodern to Deconstructivism: The Evolution of Architectural Production
by Carolina Batista
According to the Oxford dictionary, the word “end” can be defined as “the furthest or most extreme part of something”. When Puglisi states that “deconstructivism defined the end of Post-Modern period in architecture” he seems to assume that Deconstructivism replaced Postmodernism completely. Furthermore, he seems to assume that Postmodernism would have nothing more to contribute to the development of architecture. Even the existence of Postmodernism’s contribution is questioned, or simply rejected, by many architects and critics who see it, in the words of Farrelly(1986), as a “meaningless mannerist charade”, reducing it to a mere formal historicist style. This essay aims to discuss the validity of Puglisi’s statement by comparing Postmodernism and Deconstructivism through the works of Robert Venturi and Bernard Tschumi, drawing the possibility of Deconstructivism not as the end of Postmodernism, but as a continuation free from all that can be considered normalising functions of tradition.
According to Jencks (1984), Postmodernism came on the scene in the 1970’s and can be considered a historical formation with its origins in the counter-culture movement in the 60s. Its main characteristic, as defined by Jencks, is the commitment to the pluralism and the heterogeneity of the modern cities and the global culture, acknowledging the variety of taste cultures and visual codes of its users. In addition, it may carry ironic or critical messages aiming to challenge the status quo. Furthermore, according to Jacob (2011), Postmodern ideas were as social and political as material and formal. Considering its coverage, it is possible to imagine the different, sometimes contradictory, approaches taken by each architect, as mentioned by Jencks: “It critics totalizations […] and it is obvious that the architects I will be following are sometimes Post-modern, and sometimes not.”
Indeed, Postmodernism might have been intensified by the spirit of the counter-culture, mainly the rejection of conventional social norms, which includes the dogmas of Modernism, and the search for plurality. But even earlier, during the 50s, Robert Venturi had already shown his interest in the “complexity and contradictions” of society in his unpublished Master’s project, as highlighted by von Moos (1987), when he says “The intent of this thesis problem is to demonstrate the importance of and the effect of setting on a building. It considers the art of environment; the problem of the whole environment as perceived by the eye”. It is possible to notice that Venturi was taking a more visual approach, something related to a subjective perception.
The two books written by Venturi evidences his interest on the formal aspects of architecture, how it connects to the environment and how it is presented to and understood by the users. The first one, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, was written in 1966 and focused on the two first aspects cited above. According to Von Moos(1987), Venturi was not interested in the social, historical or symbolic authenticity of the catalogued buildings on his book, but on its linkage to their respective environments and the “perceptual whole” they formed. However, in Learning from Las Vegas, the second book written in 1972 in partnership with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Venturi seems to reduce his interest even more. As Von Moos(1987) explains, they restrict the work to documenting the formal and iconographic rules that creates a system of communication, keeping to what can be visually perceived and photographed. The expected criticism about the chaos of Las Vegas, however, is replaced by a critic of architects, how they view architecture in society and the consequences of that view (von Moos, 1987).
Coincidently or not, Bernard Tschumi states in his book Architecture and Disjunction, published in 1994, that it was in 1972 that renewed importance was given to the conceptual aims in architecture. More than this, architecture became the means used to communicate concepts. It was a process of dematerialisation of architecture, a characteristic of a period from which particular groups developed in different directions resulting in movements such as “radical architecture” and “rational architecture” (Tschumi, 1994). This point can be considered the diverting point where Deconstructivism starts to take shape, where a new research line shifts from the historic-based formalism to unknown territories of formal experimentation.
In these terms, Postmodernism can be classified as part of the “rational architecture”. Despite its attempt to represent the plurality and chaos of the current society, it still carries organisational order in its structure. Von Moos (1987) clarifies this point by explaining the project of the Guild House, which presents the organisational structure of a Baroque palazzo and a facade with symbolic and representative elements, opposite to the form, structure and program, but that still combines in a same building. Again, the intention was the production of the “whole” as it would be perceived by the users.
In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi explores the importance of the signs in architecture, since he believes that architecture depends on its perception (Venturi et al, 1976). He argues that there are two main manifestations of the contradiction of structural function and representational elements: the first is the architectural duck, defined by him as the building-becoming-sculpture where the structure and form are directly dependent, just like the duck-shaped building of the Long Island Duckling drive-in from which term architectural duck derives; and the second is the decorated shed, the building whose structure and spatial systems are directly dependent of the program but the ornament is independently applied.
Venturi’s interest in how the users understand the building, how it fits within the context of the modern cities and the use of references of previous architectural periods resulted in a architectural style which could be easily accepted by the common users, those without a major understanding of architectural theory. According to von Moos (1987) these were the main reasons for Postmodernism to be called “populist”. However, Jencks states that the problem was that since Postmodernism became global it suffered “the problems of success”, becoming mass-produced and cliched. The same happened to Modernism, according to von Moos (1897), when the followers of the movement began just to copy the buildings on the so called “international style”, when the theoretical concerns behind the built products were forgotten. This was the trigger to Postmodernism arise, and the triviality of the mass-produced Postmodernism was the trigger to Deconstructivism arise.
In the words of Frank Gehry, he felt angry when Postmodernism, after freeing itself from the restricting rule of form following function of Modernism, started to look back in the past in an attempt to reintegrate meaning to architecture. This feeling of frustration was shared by many others architects, such as Coop Himmelblau, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi, who felt that instead of looking back, architecture should be pushing itself one step further. These seven architects formed the group whose works were presented on New York’s MoMA Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in 1988.
These projects, as described on the exhibition’s fact sheet, continued the structural experimentation of Russian Constructivism, but without its aim for perfection; it continues Modernism’s approach to primary forms and the use of new materials and technologies, but violating the forms, challenging the structure and organisational orders. Finally, it represents the complexity and contradictions of modern society, just like Postmodernism was committed to do, but without resorting to formal historical references. In these terms, Wigley (1988, cited in Puglisi, 2008) states that “deconstructivism cannot be defined as avant-garde. It is not a means of announcing the new, a rhetoric of the new, but rather displays the unfamiliar concept that is hidden behind what is known. It is, in the end, the surprise of the old”.
More than this, it seems right to say that Deconstructivism cannot be defined. According to the Oxford dictionary, the meaning of the word “definition” is an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something, which is contradictory to the experimental essence of the movement. The display of hidden concepts pointed by Wigley is the result of years of theoretical studies carried by these architects in the fields of philosophy and literature, in an attempt to expand, if not dissolve, the limits of architecture by breaking down conventions (Deconstructivist Architecture, 1990), which can be considered the main characteristic of what Tschumi (1994) calls the “radical architecture”. For him, architecture became a “cosa mentale”, the result of the domination of idea over matter.
According to Boullée (cited in Tschumi, 1994) architecture is the creation of the mind, and not the built product. It must be conceived before to be made. In this context, it can be said that the result of the mass-production of architecture where the mental process of conception is absent or, let’s say, reduced to a copy-paste process, cannot be considered architecture. Architecture, in these terms, is useless. For Tschumi, “architecture seems to survive only when it saves its nature by negating the form that society expects of it. I would therefore suggest that there has never been any reason to doubt the necessity of architecture, for the necessity of architecture is it non-necessity” and if it is useless, why not to be radical? (Tschumi, 1994). This is what Deconstructivism does, radically breaks down conventions, it challenges the notions of form, hierarchy and structure in architecture in a process inspired by Jaques Derrida’s philosophy of Deconstruction (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990).
Deconstruction, according to Derrida (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990), is related to hard structures of politics, of society, of language and it does not aim the destruction of this things. He insists that Deconstruction is not about negation, but about questioning pre-stablished concepts and norms. Bernard Tschumi was highly influenced by this idea, mainly in his project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris where he asked for Derrida to participate of the project’s development. The park consists in a huge cultural complex exploded into 35 pavilions that should, in accordance to the competition’s brief, represent the society of the 21st century. Tschumi argues that the park itself is a peace of the city, and being so it has its own complexity. The complexity of the modern city is its strongest representation, so the work of the architect, in this case, would be to produce spaces that could accelerate or stimulate some of the phenomenons of the city, to push it one step further.
To Derrida, buildings, like literature, does not need to be strictly interpreted according to a single holistic idea. On the contrary, they could be analysed by breaking them down, deconstructing them in independent meanings, not in a search for a pure architecture, as the Constructivists tried to do, but considering that when architecture is free from pre-stablished rules, it can engage in new forms of relation to other areas of study (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990). The result of this new approach to architectural production, according to Libeskind (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990), can be seen as the beginning of what modern architecture really is, with architects going really deeply into the consequences of modernisation.
Puglisi (2008) describes Deconstruction as a captivating spatial experimentation process that leads to the invention of complex forms, unusually articulated and with a sculptural impact. Furthermore, he speaks about the “poetics of the incomplete, imbalanced and precarious” in a almost romantic way. It illustrates the feeling of hope shared by part of the architects and architectural critics in a new kind of architecture that, in the words of Michael Sorkin (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990), could be more spontaneous and that engage with the idea of intervention within the urban context. More than just signs of hope, these characteristics became the inheritance of Deconstructivism, according to Puglisi (2008), in 1993 when Kenneth Powell declared, in the introduction of a monographic edition of Architectural Magazine, that Deconstructivism had done its job.
Again, Puglisi (2008) states the end of Deconstructivism just like he stated the end of Postmodernism. However, he takes a contradictory position, since he assumes the existence of a continuation on the production of Postmodern architecture until, at least, 1998, with projects of Aldo Rossi and Richard Meier, and the existence of a continuation of Deconstructivism through its design techniques and explorational essence still use. What happens, as himself points out, is a change in philosophical interests. Just like Modernism was influenced by Constructivism, Postmodernism by visual perception theories, and Deconstructivism by Deconstruction, the “new directions in contemporary architecture”, in the words of Puglisi, are influenced by new lines of research that not necessarily breaks with the previous work that was being developed.
On the contrary, as Bernard Tschumi (1994) argues the level of complexity achieved by the sciences has become such that “unifying the theory of the universe is not a possibility anymore, and I think it quite interesting that notion of discontinue structures, things that do not all come back to that common denominator, and in this respect you find out that you can push things one step further”. It is hard to believe that some day someone will be able to produce something completely free from any historical reference. As it was shown, contemporary architecture do not do it, Deconstructivism did not do it, Postmodernism did not do it, neither Modernism did it. All of these movements were born from the desire for something new, something that could translate, represent or reflect the supposed needs of the politics, of the religion, of the society, of the users, of the architects soul in a continuous process of evolution.
NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY
School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
May 08th 2015
References
FARRELLY, E. M., 1986. The New Spirit. The Architectural Review [online]. 1074, pp. 7-16. Available at: http://www.architectural-review.com/archive/1986-august-the-new- spirit-by-em-farrelly/8611912.article [Accessed 04 November 2014]
JACOB, S., 2011. Playing with Postmodernism. The Architectural Review. [online]. Available at: http://www.architectural-review.com/reviews/playing-with- postmodernism/8621657.article [Accessed 3 Apr. 2015].
JENCKS, C., 1984. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 4th ed. London: Academy Editions.
JOHNSON, P. and WIGLEY, M. (1988). Deconstructivist Architecture. [Fact Sheet] The Museum of Modern Arts, New York. Available at: https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/6526/releases/ MOMA_1988_0029_29.pdf?2010 [Accessed 03 April 2015]
MOOS, S., 1987. Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown buildings and projects. New York: Rizzoli.
PAPADAKIS, A., COOKE, C., and BENJAMIN, A., 1989. Deconstruction. London: Academy Editions.
PORTOGHESI, P., 1983. Postmodern. The Architecture of the Postindustrial Society. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
PUGLISI, L. P., 2008. New Directions in Contemporary Architecture: Evolutions and Revolutions in Building Design Since 1988. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
TSCHUMI, B., 1994. Architecture and disjunction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Digital Media
Deconstructivist Architecture. (1990). [DVD] USA: Michael Blackwood.
According to Jencks (1984), Postmodernism came on the scene in the 1970’s and can be considered a historical formation with its origins in the counter-culture movement in the 60s. Its main characteristic, as defined by Jencks, is the commitment to the pluralism and the heterogeneity of the modern cities and the global culture, acknowledging the variety of taste cultures and visual codes of its users. In addition, it may carry ironic or critical messages aiming to challenge the status quo. Furthermore, according to Jacob (2011), Postmodern ideas were as social and political as material and formal. Considering its coverage, it is possible to imagine the different, sometimes contradictory, approaches taken by each architect, as mentioned by Jencks: “It critics totalizations […] and it is obvious that the architects I will be following are sometimes Post-modern, and sometimes not.”
Indeed, Postmodernism might have been intensified by the spirit of the counter-culture, mainly the rejection of conventional social norms, which includes the dogmas of Modernism, and the search for plurality. But even earlier, during the 50s, Robert Venturi had already shown his interest in the “complexity and contradictions” of society in his unpublished Master’s project, as highlighted by von Moos (1987), when he says “The intent of this thesis problem is to demonstrate the importance of and the effect of setting on a building. It considers the art of environment; the problem of the whole environment as perceived by the eye”. It is possible to notice that Venturi was taking a more visual approach, something related to a subjective perception.
The two books written by Venturi evidences his interest on the formal aspects of architecture, how it connects to the environment and how it is presented to and understood by the users. The first one, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, was written in 1966 and focused on the two first aspects cited above. According to Von Moos(1987), Venturi was not interested in the social, historical or symbolic authenticity of the catalogued buildings on his book, but on its linkage to their respective environments and the “perceptual whole” they formed. However, in Learning from Las Vegas, the second book written in 1972 in partnership with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Venturi seems to reduce his interest even more. As Von Moos(1987) explains, they restrict the work to documenting the formal and iconographic rules that creates a system of communication, keeping to what can be visually perceived and photographed. The expected criticism about the chaos of Las Vegas, however, is replaced by a critic of architects, how they view architecture in society and the consequences of that view (von Moos, 1987).
Coincidently or not, Bernard Tschumi states in his book Architecture and Disjunction, published in 1994, that it was in 1972 that renewed importance was given to the conceptual aims in architecture. More than this, architecture became the means used to communicate concepts. It was a process of dematerialisation of architecture, a characteristic of a period from which particular groups developed in different directions resulting in movements such as “radical architecture” and “rational architecture” (Tschumi, 1994). This point can be considered the diverting point where Deconstructivism starts to take shape, where a new research line shifts from the historic-based formalism to unknown territories of formal experimentation.
In these terms, Postmodernism can be classified as part of the “rational architecture”. Despite its attempt to represent the plurality and chaos of the current society, it still carries organisational order in its structure. Von Moos (1987) clarifies this point by explaining the project of the Guild House, which presents the organisational structure of a Baroque palazzo and a facade with symbolic and representative elements, opposite to the form, structure and program, but that still combines in a same building. Again, the intention was the production of the “whole” as it would be perceived by the users.
In Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi explores the importance of the signs in architecture, since he believes that architecture depends on its perception (Venturi et al, 1976). He argues that there are two main manifestations of the contradiction of structural function and representational elements: the first is the architectural duck, defined by him as the building-becoming-sculpture where the structure and form are directly dependent, just like the duck-shaped building of the Long Island Duckling drive-in from which term architectural duck derives; and the second is the decorated shed, the building whose structure and spatial systems are directly dependent of the program but the ornament is independently applied.
Venturi’s interest in how the users understand the building, how it fits within the context of the modern cities and the use of references of previous architectural periods resulted in a architectural style which could be easily accepted by the common users, those without a major understanding of architectural theory. According to von Moos (1987) these were the main reasons for Postmodernism to be called “populist”. However, Jencks states that the problem was that since Postmodernism became global it suffered “the problems of success”, becoming mass-produced and cliched. The same happened to Modernism, according to von Moos (1897), when the followers of the movement began just to copy the buildings on the so called “international style”, when the theoretical concerns behind the built products were forgotten. This was the trigger to Postmodernism arise, and the triviality of the mass-produced Postmodernism was the trigger to Deconstructivism arise.
In the words of Frank Gehry, he felt angry when Postmodernism, after freeing itself from the restricting rule of form following function of Modernism, started to look back in the past in an attempt to reintegrate meaning to architecture. This feeling of frustration was shared by many others architects, such as Coop Himmelblau, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi, who felt that instead of looking back, architecture should be pushing itself one step further. These seven architects formed the group whose works were presented on New York’s MoMA Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in 1988.
These projects, as described on the exhibition’s fact sheet, continued the structural experimentation of Russian Constructivism, but without its aim for perfection; it continues Modernism’s approach to primary forms and the use of new materials and technologies, but violating the forms, challenging the structure and organisational orders. Finally, it represents the complexity and contradictions of modern society, just like Postmodernism was committed to do, but without resorting to formal historical references. In these terms, Wigley (1988, cited in Puglisi, 2008) states that “deconstructivism cannot be defined as avant-garde. It is not a means of announcing the new, a rhetoric of the new, but rather displays the unfamiliar concept that is hidden behind what is known. It is, in the end, the surprise of the old”.
More than this, it seems right to say that Deconstructivism cannot be defined. According to the Oxford dictionary, the meaning of the word “definition” is an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something, which is contradictory to the experimental essence of the movement. The display of hidden concepts pointed by Wigley is the result of years of theoretical studies carried by these architects in the fields of philosophy and literature, in an attempt to expand, if not dissolve, the limits of architecture by breaking down conventions (Deconstructivist Architecture, 1990), which can be considered the main characteristic of what Tschumi (1994) calls the “radical architecture”. For him, architecture became a “cosa mentale”, the result of the domination of idea over matter.
According to Boullée (cited in Tschumi, 1994) architecture is the creation of the mind, and not the built product. It must be conceived before to be made. In this context, it can be said that the result of the mass-production of architecture where the mental process of conception is absent or, let’s say, reduced to a copy-paste process, cannot be considered architecture. Architecture, in these terms, is useless. For Tschumi, “architecture seems to survive only when it saves its nature by negating the form that society expects of it. I would therefore suggest that there has never been any reason to doubt the necessity of architecture, for the necessity of architecture is it non-necessity” and if it is useless, why not to be radical? (Tschumi, 1994). This is what Deconstructivism does, radically breaks down conventions, it challenges the notions of form, hierarchy and structure in architecture in a process inspired by Jaques Derrida’s philosophy of Deconstruction (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990).
Deconstruction, according to Derrida (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990), is related to hard structures of politics, of society, of language and it does not aim the destruction of this things. He insists that Deconstruction is not about negation, but about questioning pre-stablished concepts and norms. Bernard Tschumi was highly influenced by this idea, mainly in his project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris where he asked for Derrida to participate of the project’s development. The park consists in a huge cultural complex exploded into 35 pavilions that should, in accordance to the competition’s brief, represent the society of the 21st century. Tschumi argues that the park itself is a peace of the city, and being so it has its own complexity. The complexity of the modern city is its strongest representation, so the work of the architect, in this case, would be to produce spaces that could accelerate or stimulate some of the phenomenons of the city, to push it one step further.
To Derrida, buildings, like literature, does not need to be strictly interpreted according to a single holistic idea. On the contrary, they could be analysed by breaking them down, deconstructing them in independent meanings, not in a search for a pure architecture, as the Constructivists tried to do, but considering that when architecture is free from pre-stablished rules, it can engage in new forms of relation to other areas of study (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990). The result of this new approach to architectural production, according to Libeskind (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990), can be seen as the beginning of what modern architecture really is, with architects going really deeply into the consequences of modernisation.
Puglisi (2008) describes Deconstruction as a captivating spatial experimentation process that leads to the invention of complex forms, unusually articulated and with a sculptural impact. Furthermore, he speaks about the “poetics of the incomplete, imbalanced and precarious” in a almost romantic way. It illustrates the feeling of hope shared by part of the architects and architectural critics in a new kind of architecture that, in the words of Michael Sorkin (Deconstructivist Architects, 1990), could be more spontaneous and that engage with the idea of intervention within the urban context. More than just signs of hope, these characteristics became the inheritance of Deconstructivism, according to Puglisi (2008), in 1993 when Kenneth Powell declared, in the introduction of a monographic edition of Architectural Magazine, that Deconstructivism had done its job.
Again, Puglisi (2008) states the end of Deconstructivism just like he stated the end of Postmodernism. However, he takes a contradictory position, since he assumes the existence of a continuation on the production of Postmodern architecture until, at least, 1998, with projects of Aldo Rossi and Richard Meier, and the existence of a continuation of Deconstructivism through its design techniques and explorational essence still use. What happens, as himself points out, is a change in philosophical interests. Just like Modernism was influenced by Constructivism, Postmodernism by visual perception theories, and Deconstructivism by Deconstruction, the “new directions in contemporary architecture”, in the words of Puglisi, are influenced by new lines of research that not necessarily breaks with the previous work that was being developed.
On the contrary, as Bernard Tschumi (1994) argues the level of complexity achieved by the sciences has become such that “unifying the theory of the universe is not a possibility anymore, and I think it quite interesting that notion of discontinue structures, things that do not all come back to that common denominator, and in this respect you find out that you can push things one step further”. It is hard to believe that some day someone will be able to produce something completely free from any historical reference. As it was shown, contemporary architecture do not do it, Deconstructivism did not do it, Postmodernism did not do it, neither Modernism did it. All of these movements were born from the desire for something new, something that could translate, represent or reflect the supposed needs of the politics, of the religion, of the society, of the users, of the architects soul in a continuous process of evolution.
NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY
School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
May 08th 2015
References
FARRELLY, E. M., 1986. The New Spirit. The Architectural Review [online]. 1074, pp. 7-16. Available at: http://www.architectural-review.com/archive/1986-august-the-new- spirit-by-em-farrelly/8611912.article [Accessed 04 November 2014]
JACOB, S., 2011. Playing with Postmodernism. The Architectural Review. [online]. Available at: http://www.architectural-review.com/reviews/playing-with- postmodernism/8621657.article [Accessed 3 Apr. 2015].
JENCKS, C., 1984. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. 4th ed. London: Academy Editions.
JOHNSON, P. and WIGLEY, M. (1988). Deconstructivist Architecture. [Fact Sheet] The Museum of Modern Arts, New York. Available at: https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/6526/releases/ MOMA_1988_0029_29.pdf?2010 [Accessed 03 April 2015]
MOOS, S., 1987. Venturi, Rauch, & Scott Brown buildings and projects. New York: Rizzoli.
PAPADAKIS, A., COOKE, C., and BENJAMIN, A., 1989. Deconstruction. London: Academy Editions.
PORTOGHESI, P., 1983. Postmodern. The Architecture of the Postindustrial Society. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.
PUGLISI, L. P., 2008. New Directions in Contemporary Architecture: Evolutions and Revolutions in Building Design Since 1988. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
TSCHUMI, B., 1994. Architecture and disjunction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Digital Media
Deconstructivist Architecture. (1990). [DVD] USA: Michael Blackwood.