Deconstruction is an architectural style that in recent years has gained ever-increasing influence among architects and educators, as well as decision and policy makers and developers of prestige projects. Many famous recent projects are examples of the style. More than just visual fashion, it has serious implications for form, function and aesthetics. Characterized by lack of human-scale details, jagged and convoluted figures, disjointed masses and planes, glittering glass and polished metal surfaces, these buildings stem primarily from a branch of philosophy whose main representative was the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Step by step, the reader is taken through Derrida’s description of deconstruction as a virus intended to attack and destroy structures, a definition and purpose shared by his architect disciples. Tschumi’s descriptions are even harder to digest, expressing his design concepts in terms of schizophrenic thought processes, spiced with a fascination for the violent, the bizarre and the perverse. Johnson’s fascination with nihilism and Nazi ideology, and his praise of war ruins and embedded violence as an exciting form of aesthetics, is at least as disconcerting. Architects cannot go on indulging themselves in the misty atmosphere of ‘constructive ambiguity’, with the logic of cults, the rhetoric of twisted pseudo-philosophy, and the terminology of disciplines they have no understanding of. It is time for architects to realize that an aggressive, self-propelling group has hijacked architecture, its teaching, discussion and raison d’être. This book is the beginning of a long-overdue counterattack.
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