Modern art and modern architecture
If we attend to the timing of the developments that took place in art (painting and sculpture) — what we usually call 'modern art' — and compare it with the timing of architectural developments in the same — modern — era, we may grasp a few points. To start with, the opening of modernism in painting can be traced in the works of Gustave Courbet, in particular in the painting Bonjour M. Courbet: in this canvas Courbet — who is called the founder and father of Realism in painting — drew himself in ordinary clothes, in the manner of someone going on a picnic.
The date of this painting is 1845. The Crystal Palace was raised in 1851 for the great London exhibition of that year, and made the world (or at any rate Europeans) aware of the changes and possibilities that had come about, or could come about, in architecture. Many authorities have taken this glass-clad Crystal Palace — designed by Joseph Paxton, a garden architect — as the start of modern architecture.
Art with -isms; architecture without -isms
But from then on — this is our argument — in painting and to a great extent in sculpture, fresh developments came one after the other and at a relatively rapid pace, and each new discovery brought along with it an '-ism': after Realism came Impressionism, Fauvism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and so on. After the Second World War, when Paris ceded much of its place to New York and the émigrés of the Old Continent took refuge there, this stream continued: tendencies such as Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, and many others were born and grew in that city.
Architecture, in this period, was relatively quiet, and to a great extent free of the -ism-making customary in the field of art. Cubism and Futurism did, to a degree, find a way into architecture, and architects worthy of the name — and a number of imitators — were marked, well or ill, by them. But it can be said that the main current of modernism in architecture continued — almost without a clearly named -ism — practically up to the 1960s. Why?
Why? The heaviness of architecture's nature
It is not at all that architects had stopped working in this period or had grown indifferent to fresh possibilities. The German Werkbund and its associated architects, Belgian Art Nouveau, the Dutch De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Peter Behrens, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Auguste Perret, Le Corbusier, Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, and dozens of other architects and institutions were at work, each with his own personal tendencies. Yet it seems that all of them — and the critics of art and architecture along with them — had accepted the umbrella term 'modernism'.
The chief reason was that architecture, by its very nature, is heavy and steps heavily. For it depends on building materials, on construction technology, on economy — and, more clearly, on money — and until a client is ready to invest, its birth is only on paper.
Tendencies and innovations in architecture, then — unlike in art — remained for years (about half a century) as suppressed inclinations, until in the 1960s, when the pioneers of modern architecture were no longer in the world, or had passed the heat and high-noon of their youth and were spending their last years, they almost suddenly broke out.
Venturi and 'Las Vegas' architecture
In the midst of this, Robert Venturi, in his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in the 1960s, raised his voice loudly in protest. Venturi — himself an architect, but a stout defender of the calm of the modern architecture of the 1950s and '60s — prescribed a kind of architecture both cheap and vulgar, which needed neither costly technology nor a daring investor afraid of heavy expenditure. In his other book, Learning from Las Vegas, he openly spoke of the architecture of 'libertines, prostitutes, panders, and gamblers'.
Derrida, Saussure, Lévy-Strauss: the philosophical roots
Historians and critics of contemporary art and architecture usually look for the roots of deconstruction in a philosophy of the same name, the founder of which is Jacques Derrida — together with the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the structuralist anthropology whose initiator was Lévy-Strauss.
But Venturi's cry of protest had another source — it was the protest against the immobility that the imitators and minor disciples of the early modern architects, and Mies van der Rohe more than anyone, had brought about. Le Corbusier was more agile and turned earlier with his Ronchamp chapel. The cyst that had long ago formed inside architecture was opened by this cry — even as in art, the fiery and radical daring of the Futurists, and the law-breaking of the Dadaists and Surrealists, had brought forth fresh outlets.
The technological and economic ground
But in the 1960s, as soon as the West had passed beyond the crises arising from the destruction of the Second World War, and as soon as the oil crises of the 1950s had also subsided, and the economic power of the West had increased many times over its earlier strength, and technology — that tame but expensive instrument — had laid out a ground on which 'anything goes' became practicable, the long-held cyst of modern architecture broke open.
True, the architecture of Venturi and Gehry had a simple appearance, and Jencks ironically called the architecture of the 1950s and '60s 'Corporate Architecture'; but the modest appearance did not last long, and we now witness the costliest buildings in the world in the new tendencies.
Searching in Saussure's linguistics and the post-structuralist excesses of Lévy-Strauss does not greatly help in understanding deconstruction in architecture. Architecture has its possibilities and its constraints, its limitations and its difficulties. Architecture is closer to art, and is more dependent on economy and technological means, than on linguistics or philosophy. Let there be no misunderstanding — I am not denying the relation between philosophy and architecture; that relation does exist, but it is not always direct or apparent.
'Wa', not simply 'destruction'
We take the Persian prefix vā- as the equivalent of the French prefix de-. Take this counsel-bearing proverb: 'when you cannot reach the (full) round, turn back' (vā-gard). The prefix vā- in this sentence has no sense of destruction — just as the meaning of de in déconstruction in French is not, as the deconstructionists themselves have insisted, destruction or breaking, but rather the seeking of a fresh path and the rejecting of the previous ones.
The first manifestation: the breaking of the grid
The first manifestation of this deconstruction is non-compliance with the grid — from the squared lattice that Mercator, the 16th-century Flemish scholar, posited for marking man-made positions on the earth, and which is still in use for the precise determining of the location of points around the world; to the squared grid of streets and alleys, the invention of which has been attributed to the Greek architect Hippodamus, and which is found, in recent decades, in pre-Greek Indus Valley sites and in Mesopotamia, and is still in many cities the basis of urban form (with buildings and their sides set at 90 degrees, like Mies van der Rohe).
In the works of deconstructionist architects, the squared grid does not have the 90-degree angle — that is, it crosses the grid at some other angle. (Such an intersection in three dimensions was offered by Zaha Hadid in her project for the 'Peak' building — four enormous beams set horizontally, one on top of another, with a 30-degree angle between each adjacent pair.) Put differently, the works of the deconstructionists make a geometry, then impose another geometry upon it; for that reason these works seem restless and unusual.
Setting the volumes dancing
But these intersections and the breaking of the customary grid do not stop at the intersection of one squared grid with another; they spread to the entire architectural work. The closed (Solid) and open (Void) volumes settle in with non-right angles and with sides whose extensions cross one another — or, in a milder phrase, set them dancing. Such is the building that Coop Himmelblau designed for an Austrian lawyer's office on the rooftop of a building in Vienna. The twisting stairs and ramps so curl into and intersect with one another that, as Wigley has said, it is as if an eagle had come down from the sky and alighted on this rooftop, or as if an insect that had landed on the ground had swallowed the building, or as if a bird in a cage were trying to free itself and escape.
But no — there is no eagle and no insect. This is the architecture of deconstruction, which would free itself from the bonds of modernism — that very modernism which once was itself a liberator, freeing itself from the imitative bonds of nineteenth-century neo-classicism. It seems that all, or many, of the new phenomena and movements have this same character: at first tradition-breaking and innovation-bringing, and then themselves binding and limiting.
Fragmentation
Another quality of deconstructionist architecture might be called fragmentation. All the parts of a building do not gather into a single mass; rather, each part finds its own personality and identity. Years ago, Bruno Zevi, in describing Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building in Dessau, listed this very quality among the seven outstanding qualities of modern architecture. Zevi attributed it to the building's function.
Later, Louis Kahn, with the building of the biology laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania, used this same fragmentation with success. Kahn had a poetic language in describing his architecture, and tried, with phrases of allusive ambiguity, to defend the moves of his work. Those who took inspiration from his architecture — among them Eisenman — used a more crafty language; Eisenman attributed the inspiration of this same quality of his architecture to the discoveries and theories of biology and to the qualities of DNA, which is hardly convincing.
The laws of chance
Another quality of the deconstructionist architects, which in my view they have taken from the Dada artists, is their use of 'the laws of chance'. Hans Arp, the Swiss Dadaist painter, has a work composed of a collage of unrelated images and drawings, which he titled Selon les lois du hasard ('according to the laws of chance').
An answer to Derrida and Foucault
If we go searching for 'nothing in nothing' in the world, in architecture, in the convoluted speech of Derrida and Foucault and Barthes, we have lost our way. The artistic developments of eighty years ago (Futurism and Dadaism, which we have cited as examples) better show the cyst that had stuck in modern architecture's throat for some fifty years — a cyst that, because of the Western world's economic unpreparedness and the unavailability of technology in the war decades, did not find its way into the heart.
But this much is good in deconstruction: that it is constantly deconstructing itself.