Deconstruction and Deconstructivism. The new “architectural dictionary” of the twenty-first century and the fragmentation of the architectural discourse

1. Junk Space
Deconstructivism and Beyond
Alberto Iacovoni, Marialuisa Palumbo | Cornell in Rome Fall 2016

2. 1. Postmodernism vs Deconstructivism

3. Portoghesi, La Strada Novissima, The
Presence of the Past Venicel Biennale, 1980

7. Deconstructivist Architecture,
Exhibition curated by Philip Johnson
and Mark Wigley, MoMA, 1988

10. Iakov Chernikov

11. Ivan Leonidov

12. Alexandr Rodchenko Vladimir Tatlin

13. International
Symposium on
Deconstruction,
Tate Gallery, 1988
Deconstruction in
Architecture,
Architectural Design
Profile n.3, 1988
Deconstruction II,
Architectural Design
Profile n.4, 1988

14. <<I believe the projects in the Deconstructivist Architecture
exhibition at MOMA mark a different sensibility, one in
which the dream of pure form has been disturbed. Form is
no longer simply pure, it has become contaminated...
The roof-top re-modelling by Coop Himmelblau is a form
distorted by some alien organism, a roving, disruptive
animal breaking through the corner. Some twisted counter-
relief infects the octagonal box... the roof splits, shears and
buckles.
Deconstructivist Architecture seeks the unfamiliar within
the familiar, it displaces the context rather than acquiesces
to it. The projects in the exhibition do not ignore the
context, they are not unti-contextural. Rather, each makes
a very specific intervention in which elements of the
context become defamiliarised.>>

15. Coop Himmelblau, Attic conversion,
Vienna, 1984-1988

17. << This is not a new style. The projects don't even
share an aesthetic. What they share is the fact that each
produces an unsettling object by exploiting the hidden
potential of Modernism.
They all produce a devious architecture, a slippery
architecture that slides uncontrollably from the familiar
into the unfamiliar, promoting an uncanny sense of the
alien hidden within the familia, an architecture, finally,
which form distorts itself.>>
Mark Wigley, Deconstruction. Omnibus Volume, 1989

20. Frank Gehry, Santa Monica House, 1978

24. Edgemar Museum, Santa Monica,
1984-88

26. Chiat/Day/Mojo Office, Venice,1975 e 86-91

27. Fish Sculpture at La Vila Olímpica
del Poblenou in Barcelona 1989-92

29. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao,
1991-97

36. In 1969, at Moma in New
York, Kenneth Frampton
presented the work of five
young architects: Peter
Eisenman (1932), John
Hejduk (1929), Michael
Graves (1934), Charles
Gwathmey (1938), Richard
Meier (1934).
A few years later, in 1972,
Manfredo Tafuri published
the volume Five Architects.

39. Casa del Fascio. Diagramma
assonometrico che mostra un
centro implicito quale risultato
dell'intersezione di quattro
piani.
Diagramma assonometrico che
mostra un centro implicito
quale risultato della relazione
tra vuoto e pieno.
Diagramma assonometrico che
mostra l'articolazione di quattro
angoli in un vuoto cubico tale
da avere angoli dominanti e un
centro recessivo.
Diagramma assonometrico che
mostra angoli pieni dominanti e
un vuoto centrale.

40. House I, 1967-68

41. House II

43. House III

45. House VI

46. House X, 1978

47. Fin D’Ou T Hous S, 1983

49. Checkpoint Charlie, IBA, Berlin, 1982-85

51. Carnegie Mellon Research Center, Pittsburg, 1987-88

52. Guardiola House, Cadice, 1988

54. School of Architecture, University
of Cincinnati, 1988-91

55. Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio, 1989-93

56. Koizumi Sangyo Office, Tokyo, 1988-90

58. Church of the Year 2000,
Roma, 1996

61. City of Culture, Santiago de Compostela, 1999

69. Jews Memorial, Berlin, 2005

74. Bernard Tschumi, Parc de La Villette, Paris, 1982-1997

77. A specific aim: to
prove that it is
possible to construct
a complex
architectural
organization without
resorting to traditional
rules of composition,
hierarchy and order.

78. The principle of
superimposition of
three autonomous
systems of points,
lines and surfaces
was developed by
rejecting the totalizing
synthesis of objective
constraints evident in
the majority of large-
scale projects... the
parc became
architecture against
itself: a dis-
integration.

79. Another goal: to
displace the
traditional opposition
between program and
architecture, and to
deconstruct
architecture by
dismantling its
conventions, by using
concepts derived from
both architecture and
from elsewhere - from
cinema, literary
criticism and other
displines.

80. The Manhattan Transcripts, 1976-81

81. Studio National des Arts
Contemporaines, Le Fresnoy,
1991-97

84. 1978, 1995, 2001

85. 1995

86. 2001

87. Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Exodus, or the Voluntary
Prisoners of Architecture, 1972

88. Superstudio, Monumento Continuo, 1969

94. Parco della Villette,
Parigi, 1982

98. Teatro Nazionale di Danza, L’Aia, 1984-87

101. Sea Terminal, Zeebrugge, 1989

102. Biblioteca di Francia, Parigi, 1989

105. Villa Dall’Ava, Parigi, 1991

111. Kunsthall, Rotterdam, 1993

120. Casa da Musica, Porto, 2005

137. New Public Library, Seattle, 2004

145. Mc Cormick Tribune Campus Center, Chicago, 2003

153. Rem Koolhaas + Cecil Balmond, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2006, Londra

160. Zaha Hadid, The Peak Club, Hong Kong,
1982-83

162. Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1989-93

164. Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, 1998

167. Stazione dell’Alta Velocità di Napoli, 2003

170. Museo mediterraneo dell'arte nuragica e dell'arte contemporanea, Cagliari 2006

176. Daniel Libeskind,
Victoria & Albert
Museum, 1996

179. Daniel Libeskind,
Museo Ebraico,
Berlino, 1997-99

183. Museo d'arte, Denver, 2006

188. World Trade Center, 2003

189. 2. Dictionary of Advanced Architecture

190. AA >> Advanced Architecture
>> Action
>> Antytipe
An action (an architecture) that is advanced is an
action (an architecture) which is necessarily
projective: propositive and anticipatory/anticipating.
An action (an architecture) with the capacity to
connect with technological change (industry and
technique), with cultural progress (thought and
creation) and with scientific logic (research and
development).

191. Action
What we are interested in today is an ‘action
architecture’ defined by a desire to act, to (inter)act.
That is to activate, to generate, to produce, to
express, to move, to exchange and to relate.
To promote interaction between things, rather than
interventions on them. Movements, rather than
positions. Actions rather than figurations. Process,
rather than occurrences.

192. Alejandro Aravena, Elemental, Cile, 2003-2004

199. Antitypes
A surprising image shows a car coupled to an
aeroplane…
This is not an univocal object… it is not a typological
design, but rather an a-typological mechanism; an
antitype.

200. MVRDV, Frosilos, Copenaghen 2005

204. MVRDV, Pig City, 2001

207. >> Form (and no-form) >> ambiguity
>> Interfaces
>> Devices
>> Dispositions
>> Situation >>“Excited place” >> form >> ambiguity

208. Ambiguity
Univocal space now yields to a space decidedly
ambivalent…
In a multifaceted, polyphase, definitively non-
essential reality, architecture can create spaces that
are more plural, by virtue, precisely, of being
indeterminate. Implicitly changing and (in)formal.
Multiple. Multiplied and multiplicative.
A building can be a garden. A garden, a building.

209. Francois & Lewis, Case Rurali, Jupilles, Francia 1996

213. NL, Basketbar, Utrecht, 2003

218. FOA, International Port Terminal, Yokohama, Giappone, 2002

221. Devices
Our challenge as
architects is to
produce new
devices of action…
Dispositifs (devices)
(open and
evolutionary) rather
than design (closed
and exact).

222. Topotek 1, Temporary Playground, Garden Show, Wolfsburg, Germany 2004

223. >> Diversity
>> Housys
>> Inhabiting
>> Livrid (live+hybrid)
>> Lightness
>> Precarious(ly)
>> Reversible

224. Diversity
Ours is a time of diversity, calling for constant
simultaneity of individual events in global
structures… evidencing the impact –the emergence-
of the singular upon the collective, not as “part of the
whole”, but rather as specificity “interconnected with
the whole”.
In our time there exists the conditions for assuming
creatively this fragmentation, and thereby attaining
an anthropological universality which also integrates
plurality, difference and discontinuity.

225. MVRDV, Hageneiland , Netherlands, 2001

229. Hybrid
Land-arch
Land(s) in lands
Ecology >> Ambiguity

230. Land-arch
…as an instrument. This
shift has been favoured by
the passage from a
generation obsessed with
the relationship between
architecture and city to
another, the latter more
aware of a new contract
with nature (a nature
evidently epic, mongrel,
manipulated, rather than
domestic and bucolic).

231. MVRDV, Dutch pavilion
Expo 2000, Hanover

234. New dynamics conform to an incipient vocabulary of a
hybrid contract… Construction that would artificially
integrate movements –or moments- of nature, in some
cases “architecturalising” the landscape (modelling,
cutting, folding…), proposing new topological shapes
(reliefs, waves, folds)…

235. …in others, landscaping (lining, enveloping, covering)
an architecture in ambiguous synergy with the strange
nature that surrounds it.

236. Plot, Maritime Youth House, Copenhagen, 2004

237. Imaginative formulas capable of favouring this new natural
contract… would reside precisely in its capacity to
incorporate the technical, plastic and perhaps unheard-of
solutions neither paralysed nor diminished by the presence
of the nature, but rather stimulated precisely by the
possibility to incorporating it, of spurring it, of reformulating
it –of enriching it rather than conserving it.

238. Land(s) in lands
“Operative landscapes” rather than “host landscape”.
As with the city, which has blurred the boundaries separating it
from former extramural territories, today the architectural project
too can blur its profiles –and its edges- in new
geographies of transition. The application of new structural
and technical concepts… now permit the positing of a
deformation of the old Euclidean structures, transforming
them into multilayered spaces… towards almost geological
processes… spaces of folding rather than prismatic
volumes…
Topographies rather than volumes.
“Lands over other lands”.
Constructed geographies rather than architectures.
No longer lovely volumes under the light, but rather
ambiguous landscapes under the sky.
Fields within other fields. Lands in lands.

240. Eden Bio is a 100-unit social housing development in Paris.
The project features terraced houses along pedestrian alleyways.
Staircases to reach the upstairs units will be mounted externally and
covered in plants.

243. Ecology
Instead of old nostalgic or pseudobucolic ecology
(which freezes landscapes, territories and
environments), we suggest a bold ecology. Based no
longer upon a timid, merely defensive –resistant-
non-intervention, but rather upon a non-impositive,
projecting and qualifying –restimulating- intervention
in synergy with the environment and, also, with
technology.
An ecology in which sustainability is interaction.
In which nature is also artificial.
In which energy is information and technology is
vehiclisation.
In which to conserve implies always to intervene.

244. 3. The Planetary Boundaries

257. Nairobi, Kenya

259. Israel/Palestine separation wall

262. 4. The Nordic Model

263. MALMO, Västra Hammen