DECONSTRUCTION in ARCHITECTURE

In the 1980's a new tendency was born: the deconstruction, which was also called "new modern architecture" in its beginning. It was meant to replace post modern architecture. A very significant difference of this style is that it started rather from an intellectual movement than from a significant building marking it's beginning. The new slogan was "form follows fantasy" analogous to the tradition formula pronounced by Sullivan "form follows function". In 1988 Philip Johnson organized an exposition called "Deconstructive Architecture" which finally brought these ideas to a larger audience. Those ideas even had a philosophical base developed by Jacques Derrida.

The idea was to develop buildings which show how differently from traditional architectural conventions buildings can be built without loosing their utility and still complying with the fundamental laws of physics. The houses looked as if a bunch of parts had been thrown together and left exactly the way they fell on the floor. These buildings can be seen as a parallel to other modern arts, which also became more and more abstract, questioning whether a certain object is still art or not. Thanks to their significant differences to all other buildings, the deconstructive ones made clear to the observer, that architecture is an art and not just an engineering discipline. This movement was also inspired by the futurists of the early 20th century in Russia who also broke with all architectural conventions of their time.

Because the deconstructive houses were huge abstract sculptures you can enter rather than real buildings, the number of realized works is rather small. Due to the high costs and the fact that big companies were not interested in such buildings for their representative skyscrapers and even less for their functional buildings, only small projects for the public sector or private clients were realized. Like the new roof for a lawyers office realized in 1983 until 1984 in Vienna by COOP Himmelblau. 

It looks like an arch under tension, dominating the classic building. The fact that COOP Himmelblau was founded in 1968 also gives a small indication on the opposition this generation sought in architecture, including everything that has been done before.

Another example is the Hyper-Solar Institute in Stuttgart, Germany by Behnisch which shows many classic motives like leaned window frames or absolutely disproportional blocks combined with very contrasting colors and useless steel constructions.

Zaha Hadid shows with her fire station in Weil on the Rhine, Germany, that deconstructive architecture is also possible with concrete and very little glass and steel. She was also a member of a group of architects who constructed the Follies 1982-1990.

Other members of this group were Bernhard Tschumi and Frank O. Gehry who even constructed 1978 his own house in Santa Monika CA with trash materials usually used by the third world population to build their barracks.

They show structures that are even more absurd than those of other deconstructive buildings. Others often only modified the facade of their buildings, but these pavilions go even further. They have staircases leading nowhere or pylons supporting absolutely nothing. Already their names indicate the idea behind them.

Finally Daniel Liebeskind could realize in Berlin 1999 his "Jewish Museum" as an extension of the Berlin Museum which is such an important work of art that it attracts the visitors attention in a way that the art expositions in it are almost neglected. The Guggenheim Museum in NYC from Frank Lloyd-Wright is in this aspect similar to Liebeskind's work. Hence one can see that this architecture is still up to date. Nevertheless the main tendency is going back to other forms because the deconstruction was based on provocation and experiments testing out the limits or architecture.

(source: http://library.thinkquest.org)