5. ARCHITECTURE:
How have the education of the architect impact architecture? The pinnacle of the reductionist modern movement can be found in the Deconstruction phase. Architects like Peter Eisenman, Frank O'Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi are said to have initiated the architectural movement.
A visual analysis of both architectural
graphics and built form of deconstruction architecture reveal common themes
about graphic primitives, elements, organization, objectives and experiences.
Graphic primitives are seen to bend, skew, tilt, break, divide, intersect,
repeat, and shrink. Architectural elements are characterized as incomplete,
fragmentary, leaning, curved, sharp, segmented, distorted, and cut into forms.
Architectural organization include themes of juxtaposition, dispersion,
shifting, sliding, wrapping, superimposition, grid planning, scaling,
colliding, hung, zigzagging, absence, and recursive. Over-all architectural
features are seen as ramming, light, flying, clashing, peeling-off, fluid,
bundled, stacked, compressed, squeezed, ambiguous, haphazard. Design objectives
speak of shock, unpredictability, abstractness, disorientation,
meaninglessness, unconsciousness, chaos, unexpected, and order-less. The
architecture experience is one that conveys dissonance, suffering, alienation,
and revolt. In addition to the above architectural written texts refer to
concepts about Anti-hierarchy, Anti-structure, Anti-form, Anti-function …
etc. See
The above analysis of graphic and building form is confirmed by architectural writings that assert that Deconstructive architecture “is hermetic in coding, often fragmented and dissonant in form, self–contradictory by intention, anti-humanist and spatially explosive. Often the intention is to weave opposites together and deconstruct traditions from the inside, in order to highlight difference, otherness and our alienation from the cosmos.”[1] Others refer, furthermore, to architecture of disruption, dislocation, deviation, distortion, arbitrary, and uneasy. The intention is to dislocate and de-regulate the idea of ‘universal meaning’. No longer do concepts refer to any kind of ‘fixed absolute’ or any kind of ideal. Deconstructivists will deconstruct other people's beliefs from within their own terms of reference in an effort to ‘affirm’ (astonishingly) the idea of non-center, i.e., impossibility of political mastery by ‘one-dominant system’.
At the end of the day architecture is
born out of architects and architecture education is the defining activity for
architectural theory. Architecture is a mirror of architects ‘ruined’ consciousness.
[1] Theories and Manifestos of Contemporary Architecture. Ed. by Ch. Jenks and K. Kropf. Academy Edition. 1997. p.312