History of Deconstructionism
Quote: Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture.
Koolhaas, Rem. 1994. (originally published 1978) Delirious New York: A Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press. pp.9-12
Page 9 – 12 Summary:
Manhattan, a mountain of evidence without manifesto, it is occupied by many architectural mutations such as central park, and sky scrapers, but it is also being mentioned that it incorporates several layers of phantom architecture. A factory of man-made experience, where the real and the natural ceased to exist. It is often explained that Manhattan, is no longer a natural place, but fantasized and unnatural place created by man to live inside of a fantasy.
It is indicated that Manhattan has generated shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion of its defiant lack of self-hatred. Manhattan is a dense and vast jungle of similar and repetitive architecture which is meant to consistently repeat itself throughout the city. Manhattan, because of its repetitive nature, is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
A blueprint does not predict the cracks that will develop in the future, it describes an overall picture of something that is approximated. It describes much of the reality and true nature of the city’s construct and show of progression.
Wigley, Mark and Philip Johnson. 1988. Deconstructivism Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art. (Catalogue of 6/23/88-8/30/88 show)
Page 10 – 12 Summary:
Gothic and Romanesque, in their day, were taking over the discipline of art itself. With their assistance of the many well-known architects during their time, the prophesied an international style in architecture took the place of the romantic styles of the previous held century. Deconstructivism architecture during this time, was not a new style. It represents no movement nor is it a group or movement. Deconstructivism architecture have very formal similarities with Russian constructivism. Some of these similarities range from overlapping geometry.
In art as well as architecture, there are many plenty of contradictory trends as time progresses. Many range from classicism to strict modernism and many art forms in between. But many of the beautify found in these forms and in Russian constructivism is often mimicked in painting and sculpturing, something that is not often used between artists, with the fear of plagiarism. Many of the shapes they produced, aspired by architecture, relate back to forms found in Russian constructivism. The aspect of this, to create pure forms which therefor can be unified using various methodologies of deconstructionist architecture concepts using geometric compositions.
Page 13 – 14 Summary:
Architecture, mainly known for its profound stability and order, as well as the central culture of institutions valued above all. The creation of architecture, is produced and formed using many geometric forms, often coined by architects as pure forms. Following compositional rules,. They prevent any forms included from conflict with one another. The consistent integration of these geometrical forms, eventually becomes a harmoniously unified form.
Deconstruction itself has always been misunderstood in the aspect of its process. It is a complex dissimulation of an object into a collage of traces. Deconstruction gains all its forces by challenging the very harmony, unity and stability. A deconstructivism architect is one whom analyzes and located dilemmas within buildings.
Page 15 – 17 Summary:
Architecture was seen as a high art form which was sufficiently grounded in function and intertwined with society. Soon, movements began to idealize and formulate strategies to incorporate prerevolutionary art as a basis of the radical structures. But this would soon begin to change, as the constructivists became committed to architecture and afterwards, prerevolutionary work became to dwindle down.
Images on page 16 appear to depict many sketches and forms of deconstructed architecture, which is incorporating a lot of pure geometric forms, merged together in unlikely forms to create something very pre-revolutionary in appearance.
Images appear to be large structural designs which seem to incorporate a lot of linear elements which are connecting them together, similar in appearance to a ship. It also includes a large amount of combined geometric forms. These forms are either represented by being stacked up on one another, or being extruded to develop form.
Page 18 - 19 Summary:
The idea of most of these linear forms used at the time, were necessarily meant for them to clash against one another, to distort basic volumes and purify these forms so that they may become or appear to be smooth and classical. These linear elements are meant to represent a single hierarchical and vertical movement.
Radical avant-garde projects failed in architecture. The Russian avant-garde was a corrupted by the purity of the modern movement. The modern movement attempted to purify architecture by removing its original ornament of the classical tradition. By employing the machine aesthetic they produce a functionalist style, like the classicists, they articulated the surface of a form in a way that marked its purity.
Page 20 – 21 Summary:
Architecture, it displaces structure instead of destroying it. Not only does architecture survive its own torture, but it is known to be all the stronger for it. In recent years, the modern understanding of social responsibility as functional program has suspended a concern for context. But contextualism has been an excuse for mediocrity. Architecture has since sought out the unfamiliar with the familiar.
Geometry has proved to be a much more greater force than it seems to be. It gives the sense of enclosure, depending on the way it is used in architecture, but not by using simple constructional elements, but using it as a form for closure. It is a form of providing security where needed, and bringing in the worlds natural elements, as punctures windows along a structure.
Page 22 – 24 Summary:
In projects, the traditional structure of parallel planes are stacked up horizontally and parallel to the ground, creates the form and frape of a building structure. These forms of geometry are used to create extreme solid forms. Deconstructivism architecture is a curious point of interest among different architects.
The architect only makes it possible for the tradition to go wrong, top deform itself. The nightmare of deconstructivism architecture inhabits the unconscious of the architect. Each architect releases different inhibitions in order to subvert form in radically different ways.
The original Gehry house embedded in several interlocking additions of conflicting structures. Forms find themselves, twisting their way out from the inside. Tilted cube bursts through the structure peeling back the layers of the house. These forms push their way out of the skin exposing thew skin of the building and the structure. The second stage, the structure of the rear wall is unprotected by the skin. In this stage, the backyard fills up with forms that appear visually to have escaped from the house.
The design by Ghery incorporates a home which many geometrical forms that have been deconstructed, recreated and textured across the design in many different forms. These forms incorporate these geometrical forms to have been replaces with linear elements, and these forms being distorted to create what appears to be useable interior and exterior spaces.
Pages 37 – 48 Summary:
The city edge project is an office and residential development. It exploits the logic of the wall which violently slices up the territory. Breaking fragments of the old city structure. The wall is further transformed by being broken into pieces, which are then twisted against each other. The dismembering of the wall, and the traditional thinking about the structure is also broken down. This symbolic breakdown of the wall effected by introducing the constructivist motifs of tilted and crossed bars sets up a subversion of the walls that define the bar itself.
Page 49 – 58 Summary:
The Rotterdam project is a high-rise apartment building whose base contains communal facilities, such as kindergarten and school, and whose top forms a street in the sky along which is a hotel, with club, health center, and swimming pool. The building is enigmatically poised between being essentially a single slab, a homogeneous monolith but distorted by a number of towers. The struggle between the towers and slabs open up gaps, either as a narrow slit, a huge hole in the volume, or a complete void. At one end of the slab, a pure orthogonal tower begins to detach itself. At the end, an angles open-steel tower has escaped altogether.
Page 59 – 70 Summary:
This project is a center for advanced biological research for the university of Frankfurt. It is based on the symmetrical distribution of units along a spine. The units spread out along this spine are basic modernist blocks, rational units organized by a rational system. Each one is given the form of one of the four basic shapes which biologist use as a code to describe fundamental biological processes. Art is no longer something that is given a segregated space in an architectural project. It is all around and integrated within its urban community.
Page 71 – 82 Summary:
The peak was the first prize winner in a competition for a club of wealth in the hills above Hong Kong harbor. Into this artificial topography are thrust four huge beams. They have been abstracted from the city. The beams are twisted relative to each other, bringing them into conflict with each other. But the most radical Decentering occurs when the upper pair of beams is pulled apart, vertically enough from the lower pair to construct deep voids. The gaps between the horizontal beams form an indeterminate space in which everything is angular and joined by long diagonal ramps. The basic elements of the club occupy both the void and the underground world of the artificial topography extending back into the hillside.
Page 83 – 94 Summary:
A rooftop remodeling is a renovation of 4300 square feet of attic space of traditional apartment block in Vienna. The other Vienna project is a fifty unit apartment building on main street leading out of the city. The skyline tower is part of a refurbishment plan for the banks of the Elbe in humburg. It is one of a complect of five buildings that straddle the river, a thousand foot tall tower propped by huge columns.
Page 95 – 109 Summary:
The project is a public park occupying the 125 acres of La Villette in Paris. The park is populated by an array of scattered structures linked by a complex series of gardens in axial galleries. The principle of the project is the superimposition of three autonomous ordering systems which consist of points lines and surfaces. Each system is distorted by the conflict with other systems but is also distorted within itself. There are cubes which are decomposed into a number of formal elements, In each structure, the cube remains legible. But distorted by elements that were extracted from it.
Woods, Lebbeus. “Manifesto: Lebbeus Woods.” Edited by Edwin Heathcote, R / D, Reading Design, 2013, www.readingdesign.org/manifesto-lebbeus-woods.
Page 1 Summary:
Architecture is war, war is architecture. A great quote, identifying the vast progression and in some ways, a theoretical battle between the progression of design and construction within architecture as the years progress over time. Architecture is a style and conceptualized idea that has transformed itself as time progressed. It has vastly consumed the land, as we began to reach new territories and heights in construction, population development and urban scale. Most of the time, consuming the light, and taking over land, architecture is a physical force that reckoned the land for the advancement of man.
Crawford, Margaret. 2003 “Suburban Life and Public Space” in Sprawl and Public Space Redressing the Mall Edited by David Smiley, Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 21-30
Page 5 – 6 Summary:
The outcome of the generic suburban regional mall has reproduced from coast to coast. It also portrays the mall as a fundamentally antiurban force which generally creates an urban space without generally providing the urban experience.
But, this concept has continuously adjusted and reinvented itself in response to the economic and social changes. It was important for the mall to provide a community focus and centralizing element. It was important to see a modifiable commerce and commodification that can be adapted and reshaped and time passed. Among the innovation’s was the organization of the centers that came under management of a single owner. This than brought in the integration of how these spaces were laid out. Eventually the physical organization of the projects was based on urban blocks which incorporated housing shops, and offices.
Page 7 – 8 Summary:
The shopping centers were utilized as fundamental elements in strategies for decentralization. These shopping centers were the center of community social life. Mixing commercial services necessary for development with recreational spaces for the general public of the community which was heavily pushed by the architects and planners for the small towns. The major explosion of shopping centers came after world war 2 when the dumbbell model first appeared. These centers incorporated large department stores an d every day services such as supermarkets, drug stores and dry cleaners. Typically anything that would generally service the public. These activities typically drew in women and children from the community and continued the tradition of domesticated public spaces.
Architects typically saw shopping centers as a way to bring together, fragmented communities with the integration and injection of urban spaces in suburban areas. It would be labeled as better planned downtown areas with easy parking, which has a model named as a convenient one stop shopping area. Victor Gruen, a developer, attempted to try to revision and redesign the concept of the suburban mall, to recreate its complexity and importance minus all of the attributes that would typically come with something such as a large shopping mall in an urban city, such as noise, pollution, dirt, etc. So what was typically in the works of being adapted into this new concept of these malls, was the idea of integrating cultural, enrichment and relaxation elements such as non-retail functions, cultural, artistic and social event aspects into an environmental form of architecture.
Page 9 – 10 Summary:
Enclosed malls expanded over the next two decades, into regional, super-regional and megamall sizes. This would generate its own form of activities and form of social life. Malls would eventually become important work places, providing women and teenagers with convenient jobs. Malls would soon also become magnets for concentrated suburban development, serving as central landmarks to construct hotels, offices and other urban projects around these mall structures. It inevitably served as the heart of what’s known as edge cities.
At the end of the 1970’s,. regional malls had saturated and covered American landscape patterns. Rouse took malls from the an initial suburb concept and transformed it into a urban revitalization concept to be integrated within neighborhoods which featured plenty of urban amenities and public spaces.
Page 11 – 12 Summary:
The mall of America connected by public transportation to downtown Minneapolis which was often crowded by thousands of minority teenagers or what the mall management referred to as inner city youth who used these places as gathering spaces on weekend nights. Because of this persisting issue, they reconverted spaces to use as available youth clubs, so they may supervise students.
Page 13 – 14 Summary:
These large mall plazas consistently act as a link between a several block area of malls and mini malls and consolidated them into a dense urban cluster which burs the lines between public and private spaces within these suburban cities. But these malls, although they are very beneficial to the cities that they are locating in, they are said to only have a specific life span of only ten years. Therefore they are consistently being reinvigorated over time to ensure their adaptation over time.
Questions:
Is Deconstructivist architecture relationship to Russian Constructivism?
Deconstructivism architecture have very formal similarities with Russian constructivism. Some of these similarities range from overlapping geometry.
In Deconstructivist architecture does “form follows function”?
Deconstructivism attempts to move away from the supposedly constricting rules of modernism such as form follows function and purity of form.
Keywords:
Deconstructivism – Deconstructivism is a movement of postmodern architecture which appeared in the 1980s. It gives the impression of the fragmentation of the constructed building, commonly characterized by an absence of obvious harmony, continuity, or symmetry.
Avant-Garde – new and unusual or experimental ideas, especially in the arts, or the people introducing them.
Enigmatically – difficult to interpret or understand; mysterious.
Juxtapose - place or deal with close together for contrasting effect.
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