DECONSTRUCTIVISM

UPS Wishes Delivered! What is your wish?

2014-11-19T22:09:00.000-08:00

It’s the time of year that we get together with friends and family and celebrate all the good things in life. It’s also a time of year for giving and thinking beyond our own wants. This year the UPS is doing just that with their #WishesDelivered campaign. For every wish submitted the UPS will donate $1.00 to one of their charity partners, up to $100,000 total donation! I think it’s great that the UPS that delivers wishes everyday on our doorsteps is going above and beyond this season and giving back in a big way!

MoMA Exhibition #1489, June 23-August 30, 1988:

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"Deconstructivist Architecture focuses on seven international architects whose recent work marks the emergence of a new sensibility in architecture. The architects recognize the imperfectibility of the modern world and seek to address, in Johnson's words, the "pleasures of unease." Obsessed with diagonals, arcs, and warped planes, they intentionally violate the cubes and right angles of modernism. Their projects continue the experimentation with structure initiated by the Russian Constructivists, but the goal of perfection of the 1920s is subverted. The traditional virtues of harmony, unity, and clarity are displaced by disharmony, fracturing, and mystery.

"The exhibition includes drawings, models, and site plans for recent projects by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha M. Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. Their works are preceded by an introductory section of Constructivist paintings and sculptures drawn from the Museum's collection."

CONCLUSION:

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Those who truly value Deconstructivist Architecture, it is for that creativity and inventive freshness that they create new rules in architecture. One the other hand, those who doubt this approach, are those who are always sure of the negative results and the anti-social nature of the activity. It could also just be a matter of self-denial.
After all, deconstructivist architecture may appear odd to some people due to its unconventional and out-of-barriers technique and looks, but it has managed to find its own place in the world of architecture. It has also proven that it still retains social significance and recognition amongst the public. This can be illustrated by the demand of consumers to more and more ask for modern and different impressive buildings. It can also be seen by the famous buildings made by well-known architectures. However, this could not be made without the bad or good criticism. Even though, the buildings still manage to impress and attract, as except of being functional and structurally stable, they are also unique.

Controversial and contradictory opinions:

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Some critics evaluate this type of architecture as a purely formal exercise with little social significance with ambiguous meaning. Certain architects such as Charles Jencks the famous American theorist, architect and designer, claim Deconstructivism as a new paradigm, whereas others questioned the wisdom behind this type of architecture and the impact it might have on future generations of architects and the built environment. It has been described as fundamentally destructive, because of its rejection of all architectural rules, and its lack to provide clear values as replacements of those.

The ideas and philosophy:

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Deconstructivist architecture is characterised by ideas of fragmentation, and manipulation of a structure’s surface or skin. It refers mainly to the architectural language being displaced and distorted with forms that are often set within conflicting geometries. Usually the building would be designed in parts or pieces in a weird manner with no attention or logic to be given to architecture norms. It would reflect pieces joined together to form unrelated abstract forms. Generally, the finished visual of the projects that illustrates the deconstructive styles, is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

The Controversial Opinions Of Deconstructivist Architecture Philosophy Essay

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Opinions about ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ are controversial and often contradictory- some critics consider it as ‘a purely formal exercise with little social significance and ambiguous meaning’ whereas others see it as a way of locating ‘the inherent dilemmas within buildings (and promoting) a serious and necessary criticism of unbridled consumer culture and media-driven hyper reality’.
In view of the debate surrounding the nature of Deconstructivist Architecture, discuss the ideas and philosophy related to it and argue in favour or against one of the opinions expressed above. Use examples as appropriate.
INTRODUCTION:
Deconstructivist architecture is a type of architecture developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike any other type of architectural type, it escapes the conventional architectural pattern, breaking in that way all the rules of constructive theory. The leader of this movement was the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, who as we shall see later, with his ideas and philosophy has much influenced other architects into accepting and applying this unpredictable type of architecture.
In this course of paper, we will make a discussion on the concept of ‘deconstructive architecture’ analysing at the same time its elements and background basic idea. Moreover, a historical development will be made on deconstructivism showing what are the origins of the movement. The philosophy will also be discussed behind this type of architecture and all will appear simultaneously with examples of buildings illustrating the concept of ‘deconstructivist architecture’. In addition to the above, some criticism will be made on the subject showing that the debate surrounding the nature of this form of architecture is both controversial and contradictory. Examples and commentary will be given by architects that have given their personal opinion on the subject throughout the years.
MAIN PART:
As already mentioned above, deconstructivist architecture is a style of architecture that contradicts the conventional methods of architecture. While an architect would dream of pure form, by using geometric shapes as cylinders, spheres, cones etc. avoiding instability and disorder, deconstructivist architecture supports the exact opposite. This type of architecture marks a different sensibility, one in which this stability and uniformity is disturbed. And it is exactly this ability to disturb our thinking that makes these projects deconstructive.
The history and development:
Deconstructivist architecture has initially had two main facets-modernism and postmodernism. While those two schools have ruled almost all of the forms of architectural styles, deconstructivist architecture opposed to their rationality. The journal Oppositions (published 1973-84) in which postmodernist architects and deconstructivist architects published their theories alongside each other, has been the decisive separation between the two movements. While postmodernism followed the historical references of modernism, deconstructivism has gone the other way- rejecting its acceptance and idea of ornament as an after-thought or decoration.
Deconstructivism has also been influenced by the Russian Constructivism and Futurist movements of the early 20th century. Both tendencies were concerned with the radical simplicity of geometric forms, all expressed in graphics, sculpture and architecture. However, Constructivism has followed the ornamentation of building, whereas Deconstructivism refuted it. Maybe that is why this style of architecture is called ‘deconstructivist’; because while it draws from Constructivism, it radically deviates from it. Some Russian artists from which Deconstructivism has been inspired, include Naum Gabo, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko.

Implementation Parc de la Villette

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Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la villette is one of the most-mentioned pieces when talking about the implementation of Deconstruction discourse in architecture. In designing the park, he challenges the classical oppositions that think in terms of cause and effects. Architecture is

Just as Derrida shows us that any writings contain within themselves challenges to the very concepts on which they are based, so Tschumi hopes to show that in architecture ‘deconstruction of program’ challenges the very ideology on which the program itself based. This means dismantling the conventions of architecture by using the concepts derived from architecture itself.
Tschumi introduces different methods of deconstructing programs as follows:
CROSSPROGRAMMING: Using a given spatial configuration for a program not intended for it, i.e.: using a church building for a discotheque. This can be seen as a rejection of the typological approach in architecture. Programs of a town hall can be put in the configuration of a prison, or a museum in a car park.
TRANSPROGRAMMING: Combining two programs, regardless of their incompatibilities together with their respective spatial configurations.
DISPROGRAMMING: Combining two programs so that the required spatial configuration of one program contaminates the configuration of the other.
In designing the master plan for Parc de la Villette, Tschumi rejected conventional composition of built forms as well as the complete planning. Montage, a technique borrowed from film, was used to randomly juxtapose different elements (points, lines and planes) together. What interested him is the design that is flexible enough to accommodate constant changes of programs, as well as socio-political situation. In stead of a specific organization of different programs, Tschumi’s Parc is a superimposition of three different ordering systems of points, lines and planes. Each system is perfectly in order within itself, however when they are overlaid, one configuration starts to influence another. The result is a series of ambiguous intersection between systems …in which the status of ideal forms and traditional composition is challenged. Purity, perfection, and order become sources of impurity, imperfection, and disorder.(Wigley 1988) Also by allowing the co-existing of multiple, dissociated elements, it promotes a new kind of stability, an unstable stability.

Tschumi, moreover, acted on ‘a strategy of difference’. If other designer were to contribute to his Parc then it would be a ‘condition’ of their contribution that their projects differ from his follies (fig.4). Indeed their work would be successful only in so far ‘as they inject differences into the system. Tschumi aimed to present ‘an organizing structure that could exist independent of use, a structure without center or hierarchy, a structure that would negate the simplistic relationship between a program and the resulting architecture, or function and forms..

Deconstruction and Its Implementation in Architecture

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“Something has been constructed, a philosophical system, a tradition, a culture, and along comes a de-constructor who destroy it stone by stone, analyzes the structure and dissolves it. One looks at a system and examine how it was built, which keystone, which angle supports the buildings; one shift them and thereby frees oneself from the authority of the system.”
Derrida

Deconstruction has been theorized and exercised since the late 1960s by Jacque Derrida, the French philosopher.(fig.1) Derrida methods of constructing his own discourse is interrogating, reexamining, and reacting to the works of other philosophers before him, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Liebniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Saussure, Heidegger. In each case Derrida aims to refute the author with arguments derived from the authors’ own writings, to demonstrate that most writings contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

In his own writing, Derrida intentionally breaks all the convention of writing just to make it ambiguous and difficult to understand. He convinces that there is no such thing as “clarity.” Clarity is merely rhetoric. In making the writing ambiguous the readers will have to create their own interpretation.
Since Deconstruction is a theory in literary criticism that has nothing to do with architecture in the first place, its implementation in architecture needs a careful translation. In The Architecture of Deconstruction, Mark Wigley asked how to translate Deconstruction in architectural discourse? What is left to translate? Or more important, what is always left by translation?
What is there to deconstruct in architecture?
We can borrow Derrida’s methods to deconstruct established architectural ideologies. For example there is a long tradition of architectural theory that favors “space” over “form.” Lao-Tzu, the Chinese philosopher wrote in the 6th century BC that:
We make a vessel from a lump of clay;
It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.
We make doors and windows for a room;
But it is these empty spaces that make the room livable.
Frank Lloyd Wright also said that “internal space is the reality of the building.” Bruno Zevi saw it in the opposite view . For Zevi the essence of architecture lies in the surfaces enclosing the spaces rather than the spaces themselves.
Yet Roger Scruton deconstructed this whole historic concept when he wrote in 1979:
Taken literally, the theory that the experience of architecture is an experience of space is obviously indefensible. If space were all that interested us, then not only must a large part of the architect’s activity seem like so much useless decoration, but it is even difficult to see why he should bother to build at all.
For Scruton the essence of architecture lies in “significant details”; light and shade, ornament and texture including the material from which it is made. For Derrida, however, there are no such things as ‘essence’ of this kind anyway. Any argument could be continually deconstructed.
When Derrida himself had been involved in the organizing of the permanent home for the International college of philosophy, he wrote: “The College had to be prepared to invent …a configuration of places which do not reproduce the philosophical topos (topique) which was itself being interrogated or deconstructed.”
He did not want to take anything for granted. To search for a new form that the new community might take, the program itself is called into questions.

Borrowing Architectural Theory: Fissures In The Simulation Of Coherence

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GEORGE L. CLAFLEN, JR.
Temple University
ASSESSMENT
If architecture is at all a system grounded in any "reality" of experience and nature, then a deconstruction of its language cannot proceed from an assumption of total arbitrariness. This is the issue which the deconstructionists take up with respect to phenomenology. At the same time, if architecture is a totally arbitrary system of meaning, then it should be possible to eliminate all natural or quasi-natural elements from it.
The implications of these two positions may indeed be the very attraction architecture presents to Derrida and an explanation of his interest in working on architectural projects with Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. (Indeed, Derrida's interest in issues of geometry is evident in that his first published work was a new "Introduction" to Husserl's "On the Origins of Geometry.”22 His ambiguous relations with phenomenology are well known) It would further explain Peter Eisenman's fierce efforts to undermine both function and natural structure in architecture, essential preconditions for any effort to privilege the arbitrary.
If the borrowing of deconstruction in architecture examined herein and the traditional modernist's critique of borrowing are both suspect, where does one turn for clarification? Could it be that something is being missed in the conceptualization of architecture which would illuminate this impasse? Alan Colquhoun has proposed a view of architecture analogous to music in which he sees architecture as both a natural and an arbitrary system:
"The application of the linguistic model to the arts resulted in a certain confusion, for it could be interpreted in one of two ways: as a syntactics that was 'empty' or as a semantics that was 'full'. Neither of these interpretations contradicts the notion of the arbitrariness of the signs. Nor do they necessarily exclude each other, since one is concerned with the signifier and the other with the sign (signifier + signified) as an object of attention. But, I would argue, it is the second of these two interpretations that applies to architecture, a position best justified by Levi-Strauss in his discussion of ...music. ...In music, meaning (that is, 'musical' meaning) is only imaginable if the sonic material has already been given a structure; no meanings can only emerge as modifications of an inherited structure. Now in music the basis for any such cultural structuration already exists in the natural degrees of dissonance. I would argue that a similar basis exists in architecture and that, therefore, architecture, like music, is both a natural and an arbitrary system."23
Deconstructive thinking would thus be most useful in any part of architecture concerned with arbitrary systemic forms of meaning. This limitation would of course be resisted by most deconstructors as the establishment of a "protected" natural system of meaning. Is there a way to get beyond this second impasse?
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing about art as a cultural system, expressed the magnitude of the task in the following:
"...the notion that the mechanics of art generate its meaning, cannot produce a science of signs or of anything else, only an empty virtuosity of verbal analysis.
If we are to have a semiotics of art (or for that matter, of any sign system not axiomatically self-contained), we are going to have to engage in a kind of natural history of signs and symbols, an ethnography of the vehicles of meaning."24
In architecture these vehicles of meaning might include complex associations between "natural" and "arbitrary" elements; associations which would of course be time dependent and
subject to many forms of variation. A continuing difficulty in the culture of architecture is its resistance to any deepening of the ethnography of its elements of meaning through its continuing focus upon superficial aspects of architectural experience. Such an ethnography would enrich the condition of borrowing and would be able to define contexts of meaning beyond the geometric.
And finally, what then of the original question of borrowing? The interaction of mutually distant modes of thought is, or should be, a feature of intellectual life. The problem cannot be the existence of borrowed ideas. As John Griffiths points out, borrowing creates unique conditions which do not jibe with either the source or destination discipline when he writes of deconstruction in architecture:
"Almost every interested party will find fault with any account of the concept and its history with respect to the visual arts. That, in a way, is as it should be. Works of art often have the oddest relations to the ideas which they cite, manipulate, and even proclaim as their origin and goal. Measured by the yardstick of loyalty to the supposed originating philosophic, theological, or political system, artworks which a number of people agree are very worthwhile are usually cheap heresies. Strange to say, however, they often would not exist, or exist in precisely that appealing way, without the impetus and sometimes correct but usually mistaken quotation of the ideological system which is their apparent structuring principle."25
Borrowing is thus not the problem so much as is the lack of attention to the interactions between the borrowed ideas and the natural language of architecture. In the Frankfurt project the borrowed processes have been geometricized and in the excitement of the borrowing are seen to be new when they are in fact quite limited by and derived from traditional architectural motivations. In this project, each of the borrowed fields: deconstruction, biology, and fractal geometry has alternative and potentially richer architectural linkages. The rapid translation of concepts into representations of themselves limits their architectural resonance. In trying to do this with deconstruction, Peter Eisenman may have finally hit upon the impossible borrowing, one that deconstructs any attempt to grant it privilege.

Borrowing Architectural Theory: Fissures In The Simulation Of Coherence

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GEORGE L. CLAFLEN, JR.
Temple University
ATTITUDES TOWARD BORROWING
Peter Collins articulated the traditional view of the academic profession on the linkage of architecture and literature in 1965, and the tenor of much conservative academic criticism of deconstruction in architecture has taken on a similar character:
"The influence of the allied arts on architectural design raises ethical problems of considerable gravity, for what this influence can bring about, and undoubtedly has brought about, certain benefits, it can also vitiate the nature of architectural creativity by leading to the production of forms which are not strictly architectural [emphasis added] at all....
But it seems nevertheless fair to say that when the allied arts have exerted an excessive or even predominant influence on architectural design, the result has often been pseudoarchitecture, in the sense that it is difficult in such instances to tell where the genuine tectonic virtues [emphasis added] of the work are to be found... But if the artistic merit of a building depends mainly on literary romantic allusions, ... it may be reasonably argued that such buildings are not architecture at all but whimsically conceived constructions disguised in the borrowed aesthetic trappings of another art.”18
From a deconstructive point of view, Collins's text is dripping with ties to assumed metaphysical authority. He refers, without definition or clarification, to "forms which are not strictly architectural". Clearly there is an assumed, and privileged condition of "being architectural," which the particular production he is criticizing is outside. This is an effort to draw a boundary, but, funny to say, the words
do not define one, rather forcing us to assume it through our own interpretation of the word "architectural".
Reference is also made to "genuine tectonic virtues". Here the quest for authority has run into a little difficulty, surely indicated by the appeal to the moral value of truth implied in the word "genuine". What are the implicit alternatives. necessary for this statement to carry meaning? What is a non-genuine tectonic virtue? What is a genuine, non-tectonic virtue? Each of these realms is necessarily an implicit creation of the original statement, and the understanding of each is necessary for the original statement to have meaning. Collins is here aligning himself with many other critics including, Quatremere de Quincy19, Demetri Porphyrios20, and Kenneth Frampton21 in defining the natural or distinctive system of architecture as the tectonic.
It should thus be apparent that Collins's view of borrowing does not provide an adequately secure base from which to criticize deconstruction in architecture.

Borrowing Architectural Theory: Fissures In The Simulation Of Coherence

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GEORGE L. CLAFLEN, JR.
Temple University
FRANKFURT LABORATORIES:
DECONSTRUCTIVE REPRESENTATION
In his description of how his architectural process is influenced by deconstruction, published after the Lab project, Eisenman makes an astoundingly un-Derridian claim of authority for deconstruction:
"...it is possible to propose an architecture that embraces the instabilities and dislocations that are today in fact the truth, not merely a dream of a lost truth."6

This unvarnished zeitgeist argument is an inauspicious starting point for the application of a theory which undermines the very idea of truth. It does reveal (perhaps, inadvertently) the rhetorical technique of dismissal by means of a straw man. In this case the rest of architecture is dismissed as concerned with a search for the "lost truth".
That this project was widely understood by others as concerned with deconstruction is further demonstrated by its presence in the MOMA exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture" and in Mark Wigley's comment about it: "the Frankfurt Project similarly attempts to undermine presence..."7 Wigley reveals implicitly the deconstructive aesthetic project: to design an object which demands to be categorized, and simultaneously resists that categorization and therefore throws any foundation or assumption upon which it might appear to be based into question.8
Eisenman's claims for the project itself are epitomized in the following:
"As biology today dislocates the traditions of science, so the architecture of the biology center dislocates the traditions of architecture."9
The implicit symmetry raises several problems. Is a "dislocating" architecture only appropriate for a "dislocating" science? What then of other sciences, or non-dislocating activities, if there are any? The tendency toward iso-morphism is
both clear and un-apologetic. If we assume that this is merely an excess of rhetorical zeal, and that we can indeed build "deconstructive" buildings for other than dislocating sciences, the statement is still problematic. Which traditions are dislocated? Some? All? Deconstruction comes from a tradition of thought that is traced to Hegel by virtually all of its proponents, presumably that tradition is
privileged. Deconstruction is indeed concerned with the dominance of one term of an opposition at the expense of the other. It often seeks to find and rehabilitate the suppressed element, the "other," but also to avoid the trap of simply reversing the roles of dominance and suppression.
The focus upon the translation of biological and architectural ideas to geometric analogues is both central to Eisenman's project and the problems it creates.

Borrowing Architectural Theory: Fissures In The Simulation Of Coherence

2013-10-30T20:50:00.001-07:00

GEORGE L. CLAFLEN, JR.
Temple University
WHAT IS DECONSTRUCTION?
Is it a style, a theory, or a method? In the view of its foremost proponent, Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is none of these: "Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one."3 It is rather to be considered a condition, a practice, a sensibility, a habit of looking for the ways in which formal structures undo themselves through the oppositions of their constituent and essential elements. It is a continuous process of framing and re-framing events. It derives from the traditions of semiotic analysis of meaning and represents a break with the practice of structural analysis (in fact some would say that deconstruction and poststructuralism are synonymous). Terry Eagleton has concisely described its tenets:

"Deconstruction...has grasped the point that the binary oppositions with which classical structuralism tends to work represents a way of seeing typical of ideologies. Ideologies like to draw rigid boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not, between self and non-self, truth and falsity,...reason and madness, central and marginal.... Such metaphysical thinking...cannot be simply eluded: we cannot catapult ourselves beyond this binary habit of thought into an ultra-metaphysical realm. But by a certain way of operating upon texts -- whether 'literary' or 'philosophical' -- we may begin to unravel these oppositions a little, demonstrate how one term of an antithesis secretly inheres within the other. Structuralism was generally satisfied if it could carve up a text into binary oppositions (high/low... Nature/Culture and so on) and expose the logic of their working. Deconstruction tries to show how such oppositions, in order to hold themselves in place, are sometimes betrayed into inverting or collapsing themselves, or need to banish to the text's margins certain niggling details which can be made to return and plague them. The tactic of deconstructive criticisms ...is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic; and deconstruction shows this by fastening on the 'symptomatic' points, the aporia or impasses of meaning, where texts get
2
into trouble, come unstuck, offer to contradict themselves..."
"There is a continual flickering, spilling, and defusing of meaning ...which cannot be easily contained within the categories of the text's structure, or within the categories of a conventional critical approach to it. Writing, like any process of language, works by difference; but difference is not itself a concept, is not something that can be thought. A text may 'show' us something about the nature of meaning and signification which it is not able to formulate as a propositions, All language, for Derrida, displays this 'surplus' over exact meaning, is always threatening to outrun and escape the sense which tries to contain it ...The advent of the concept of writing, then is a challenge to the very ideal of structure: for a structure always presumes a center, a fixed principle, a hierarchy of meanings and a solid foundation, and it just these notions which the endless differing and deferring of writing throws into question."4
Deconstruction thus throws into question the assumptions of originary authority upon which, ultimately, our entire culture appears to rest. Another definition, this time from a critic of
deconstruction, Richard Rorty, further probes both its tactics and apparent differences from previous forms of analysis:
"It takes a lot of hard work to produce such special effects as 'presence is just a special case of absence' or 'use is but a special case of mentioning.' Nothing except ingenuity stands in the way of any such recontextualization, but there is no method involved, if a method is a procedure which can be taught by reference to rules. Deconstruction is not a novel procedure made possible by a recent philosophical discovery. Recontextualization in general, and inverting hierarchies in particular, has been going on for a long time."
"But why does it sound so shockingly different when Derrida does it, if it is just dialectical inversion all over again? Simply because Derrida makes use of the 'accidental' material features of words, whereas Hegel,...still stuck to the rule that you cannot put any weight on words' sounds and shapes.”5
Deconstruction and architecture could thus be expected to have an intense relationship, of interest to persons in both fields. Why? Because architecture, of all the arts, is a continuous tangible presence in the world, one which is of necessity constantly being recontextualized in many ways simultaneously both by our perception and by the processes of building and altering the environment. Architecture also has multiple systems of meaning, including both patterns of use and associational imagery. The Frankfurt Laboratory was designed and described in pursuit of this relationship.

Borrowing Architectural Theory: Fissures In The Simulation Of Coherence

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GEORGE L. CLAFLEN, JR.
Temple University
ABSTRACT
An investigation of the translation and application of theoretical ideas from deconstruction, molecular, biology, and fractal geometry in Peter Eisenman's Frankfurt Biology Laboratories project as a case study to assess possible difficulties in such borrowing. Each borrowed concept is considered in both its original and architectural context. Alternative critical views toward the possibilities and role of borrowing in architecture are proposed and discussed.

INTRODUCTION:
BORROWING AS A PHENOMENON
Borrowing, appropriation, recontextualization, and displacement1 might each be employed, depending upon one's perspective, to describe the shifting of mature schemes of thought developed in one disciplinary context to another. As a coherent body of thought, the borrowed scheme often brings with it its own vocabulary, adherents, and critics. Tension often develops between the initiates and those previously unaware of the new position and its terminology. The confusion, excitement, and opportunity generated by the recent introduction in architecture of ideas associated with the philosophic movement known as deconstruction make this a particularly appropriate moment to review the circumstances of borrowing.
This study will focus upon one un-built project, the Biology Laboratories for the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, by Peter Eisenman, in which links to deconstruction, microbiological processes, and fractal geometry are all explicitly acknowledged in a detailed descriptive text, as a vehicle for this exploration. Eisenman proposed a double articulation interpreting both biological and architectural conditions geometrically, in the process "deconstructing" the conventional assumptions surrounding them to create "a project that is neither simply architectural nor simply biological, but one suspended between the two."2 The references to deconstruction, molecular biology and the geometric operations will each be considered in the contexts of both their source and their architectural manifestations. The evidence thus gathered will be considered in its impact upon the possible evolution of attitudes toward borrowing in architecture.

High-tech architecture

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High-tech is one of the styles in architecture, which refers to the broadly defined postmodernism. In contrast to modernism here the object itself is important, not the object as a functional use of space. The object is the aim. The structure of the buildings in the style of high-tech are exposed, treated as an ornament at the same time. At this point, this architecture is close to postmodernism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, modern building techniques and new materials (glass, steel, concrete) have been appreciated by contemporary modernist architects. As technology has greatly evolved, new materials and modern equipment started to be used in the construction industry. Thus was born a new architectural design developed using advanced technology, known as high-tech.

High-tech style is characterized by countless use of new technologies in the construction of the buildings and their technical equipment. Technical elements, such as blinds or solar cells, are a kind of modern ornament, especially when put together in repetitive sequence.
High-tech architecture wants to integrate the technical equipment of the building in its structure. This strengthens the impact of the object in a high-tech style, both in terms of functional and visual matter. So arises the so-called intelligent building, in which installations and construction are designed as an integral whole.
The most famous architectural high-tech works are: town hall in London, standing next to Tower Bridge, London's Millennium Dome and Wembley Stadium, office building Lloyd's in London Olympic Stadium and the Allianz Arena in Munich, the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, HSBC headquarter in Hong Kong, Zizkov Television Tower in Prague, Hotel Arts Skidmore and the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Hearst Tower in New York, the Beetham Tower in Manchester, John Hancock Center in Chicago, Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower in Tokyo.
Representatives of high-tech architecture are: Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Michael Hopkins, Nicholas Grimshaw, Schweger & Partner, Jean Nouvel, Paul Andreu, Michel Virlogeux.

Neomodernizm in architecture

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Neomodernizm in architecture was created at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Its birth date is usually around 1965. It is one of the styles in architecture, which refers to modernism (its details and spatial forms), while rejecting its socio-political and urban ideas.
Buildings, created in this style, usually have only neomodernist facade. This is a sharp contrast to the modernist principle of the treatment of the building as a whole.

Neomodernizm is a respond to the splendor of eclectic postmodernism and the protest against populism in architecture. Neomodernizm uses simplicity that is a mean of expression for the present time. At the same time it often resorts to the spectacular and impressive, and thus-artificial solutions. These include various types of light illuminations or large wall space glazing. Neomodernist buildings are constructed according to the principles of additive or substractive. Their solids are based on cubic elements or rotating forms. Neomodernizm is often used in the construction of flats, primarily because of its minimal extravagance compared with other styles of architecture.
The so-called “new rigor" is treated as a one of neomodernist direction. It is based on creating the building on a constructional principle basing on the functional system. Attractive aspects of such a facility are especially emphasized. Buildings in "new rigor" style are designed to have a very modern feel. Deconstructionism may also be called neomodernism, in its broader sense.
Representatives of neomodernism are: Rem Koolhaas, Richard Meier, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, Ingenhoven, Overdiek und Partner, MVRDV, Jong Soung Kimm, Mathias Klotz.
Examples of neomodernist architecture are among others” building of the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Birchmeier Kaufmann Architekten-multi-family house in the Zurich, office building in Nijmegen (Netherlands), Burgo Tower in Porto (Portugal), Heyri Art Valley in South Korea, Jianwai SOHO in Beijing (China), buildings in the Eco Park in Warsaw.

Critical Regionalism in architecture

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Critical Regionalism in architecture has nothing to do with the commonly understood regionalism, which refers to the local architectural tradition. It was created in the 80s of the twentieth century. The name of this style of architecture was spread by Keneth Frampton, the critic of a modern architecture.
Its theorist was French – Paul Ricour, who preached the philosophy of proportion. He wanted to continue the tradition and modernize it at the same time.
He supported relying on trait taken from modernism, which is the universal value of the object, taking into account the geographical context of the building ("local tectonic forms", climate, light, topography). For Ricoura ways of building formation, forms, due to the history and the context of the place and its geography, were important.
Critical Regionalism can be called reformed modernism. Since, modernism was one of the earlier styles of architecture, to which critical regionalism referred.
The prototype of critical regionalism architecture became Säynätsalo City Hall, designed by Alvar Aalto. Aalto blended his modernist building in the surrounding forest. He introduced brick elements, wood floors, stairs and smooth irregular surfaces. For the project of this object he used models taken directly from nature, as well as local materials. Aalto, when creating his town hall, was guided by the principle of critical regionalism – honesty of the material and the design.
Representatives of critical regionalism in architecture are for example: Alvar Aalto, Mario Botta, Tadao Ando, Geoffrey Bawa, Charles Correa, Juha Leiviska, Rafael Moneo, Glen Murcutt, Raj Rewal and Jorn Utzon.
The most famous architectural realizations in critical regionalism are: Säynätsalo Town Hall in Finland, Azuma House in Osaka Japan, Fabrica Benetton Research Center
Treviso, Italy, The House of Art of Hombroich Langen foundation in Germany, Modern Art Museum Fort Worth in Texas (USA), the Parliament building in Sri Lanka, Reykjavík
Art Museum in Iceland, the City Library of Dortmund (Germany), Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich Basel and the Church of Sts. John the Baptist Mogno in Switzerland, Cathedral of Evry (France), Sabarmati Ashram Ahmed in India, Sydney Opera House (Australia) or Synagogue Cymbalista in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Modernism and Postmodernism

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Deconstructivism in contemporary architecture stands in opposition to the ordered rationality of Modernism. Its relationship with Postmodernism is also decidedly contrary. Though postmodernist and nascent deconstructivist architects published theories alongside each other in the journal Oppositions, that journal's contents mark the beginning of a decisive break between the two movements.

Deconstructivism took a confrontational stance toward much of architecture and architectural history, wanting to disjoin and disassemble architecture. While postmodernism returned to embrace, often slyly or ironically, the historical references that modernism had shunned, deconstructivism rejects the postmodern acceptance of such references. It also rejects the idea of ornament as an after-thought or decoration.
In Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction of Architecture, geometry is to deconstructivists (Figure 1) what ornament is to postmodernists, and this complication of geometry was in turn applied to the functional, structural, and spatial aspects of deconstructivist buildings. One example of deconstructivist complexity is Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, which takes the typical unadorned white cube of modernist art galleries and deconstructs it, using geometries reminiscent of cubism and abstract expressionism. This subverts the functional aspects of modernist simplicity while taking modernism, particularly the international style, of which its white stucco skin is reminiscent, as a starting point.

Background

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Deconstructivism is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is influenced by the theory of Deconstruction, which is a form of semiotic analysis. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, and non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope. The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist styles is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.

Deconstruction

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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.

Mourning

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In Memoires: for Paul de Man, which was written almost immediately following de Man’s death in 1983, Derrida reflects upon the political significance of his colleague’s apparent Nazi affiliation in his youth, and he also discusses the pain of losing his friend. Derrida’s argument about mourning adheres to a similarly paradoxical logic to that which has been associated with him throughout this article. He suggests that the so-called ‘successful’ mourning of the deceased other actually fails – or at least is an unfaithful fidelity – because the other person becomes a part of us, and in this interiorisation their genuine alterity is no longer respected.
On the other hand, failure to mourn the other’s death paradoxically appears to succeed, because the presence of the other person in their exteriority is prolonged (MDM 6). As Derrida suggests, there is a sense in which “an aborted interiorisation is at the same time a respect for the other as other” (MDM 35). Hence the possibility of an impossible bereavement, where the only possible way to mourn, is to be unable to do so. However, even though this is how he initially presents the problem, Derrida also problematises this “success fails, failure succeeds” formulation (MDM 35).
In his essay “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok”, Derrida again considers two models of the type of encroachment between self and other that is regularly associated with mourning. Borrowing from post-Freudian theories of mourning, he posits (although later undermines) a difference between introjection, which is love for the other in me, and incorporation, which involves retaining the other as a pocket, or a foreign body within one’s own body. For Freud, as well as for the psychologists Abraham and Torok whose work Derrida considers, successful mourning is primarily about the introjection of the other. The preservation of a discrete and separate other person inside the self (psychologically speaking), as is the case in incorporation, is considered to be where mourning ceases to be a ‘normal’ response and instead becomes pathological. Typically, Derrida reverses this hierarchy by highlighting that there is a sense in which the supposedly pathological condition of incorporation is actually more respectful of the other person’s alterity. After all, incorporation means that one has not totally assimilated the other, as there is still a difference and a heterogeneity (EO 57). On the other hand, Abraham and Torok’s so-called ‘normal’ mourning can be accused of interiorising the other person to such a degree that they have become assimilated and even metaphorically cannibalised. Derrida considers this introjection to be an infidelity to the other. However, Derrida’s account is not so simple as to unreservedly valorise the incorporation of the other person, even if he emphasises this paradigm in an effort to refute the canonical interpretation of successful mourning. He also acknowledges that the more the self “keeps the foreign element inside itself, the more it excludes it” (Fors xvii). If we refuse to engage with the dead other, we also exclude their foreignness from ourselves and hence prevent any transformative interaction with them. When fetishised in their externality in such a manner, the dead other really is lifeless and it is significant that Derrida describes the death of de Man in terms of the loss of exchange and of the transformational opportunities that he presented (MDM xvi, cf WM). Derrida’s point hence seems to be that in mourning, the ‘otherness of the other’ person resists both the process of incorporation as well as the process of introjection. The other can neither be preserved as a foreign entity, nor introjected fully within. Towards the end of Memoires: for Paul de Man, Derrida suggests that responsibility towards the other is about respecting and even emphasising this resistance (MDM 160, 238).

Forgiveness

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Derrida discerns another aporia in regard to whether or not to forgive somebody who has caused us significant suffering or pain. This particular paradox revolves around the premise that if one forgives something that is actually forgivable, then one simply engages in calculative reasoning and hence does not really forgive. Most commonly in interviews, but also in his recent text On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida argues that according to its own internal logic, genuine forgiving must involve the impossible: that is, the forgiving of an ‘unforgivable’ transgression – eg. a ‘mortal sin’ (OCF 32, cf. OH 39).
There is hence a sense in which forgiving must be ‘mad’ and ‘unconscious’ (OCF 39, 49), and it must also remain outside of, or heterogenous to, political and juridical rationality. This unconditional ‘forgiveness’ explicitly precludes the necessity of an apology or repentance by the guilty party, although Derrida acknowledges that this pure notion of forgiveness must always exist in tension with a more conditional forgiveness where apologies are actually demanded. However, he argues that this conditional forgiveness amounts more to amnesty and reconciliation than to genuine forgiveness (OCF 51). The pattern of this discussion is undoubtedly beginning to become familiar. Derrida’s discussions of forgiving are orientated around revealing a fundamental paradox that ensures that forgiving can never be finished or concluded – it must always be open, like a permanent rupture, or a wound that refuses to heal.
This forgiveness paradox depends, in one of its dual aspects, upon a radical disjunction between self and other. Derrida explicitly states that “genuine forgiveness must engage two singularities: the guilty and the victim. As soon as a third party intervenes, one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense” (OCF 42). Given that he also acknowledges that it is difficult to conceive of any such face-to-face encounter without a third party – as language itself must serve such a mediating function (OCF 48) – forgiveness is caught in an aporia that ensures that its empirical actuality looks to be decidedly unlikely. To recapitulate, the reason that Derrida’s notion of forgiveness is caught in such an inextricable paradox is because absolute forgiveness requires a radically singular confrontation between self and other, while conditional forgiveness requires the breaching of categories such as self and other, either by a mediating party, or simply by the recognition of the ways in which we are always already intertwined with the other. Indeed, Derrida explicitly argues that when we know anything of the other, or even understand their motivation in however minimal a way, this absolute forgiveness can no longer take place (OCF 49). Derrida can offer no resolution in regard to the impasse that obtains between these two notions (between possible and impossible forgiving, between an amnesty where apologies are asked for and a more absolute forgiveness). He will only insist that an oscillation between both sides of the aporia is necessary for responsibility (OCF 51).

Hospitality

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It is also worth considering the aporia that Derrida associates with hospitality. According to Derrida, genuine hospitality before any number of unknown others is not, strictly speaking, a possible scenario (OH 135, GD 70, AEL 50, OCF 16). If we contemplate giving up everything that we seek to possess and call our own, then most of us can empathise with just how difficult enacting any absolute hospitality would be. Despite this, however, Derrida insists that the whole idea of hospitality depends upon such an altruistic concept and is inconceivable without it (OCF 22). In fact, he argues that it is this internal tension that keeps the concept alive.

As Derrida makes explicit, there is a more existential example of this tension, in that the notion of hospitality requires one to be the ‘master’ of the house, country or nation (and hence controlling). His point is relatively simple here; to be hospitable, it is first necessary that one must have the power to host. Hospitality hence makes claims to property ownership and it also partakes in the desire to establish a form of self-identity. Secondly, there is the further point that in order to be hospitable, the host must also have some kind of control over the people who are being hosted. This is because if the guests take over a house through force, then the host is no longer being hospitable towards them precisely because they are no longer in control of the situation. This means, for Derrida, that any attempt to behave hospitably is also always partly betrothed to the keeping of guests under control, to the closing of boundaries, to nationalism, and even to the exclusion of particular groups or ethnicities (OH 151-5). This is Derrida’s ‘possible’ conception of hospitality, in which our most well-intentioned conceptions of hospitality render the “other others” as strangers and refugees (cf. OH 135, GD 68). Whether one invokes the current international preoccupation with border control, or simply the ubiquitous suburban fence and alarm system, it seems that hospitality always posits some kind of limit upon where the other can trespass, and hence has a tendency to be rather inhospitable. On the other hand, as well as demanding some kind of mastery of house, country or nation, there is a sense in which the notion of hospitality demands a welcoming of whomever, or whatever, may be in need of that hospitality. It follows from this that unconditional hospitality, or we might say ‘impossible’ hospitality, hence involves a relinquishing of judgement and control in regard to who will receive that hospitality. In other words, hospitality also requires non-mastery, and the abandoning of all claims to property, or ownership. If that is the case, however, the ongoing possibility of hospitality thereby becomes circumvented, as there is no longer the possibility of hosting anyone, as again, there is no ownership or control.

The Gift

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The aporia that surrounds the gift revolves around the paradoxical thought that a genuine gift cannot actually be understood to be a gift. In his text, Given Time, Derrida suggests that the notion of the gift contains an implicit demand that the genuine gift must reside outside of the oppositional demands of giving and taking, and beyond any mere self-interest or calculative reasoning (GT 30). According to him, however, a gift is also something that cannot appear as such (GD 29), as it is destroyed by anything that proposes equivalence or recompense, as well as by anything that even proposes to know of, or acknowledge it.
This may sound counter-intuitive, but even a simple ‘thank-you’ for instance, which both acknowledges the presence of a gift and also proposes some form of equivalence with that gift, can be seen to annul the gift (cf. MDM 149). By politely responding with a ‘thank-you’, there is often, and perhaps even always, a presumption that because of this acknowledgement one is no longer indebted to the other who has given, and that nothing more can be expected of an individual who has so responded. Significantly, the gift is hence drawn into the cycle of giving and taking, where a good deed must be accompanied by a suitably just response. As the gift is associated with a command to respond, it becomes an imposition for the receiver, and it even becomes an opportunity to take for the ‘giver’, who might give just to receive the acknowledgement from the other that they have in fact given. There are undoubtedly many other examples of how the ‘gift’ can be deployed, and not necessarily deliberately, to gain advantage. Of course, it might be objected that even if it is psychologically difficult to give without also receiving (and in a manner that is tantamount to taking) this does not in-itself constitute a refutation of the logic of genuine giving. According to Derrida, however, his discussion does not amount merely to an empirical or psychological claim about the difficulty of transcending an immature and egocentric conception of giving. On the contrary, he wants to problematise the very possibility of a giving that can be unequivocally disassociated from receiving and taking.
The important point is that, for Derrida, a genuine gift requires an anonymity of the giver, such that there is no accrued benefit in giving. The giver cannot even recognise that they are giving, for that would be to reabsorb their gift to the other person as some kind of testimony to the worth of the self – ie. the kind of self-congratulatory logic that rhetorically poses the question “how wonderful I am to give this person that which they have always desired, and without even letting them know that I am responsible?”. This is an extreme example, but Derrida claims that such a predicament afflicts all giving in more or less obvious ways. For him, the logic of a genuine gift actually requires that self and other be radically disparate, and have no obligations or claims upon each other of any kind. He argues that a genuine gift must involve neither an apprehension of a good deed done, nor the recognition by the other party that they have received, and this seems to render the actuality of any gift an impossibility. Significantly, however, according to Derrida, the existential force of this demand for an absolute altruism can never be assuaged, and yet equally clearly it can also never be fulfilled, and this ensures that the condition of the possibility of the gift is inextricably associated with its impossibility. For Derrida, there is no solution to this type of problem, and no hint of a dialectic that might unify the apparent incommensurability in which possibility implies impossibility and vice versa. At the same time, however, he does not intend simply to vacillate in hyperbolic and self-referential paradoxes. There is a sense in which deconstruction actually seeks genuine giving, hospitality, forgiving and mourning, even where it acknowledges that these concepts are forever elusive and can never actually be fulfilled.

Possible and Impossible Aporias

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Derrida has recently become more and more preoccupied with what has come to be termed “possible-impossible aporias” – aporia was originally a Greek term meaning puzzle, but it has come to mean something more like an impasse or paradox. In particular, Derrida has described the paradoxes that afflict notions like giving, hospitality, forgiving and mourning. He argues that the condition of their possibility is also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility. In this section, I will attempt to reveal the shared logic upon which these aporias rely.

Wholly Other/Messianic

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This brings us to a term that Derrida has resuscitated from its association with Walter Benjamin and the Judaic tradition more generally. That term is the messianic and it relies upon a distinction with messianism.
According to Derrida, the term messianism refers predominantly to the religions of the Messiahs – ie. the Muslim, Judaic and Christian religions. These religions proffer a Messiah of known characteristics, and often one who is expected to arrive at a particular time or place.
The Messiah is inscribed in their respective religious texts and in an oral tradition that dictates that only if the other conforms to such and such a description is that person actually the Messiah. The most obvious of numerous necessary characteristics for the Messiah, it seems, is that they must invariably be male. Sexuality might seem to be a strange prerequisite to tether to that which is beyond this world, wholly other, but it is only one of many. Now, Derrida is not simplistically disparaging religion and the messianisms they propound. In an important respect, the messianic depends upon the various messianisms and Derrida admits that he cannot say which is the more originary. The messianism of Abraham in his singular responsibility before God, for Derrida, reveals the messianic structure of existence more generally, in that we all share a similar relationship to alterity even if we have not named and circumscribed that experience according to the template provided by a particular religion. However, Derrida’s call to the wholly other, his invocation for the wholly other “to come”, is not a call for a fixed or identifiable other of known characteristics, as is arguably the case in the average religious experience. His wholly other is indeterminable and can never actually arrive. Derrida more than once recounts a story of Maurice Blanchot’s where the Messiah was actually at the gates to a city, disguised in rags. After some time, the Messiah was finally recognised by a beggar, but the beggar could think of nothing more relevant to ask than: “when will you come?”(DN 24). Even when the Messiah is ‘there’, he or she must still be yet to come, and this brings us back to the distinction between the messianic and the various historical messianisms. The messianic structure of existence is open to the coming of an entirely ungraspable and unknown other, but the concrete, historical messianisms are open to the coming of a specific other of known characteristics. The messianic refers predominantly to a structure of our existence that involves waiting – waiting even in activity – and a ceaseless openness towards a future that can never be circumscribed by the horizons of significance that we inevitably bring to bear upon that possible future. In other words, Derrida is not referring to a future that will one day become present (or a particular conception of the saviour who will arrive), but to an openness towards an unknown futurity that is necessarily involved in what we take to be ‘presence’ and hence also renders it ‘impossible’. A deconstruction that entertained any type of grand prophetic narrative, like a Marxist story about the movement of history toward a pre-determined future which, once attained, would make notions like history and progress obsolete, would be yet another vestige of logocentrism and susceptible to deconstruction (SM). Precisely in order to avoid the problems that such messianisms engender – eg. killing in the name of progress, mutilating on account of knowing the will of God better than others, etc. – Derrida suggests that: “I am careful to say ‘let it come’ because if the other is precisely what is not invented, the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in opening, in uncloseting, in destabilising foreclusionary structures, so as to allow for the passage toward the other” (RDR 60).