The Emperor's new clothes.

ANTI-ARCHITECTURE AND DECONSTRUCTION

By N. A. Salingaros, with C. Alexander, B. Hanson, M. Mehaffy, and T. M. Mikiten. Solingen: Umbau-Verlag. 2004. [euro]19/US$22.80 (inc p & p); PDF (read-only) format [euro]6/US$7.25

Deconstruction is an architectural style that in recent years has gained ever-increasing influence among architects and educators, as well as decision and policy makers and developers of prestige projects. Many famous recent projects are examples of the style. More than just visual fashion, it has serious implications for form, function and aesthetics. Characterized by lack of human-scale details, jagged and convoluted figures, disjointed masses and planes, glittering glass and polished metal surfaces, these buildings stem primarily from a branch of philosophy whose main representative was the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Salingaros, a theoretician of architecture and urbanism, as well as professor of mathematics and physics, examines the roots, development and influences of deconstruction in architecture. He explores its possible effects on our sensory processes, and on built and social structures. This collection of essays by Salingaros and his co-authors, among them Christopher Alexander, takes the reader on a trip through some of the darkest aspects of modernist and post-modern architecture. The book focuses on its advocates and propagators. Quoting writings, and analyzing some of the most well known projects of such people--among them Johnson, Jencks, Gehry, Eisenman, Hadid, Libeskind and Tschumi, but also Derrida himself--Salingaros unveils the truth hidden underneath the meandering rhetoric of deconstruction. He decodes the esoteric terminology and the unintelligible explanations used to justify deconstruction in general and its architectonic offspring in particular.

Step by step, the reader is taken through Derrida's description of deconstruction as a virus intended to attack and destroy structures, a definition and purpose shared by his architect disciples. Tschumi's descriptions are even harder to digest, expressing his design concepts in terms of schizophrenic thought processes, spiced with a fascination for the violent, the bizarre and the perverse. Johnson's fascination with nihilism and Nazi ideology, and his praise of war ruins and embedded violence as an exciting form of aesthetics, is at least as disconcerting.

Words used by Decon architects--fractals, chaos, evolution--are shown to have no relation to their meaning in a scientific context. The claims of these and others pretending to build a new world on the ruins of the old, backward one, are effectively countered by Salingaros. He advocates a return to the incremental and gradual change and evolution, through the use of patterns that are historically and scientifically validated through heuristic processes. He pleads for architecture based upon generations of application and adjustments, architecture of human scale stimulating the senses positively, as opposed to intended disorientation, anxiety and tension caused by the paradigms of deconstructivism.

Architects cannot go on indulging themselves in the misty atmosphere of 'constructive ambiguity', with the logic of cults, the rhetoric of twisted pseudo-philosophy, and the terminology of disciplines they have no understanding of. It is time for architects to realize that an aggressive, self-propelling group has hijacked architecture, its teaching, discussion and raison d'etre.

If Salingaros is right--as I am afraid he is future implications of current design trends will be grim and dangerous. This is true not only for architects and urbanists who render themselves obsolete by designing projects that do not serve their primary purpose--to provide a viable shelter--but for society as a whole. Our world is being pushed yet closer to the edge by architectonic and urban nihilism propagated by a small cadre of self-appointed connoisseurs and illuminati.