Deconstructivism

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 617.

Text B

Prepare a short presentation about the trends in the architecture of our days in the PowerPoint program.

Home task

Write a short summary of the text. It should be 10 sentences.

Exercise 8

Make up a plan of the text. To each point of the plan, choose the words/word groups which will be absolutely necessary for making a presentation.

Exercise 7

Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein designed by Frank Gehry in 1990

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*.

Deconstructivism is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, 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. In other words, deconstructivist architecture seeks to remove all rules and systems from architecture, stripping it of all the codified methods of the past.

Deconstructivism in contemporary architecture is opposed to the ordered rationality of Modernism and Postmodernism. Though postmodernist and deconstructivist architects both published in the same journal “Oppositions” (between 1973 and 1984), the journal's contents mark a decisive break between the two movements. Deconstructivism took a confrontational stance to architectural history, it wanted to "disassemble" architecture. While postmodernism returned to embrace the historical references that modernism had shunned, deconstructivism rejected the postmodern acceptance of such references, as well as the idea of ornament or decoration.

One example of deconstructivist complexity is Frank Gehry'sVitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein (Germany), which takes the typical unadorned white cube of modernist art galleries and deconstructs it, using geometries reminiscent of cubism and abstract expressionism.

Another example of the deconstructivist architecture is Wexner Center for the Arts created by the American architect Peter Eisenman The Wexner Center takes the archetypal form of the castle, which it then makes very complex in a series of cuts and fragmentations. A three-dimensional grid runs through the building. The grid, as a reference to modernism, collides with the medieval antiquity of a castle. Some of the grid's columns intentionally do not reach the ground, hovering over stairways creating a sense of neurotic unease and contradicting the structural purpose of the column. According to Eisenman, when you can sense the incompleteness of a finished structure, it is a paradoxical experience. If the parts that make up the whole are in conflict, the sensation of the incomplete contests the fact that the structure is, in fact, a finished and fully enclosed space.

Some theorists think that deconstructivist architecture takes inspiration from the Russian Constructivist and Futurist movements of the early twentieth century, both in their graphics and in their visionary architecture, little of which was actually constructed. Artists Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexander Rodchenko, have influenced the graphic sense of geometric forms of deconstructivist architects such as Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelblau.

Notes:

*semiotic analysis – семиотический анализ [семио́тика - наука о коммуникативных системах и знаках, используемых в процессе общения]

Questions:

1. When did the origin of deconstructivism take place?

2. What are the main features of deconstructivism?

3. What movements in architecture is deconstructivism opposed to?

4. What are the basic differences between deconstructivism and postmodernism?

5. In what way can we regard Wexner Center for the Arts created by the American architect Peter Eisenman as a work in the deconstructivism style?

6. Where does deconstructivist architecture take inspiration from?