Book Review: "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction", by Nikos A. Salingaros with Christopher Alexander, Brian Hanson, Michael Mehaffy, and Terry M. Mikiten

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

In his forward to this book, James Stevens Curl writes, “This book should be required reading in every institution concerned with the teaching of architecture, planning, and all other aspects of the built environment”. I will extend that recommendation to every institution of higher learning concerned with effective education in all subject matters, because this book is also about the world we live in. Though it is focused on the practice of Deconstructivist architecture, in fact this book is also, by inference and extension, a description of the end of urbanism when living, work, social life, and a sense of community connected to a place were displaced by national corporations, the separation of work from residence, the growth of suburban sprawl enabled by the car, shopping centers, and grid-locked roads.

Nikos Salingaros, a scientist and mathematician, takes on the Deconstructivist community in general, and Deconstructivist architecture specifically. He and his coauthors use scientific and mathematical analysis to understand Decons’ claims and accompanying coded language. The book is a compendium of a series essays and criticisms written over a period of time by Salingaros and the contributing authors. His most current subjects of criticism are Frank Gehry, Peter Eissenman, Daniel Liebeskind, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaus, and Bernard Tuschumi and their followers, as well as foremost Decon architectural critics Charles Jencks and Herbert Mauchamp, recently departed from the New York Times. The latter are the fashion setters for the former.

Salingaros believes that the process of architectural deconstruction started with the Bauhaus and continued with the International School, the New Brutalists, and, finally, the Postmodernists. Each one of them became a cult that invaded schools of architecture, changed our point of view of the built environment, and disassociated themselves from lessons and relevant precedents of the recent and distant past.

They and the Decon architects have disconnected themselves from the history and human needs for order and comfort; ignored cultural and cityscape contexts; are non-organic/non-evolutionary, and constitute a violent opposition to not only traditional architecture but also to Modernism. They contend they are the new paradigm, and, according to Saligaros and those of like mind, are supported by bad science and bogus logic, and expressed in terms so vague that they have no intellectual basis. Nevertheless, this so-called paradigm, a new way of looking at the world, has captured the imaginations and excitement of people looking for a new fad and status symbol. He claims, and I agree fervently, that they are dazzled by fashion and abstraction for its own sake- the “they” being powerful individuals, corporations, foundations, and governments. Worse, it has also overtaken the curricula of most architecture schools.

His heroes of the real, new paradigm, are Christopher Alexander and Leon Krier, as two prominent examples. They are innovative as well as humane, but understand architecture less as a style of building and more connected to human needs, local custom, their specific patterns of activity, and their connections to the world and the local community.

Salingaros and Michael Mehaffy of the Princes Foundation in the United Kingdom, in a separate essay list their beliefs. Alexander and Krier believe that “life has connectivity and pattern; is ‘organized complexity’ that is a mixture of contingency, order, and spontaneity; ……..; and that life is a genetic algorithm that evolves and develops complexities as it learns”. The Decons do not support this point of view, because they are creating a new world that is made up of fragments of reality that generate their own pattern and complexity and are, therefore, apart from evolution.

Deconstructivism was first described by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. It first influenced literary criticism but has now been extended to architecture. Derrida describes decon as “a method of analyzing texts based on the idea that language is inherently unstable and shifting and that the reader rather than the author is central in determining meaning”. Salingaros claims that this is a call of “liberation from the hegemony of certainty”.

Derrida has become a “virus” that has infected Decon architecture and, as a virus, reproducing itself endlessly, has killed off connections to the past, humanity, and context. Indeed, this philosophic cult explains recent Decon architecture: Bilbao, the Liebeskind plan for Ground Zero, the Seattle Public Library, the Acropolis Museum, and the Berlin Holocaust Museum. All of them produce a kind of discomfort, a series of unworkable spaces, and disorientation. My view of history of decon begins with my first visit to Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1959. I was so disoriented by the sloping galleries and disturbed by slight vertigo from looking across at more curving ramps that it was impossible to appreciate the art.

The antidote to this architectural illness is most clearly stated in part 12 of the book, a book review and interview of Christopher Alexander. Though Salingaros recommends traditonal architecture as the best alternative to Decon designs, he refers to Alexander and is non-architecture as appropriate way of approaching style and form.

Alexander claims that “we have lost touch with our most basic human feelings”. His four part book series proposes new ways to reconnect us with ourselves and the world. His “theory” is based on studies and interviews with many different people. It concludes that there are certain geometries and properties common to all of structures that make us feel alive. His analytic method for exposing solutions to various human problems that express themselves in architecture and urban design is most clearly expressed in his famous book, “A Pattern Language”.

Alexander contends that current architecture is anti-architecture and that the curricula of architecture schools is insane. They are insane because they have become disassociated from human beings and solutions to human problems in pursuit of self-referential (deconstructed), unique form.

If “Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction” suffers from anything it is its redundancy. Chapter after chapter and essay after essay pretty much say the same thing. The language, on the other hand, though dense, is the clearest description of the state of architecture and the destructiveness of the Decon movement. Words like “virus”, “cultish”, and “violence” used to describe Decon architecture seem extreme. When in fact, they are also used in a much needed rant at a movement which has become so fashionable and cultish that, like the 50s movie, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, we ourselves and our understanding of basic human needs for peace and comfort, have been stolen by a non-culture.