Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism deliberately unsettles the expectation of symmetry, order and pure geometry in architecture. Its buildings look as though they have been split apart, shifted or reassembled. The name spread after the 1988 exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which featured Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi and Coop Himmelb(l)au.

Where the ideas came from

The movement draws on two sources. One is the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, a way of exposing the hidden assumptions inside a text. The other is the dynamic, angled and colliding forms of early twentieth-century Russian Constructivism. From these, deconstructivist architects argued that a building could be read not only through function and structural logic but also through tension and a sense of movement.

Well-known buildings and digital tools

Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin are the movement’s best-known works. Drawing and building such complex geometry became practical only as computer-aided design and fabrication matured, which makes deconstructivism one of the forerunners of parametric design.

Visualising these buildings puts heavy weight on camera choice. Tilted planes and sharp edges only read clearly with strong light and shadow; from the wrong angle the same building can look merely chaotic.