“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.
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.
