In Europe

In Europe, on the other hand, deconstruction was
understood as a response to structuralism; it is therefore sometimes
referred to as a "poststructuralist" approach. Structuralism argued
that individual thought was shaped by linguistic structures. It
therefore denied or at least severely deemphasized the relative
autonomy of subjects in determining cultural meanings; indeed, it
seemed virtually to dissolve the subject into the larger forces of
culture. Deconstruction attacked the assumption that these
structures of meaning were stable, universal, or ahistorical.
However, it did not challenge structuralism's views about the
cultural construction of human subjects. Social theories that
attempt to reduce human thought and action to cultural structures
are sometimes called "antihumanist." Ironically, then,
deconstruction suffered the curious fate of being an antihumanist
theory that nevertheless was often understood in the United States
as making the radically subjectivist claim that texts mean whatever
a person wants them to mean. The misunderstandings that
deconstruction has engendered are partly due to the obscurity of
expression that often distinguishes the work of its adherents.

Deconstruction has a broader

Deconstruction has a broader, more popular, and a
narrower, more technical sense. The latter refers to a series of
techniques for reading texts developed by Jacques Derrida, Paul de
Man, and others; these techniques in turn are connected to a set of
philosophical claims about language and meaning. However, as a
result of the popularity of these techniques and theories, the verb
"deconstruct" is now often used more broadly as a synonym for
criticizing or demonstrating the incoherence of a position.
Deconstruction made its first inroads in the United States
through departments of literary criticism, which sought new
strategies for interpreting literary texts. As a result, deconstruction
became associated and sometimes confused with other trends,
including reader response theory, which argues that a text's
meaning is produced through the reader's process of encountering
it.

CONSTUCTIVSM AND RUSSIAN FUTURISM

Another major current in 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 Himmelb(l)au. Both Deconstructivism and Constructivism have been concerned with the tectonics of making an abstract assemblage. Both were concerned with the radical simplicity of geometric forms as the primary artistic content, expressed in graphics, sculpture and architecture. The Constructivist tendency toward purism, though, is absent in Deconstructivism: form is often deformed when construction is deconstructed. Also lessened or absent is the advocacy of socialist and collectivist causes.

The primary graphic motifs of constructivism were the rectangular bar and the triangular wedge, others were the more basic geometries of the square and the circle. In his series Prouns, El Lizzitzky assembled collections of geometries at various angles floating free in space. They evoke basic structural units such as bars of steel or sawn lumber loosely attached, piled, or scattered. They were also often drafted and share aspects with technical drawing and engineering drawing. Similar in composition is the deconstructivist series Micromegas by Daniel Libeskind.