Do not compose the park as one picture: lay down independent systems (points, lines and surfaces), each complete in itself, one over another, and let them collide where they meet.
Rules · Theory · Façades · Geometry
Disturb the pure form
Tilt, twist, fragment and collide the volumes of a composition, so that no floor is level, no wall upright and no angle square except where the ground forces it.
Wigley’s catalogue argued that the seven architects he and Johnson exhibited found disorder inside the pure forms of modernism rather than adding it from outside: a box whose walls lean, a bar that pierces another and cantilevers into the air, a shard of glass driven through a roof. Their precedents were the unbuilt projects of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station (1990–93) is a cluster of sharp concrete planes; Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (1989–2001) cuts its zinc skin with slashing windows.
Related rules
Set a red folie at every intersection of a 120-metre grid across the whole site; make each a 10.8-metre cube on a 3.6-metre grid, then subtract parts and add stairs, ramps, drums and canopies so that no two are alike.
grid 120 m · cube 10.8 m = 3 × 3.6 m
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Disturb the pure form”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/decon-dislocation. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.