Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley

Deconstructivist Architecture

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New York (Museum of Modern Art) · 1988 · English

Summarised and illustrated here; the text is not reproduced.

The catalogue of the MoMA exhibition that grouped seven architects under one name: Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhaas, Eisenman, Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Tschumi.

Wigley’s essay argued that these architects did not simply break things for effect: they found instability inside the pure forms of modernism itself, and in the unbuilt experiments of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, and made it visible: warped planes, skewed grids, volumes that collide and cantilever. The name deliberately echoed both Russian Constructivism and the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.

The book, part by part

I The exhibition

Seven architects; disturbed perfection; the legacy of Constructivism.

Fig. 1Order disturbed. Open in Models ↗

Rules: Disturb the pure form

Rules drawn from Deconstructivist Architecture

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.

Cite this page Chris Paton, “Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/source/decon-moma. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.