A tendency of the 1980s and 90s that set out to unsettle the stable forms of architecture (tilting, fracturing and colliding volumes, skewing grids and planes) to produce buildings of instability and unease.
The name was fixed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1988, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, which brought together seven architects: Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi. It deliberately echoed two sources: the Russian Constructivists of the 1920s, whose unbuilt projects of tilted planes and dynamic diagonals these architects studied, and the deconstruction of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, with whom Eisenman and Tschumi collaborated.
Its early manifestos were competitions and small buildings: Tschumi’s red follies scattered on a grid across the Parc de la Villette in Paris (from 1982), Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica wrapped in chain-link and corrugated metal (1977–78), Coop Himmelb(l)au’s rooftop office in Vienna that seems to have been struck by lightning (1983–88), and Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station (1990–93), a cluster of knife-edged concrete planes. Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (1989–2001) made the method carry meaning: a zigzag plan, slashed windows and empty voids express a history of rupture.
Computers made the most complex forms buildable. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1991–97), designed with aerospace software and clad in titanium, became a worldwide sensation and gave its name to the “Bilbao effect” of cities commissioning spectacular buildings to attract visitors. From there the path led, through Hadid’s office in particular, toward the continuous curved forms of Parametricism.