Junk SpaceDeconstructivism and Beyond

Alberto Iacovoni, Marialuisa Palumbo | Cornell in Rome Fall 2016

1. Postmodernism vs Deconstructivism

Portoghesi, La Strada Novissima, The Presence of the Past Venicel Biennale, 1980

Deconstructivist Architecture, Exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, MoMA, 1988

Iakov Chernikov

Ivan Leonidov

Alexandr Rodchenko Vladimir Tatlin

International Symposium on Deconstruction, Tate Gallery, 1988

Deconstruction in Architecture, Architectural Design Profile n.3, 1988

Deconstruction II, Architectural Design Profile n.4, 1988

<<I believe the projects in the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MOMA mark a different sensibility, one in which the dream of pure form has been disturbed. Form is no longer simply pure, it has become contaminated...

The roof-top re-modelling by Coop Himmelblau is a form distorted by some alien organism, a roving, disruptive animal breaking through the corner. Some twisted counter-relief infects the octagonal box... the roof splits, shears and buckles.

Deconstructivist Architecture seeks the unfamiliar within the familiar, it displaces the context rather than acquiesces to it. The projects in the exhibition do not ignore the context, they are not unti-contextural. Rather, each makes a very specific intervention in which elements of the context become defamiliarised.>>

Coop Himmelblau, Attic conversion, Vienna, 1984-1988

<< This is not a new style. The projects don't even share an aesthetic. What they share is the fact that each produces an unsettling object by exploiting the hidden potential of Modernism.

They all produce a devious architecture, a slippery architecture that slides uncontrollably from the familiar into the unfamiliar, promoting an uncanny sense of the alien hidden within the familia, an architecture, finally, which form distorts itself.>>

Mark Wigley, Deconstruction. Omnibus Volume, 1989

Frank Gehry, Santa Monica House, 1978

Edgemar Museum, Santa Monica, 1984-88

Chiat/Day/Mojo Office, Venice,1975 e 86-91

Fish Sculpture at La Vila Olímpica del Poblenou in Barcelona 1989-92

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 1991-97

In 1969, at Moma in New York, Kenneth Frampton presented the work of five young architects: Peter Eisenman (1932), John Hejduk (1929), Michael Graves (1934), Charles Gwathmey (1938), Richard Meier (1934).

A few years later, in 1972, Manfredo Tafuri published the volume Five Architects.

Casa del Fascio. Diagramma assonometrico che mostra un centro implicito quale risultato dell'intersezione di quattro piani.

Diagramma assonometrico che mostra un centro implicito quale risultato della relazione tra vuoto e pieno.

Diagramma assonometrico che mostra l'articolazione di quattro angoli in un vuoto cubico tale da avere angoli dominanti e un centro recessivo.

Diagramma assonometrico che mostra angoli pieni dominanti e un vuoto centrale.

House I, 1967-68

House II

House III

House VI

House X, 1978

Fin D’Ou T Hous S, 1983

Checkpoint Charlie, IBA, Berlin, 1982-85

Carnegie Mellon Research Center, Pittsburg, 1987-88

Guardiola House, Cadice, 1988

School of Architecture, University of Cincinnati, 1988-91

Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio, 1989-93

Koizumi Sangyo Office, Tokyo, 1988-90

Church of the Year 2000, Roma, 1996

City of Culture, Santiago de Compostela, 1999

Jews Memorial, Berlin, 2005

Bernard Tschumi, Parc de La Villette, Paris, 1982-1997

A specific aim: to prove that it is possible to construct a complex architectural organization without resorting to traditional rules of composition, hierarchy and order.

The principle of superimposition of three autonomous systems of points, lines and surfaces was developed by rejecting the totalizing synthesis of objective constraints evident in the majority of large-scale projects... the parc became architecture against itself: a dis-integration.

Another goal: to displace the traditional opposition between program and architecture, and to deconstruct architecture by dismantling its conventions, by using concepts derived from both architecture and from elsewhere - from cinema, literary criticism and other displines.

The Manhattan Transcripts, 1976-81

Studio National des Arts Contemporaines, Le Fresnoy, 1991-97

1978, 1995, 2001

1995

2001

Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972

Superstudio, Monumento Continuo, 1969

Parco della Villette, Parigi, 1982

Teatro Nazionale di Danza, L’Aia, 1984-87

Sea Terminal, Zeebrugge, 1989

Biblioteca di Francia, Parigi, 1989

Villa Dall’Ava, Parigi, 1991

Kunsthall, Rotterdam, 1993

Casa da Musica, Porto, 2005

New Public Library, Seattle, 2004

Mc Cormick Tribune Campus Center, Chicago, 2003

Rem Koolhaas + Cecil Balmond, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2006, Londra

Zaha Hadid, The Peak Club, Hong Kong, 1982-83

Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1989-93

Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, 1998

Stazione dell’Alta Velocità di Napoli, 2003

Museo mediterraneo dell'arte nuragica e dell'arte contemporanea, Cagliari 2006

Daniel Libeskind, Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996

Daniel Libeskind, Museo Ebraico, Berlino, 1997-99

Museo d'arte, Denver, 2006

World Trade Center, 2003

2. Dictionary of Advanced Architecture

AA >> Advanced Architecture>> Action>> Antytipe

An action (an architecture) that is advanced is an action (an architecture) which is necessarily projective: propositive and anticipatory/anticipating. An action (an architecture) with the capacity to connect with technological change (industry and technique), with cultural progress (thought and creation) and with scientific logic (research and development).

Action

What we are interested in today is an ‘action architecture’ defined by a desire to act, to (inter)act. That is to activate, to generate, to produce, to express, to move, to exchange and to relate.

To promote interaction between things, rather than interventions on them. Movements, rather than positions. Actions rather than figurations. Process, rather than occurrences.

Alejandro Aravena, Elemental, Cile, 2003-2004

Antitypes

A surprising image shows a car coupled to an aeroplane…This is not an univocal object… it is not a typological design, but rather an a-typological mechanism; an antitype.

MVRDV, Frosilos, Copenaghen 2005

MVRDV, Pig City, 2001

>> Form (and no-form) >> ambiguity>> Interfaces>> Devices>> Dispositions>> Situation >>“Excited place” >> form >> ambiguity

Ambiguity

Univocal space now yields to a space decidedly ambivalent…

In a multifaceted, polyphase, definitively non-essential reality, architecture can create spaces that are more plural, by virtue, precisely, of being indeterminate. Implicitly changing and (in)formal. Multiple. Multiplied and multiplicative.

A building can be a garden. A garden, a building.

Francois & Lewis, Case Rurali, Jupilles, Francia 1996

NL, Basketbar, Utrecht, 2003

FOA, International Port Terminal, Yokohama, Giappone, 2002

DevicesOur challenge as architects is to produce new devices of action… Dispositifs (devices) (open and evolutionary) rather than design (closed and exact).

Topotek 1, Temporary Playground, Garden Show, Wolfsburg, Germany 2004

>> Diversity>> Housys>> Inhabiting>> Livrid (live+hybrid)>> Lightness>> Precarious(ly)>> Reversible

DiversityOurs is a time of diversity, calling for constant simultaneity of individual events in global structures… evidencing the impact –the emergence- of the singular upon the collective, not as “part of the whole”, but rather as specificity “interconnected with the whole”.In our time there exists the conditions for assuming creatively this fragmentation, and thereby attaining an anthropological universality which also integrates plurality, difference and discontinuity.

MVRDV, Hageneiland , Netherlands, 2001

HybridLand-archLand(s) in landsEcology >> Ambiguity

Land-arch…as an instrument. This shift has been favoured by the passage from a generation obsessed with the relationship between architecture and city to another, the latter more aware of a new contract with nature (a nature evidently epic, mongrel, manipulated, rather than domestic and bucolic).

MVRDV, Dutch pavilion Expo 2000, Hanover

New dynamics conform to an incipient vocabulary of a hybrid contract… Construction that would artificially integrate movements –or moments- of nature, in some cases “architecturalising” the landscape (modelling, cutting, folding…), proposing new topological shapes (reliefs, waves, folds)…

…in others, landscaping (lining, enveloping, covering) an architecture in ambiguous synergy with the strange nature that surrounds it.

Plot, Maritime Youth House, Copenhagen, 2004

Imaginative formulas capable of favouring this new natural contract… would reside precisely in its capacity to incorporate the technical, plastic and perhaps unheard-of solutions neither paralysed nor diminished by the presence of the nature, but rather stimulated precisely by the possibility to incorporating it, of spurring it, of reformulating it –of enriching it rather than conserving it.

Land(s) in lands“Operative landscapes” rather than “host landscape”.As with the city, which has blurred the boundaries separating it from former extramural territories, today the architectural project too can blur its profiles –and its edges- in new geographies of transition. The application of new structural and technical concepts… now permit the positing of a deformation of the old Euclidean structures, transforming them into multilayered spaces… towards almost geological processes… spaces of folding rather than prismatic volumes…Topographies rather than volumes.“Lands over other lands”.Constructed geographies rather than architectures.No longer lovely volumes under the light, but rather ambiguous landscapes under the sky.Fields within other fields. Lands in lands.

Eden Bio is a 100-unit social housing development in Paris. The project features terraced houses along pedestrian alleyways. Staircases to reach the upstairs units will be mounted externally and covered in plants.

EcologyInstead of old nostalgic or pseudobucolic ecology (which freezes landscapes, territories and environments), we suggest a bold ecology. Based no longer upon a timid, merely defensive –resistant- non-intervention, but rather upon a non-impositive, projecting and qualifying –restimulating- intervention in synergy with the environment and, also, with technology.An ecology in which sustainability is interaction.In which nature is also artificial.In which energy is information and technology is vehiclisation.In which to conserve implies always to intervene.

3. The Planetary Boundaries

Nairobi, Kenya

Israel/Palestine separation wall

4. The Nordic Model

MALMO, Västra Hammen