Decontructivist Architecture Analysis

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Philip Johnson, architect, and Mark Wigley, architect and architectural historian and author argue about Deconstructivist Architecture after their Deconstructivist MOMA exhibition, explaining that the purity of the geometries of buildings and their structures guarantee their stability and clarity and further illustrate the misconceptions of decontructivist architecture as a revolutionary style. “Deconstructivist Architecture” begins with the initial assertion that every architect’s goal is pure form and lack of disorder in their buildings, and that rational structures derive strictly from that principle. However, when referring to decontructivist architecture, people usually mistake it with the disorder or the taking apart of rational structures,…show more content…
Later arguments include the modern movement and its attempt to purify architecture by avoiding all non-functional aspects of the buildings such as ornaments. However, it was more focused on the “elegant aesthetics of functionalism” instead of the actual functional properties of different design decisions. Furthermore, the projects in their exhibition analyze the intrinsic relationship between the inconstant Russian avant-garde and the balance of high modernism itself. Indeed, the final intake of decontructivist architecture and the exhibition at MOMA is the understanding that these buildings whether built or not, can, in fact, be built if desired, they are complete, buildable structurally sound designs. Finally, the architects portrayed in the galleries influence each other but are not in any circumstance a group or team, or a beginning of a new style, they simply explore through their projects the hidden capabilities of the modernist…show more content…
The architect and professor claim that the appeal to formalist art makes the exhibition, which in a sense a political statement, “reactionary” and “antithetical” since the relationships with Russian deconstructivism is not apparent and such projects do not intrinsically represent contemporary questions as historical reformulation or architectural meaning. She argues that for them, deconstructivism is about form and style, not about a deep understanding of the meaning and representation of the architectural decisions based on such principle. Interestingly, Ingraham debates that the 1988 exhibition marked a time, date and place but not necessarily a response since even the physical organization of the show, in her opinion, did not make sense. There were two galleries of models and drawings of famous high modernist architects, and a third space filled with Russian Constructivists works, which was highly difficult to link together since their qualities were very conflicting with each other. Finally, it is presented the argument of cow-things such as salt and pepper shakers or other ceramic objects as a sentimental joke of things lost in New York. A comparison is made to the exhibition by suggesting that both the cow and the deconstructivist movement are being dematerialized and pressured by architecture to produce more of a

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