Review of Nikos A. Salingaros
"ANTI-ARCHITECTURE AND DECONSTRUCTION"
by James Stevens Curl

This book should be required reading in every institution concerned with the teaching of architecture, planning, and all other aspects of the built environment. It should also be read by every person claiming to be an architect.

That, however, is a forlorn hope, as most architects seldom read at all: they only look at seductive pictures and absorb slogans. There are a very few honorable exceptions; these are those rare individuals who conserve and restore old buildings, add to them or adapt them with sensitivity and scholarship. It includes those who can still design buildings that delight and enhance life rather than threaten it, and who understand the nature of the materials used in their buildings without having to call in engineers and contortionists to enable their designs to be realized.

The rise of Deconstructivism and its adherents can partly be explained by the spread of the contagion Salingaros, in this essential and timely book, calls “The Derrida Virus”, and partly by the Imprimatur given to the style (for that is what it is) by Philip Johnson. Before the 1939-1945 War, Johnson had also encouraged the pandemic of the International Style with the exhibition he and H. R. Hitchcock organized in New York City. Now, Deconstructivism has been hailed as a “New Paradigm” by those who ought to know better, and the cult is being forced on students in those breeding grounds of the ugly and the unworkable, namely the Schools of Architecture. (In the reviewer’s opinion, they ought to be properly renamed “Schools for the Destruction of the Environment”, and, in any reasonable society, closed down because of the menace they pose for the future).

This excellent and thoughtful book dismantles the flimsy codification known as Deconstructivism, showing how the ill-educated have been fooled by obfuscation, which they have mistaken for profundity. It also warns of the wholly negative nature of Deconstructivism. How many more of these so-called “iconic” buildings, with their jagged forms and uncomfortable spaces, their grotesquely impractical corners, their expense, and their disregard for context, can be sustained? Already, LAUS DEO, there are rumblings of discontent, and certain projects are being called into question as support falls away. Despite the pseudo-intellectual apologies for this cult/style, buildings resembling crumpled boxes, or with fronts looking as though they are sliding off in shards, cannot be justified, even using obfuscatory non-language. Nor can all the glossy pages of the journals that purport to be “architectural” (but are nothing of the sort) justify them, raising questions about trades descriptions.

“The Emperor Has No Clothes” is an old adage, but, in the sad case of Deconstructivism, it is absolutely appropriate, as the style is really nothing more than Modernism in a new guise.

Modernists, notably the Bauhäusler, aimed for the clean slate — the tabula rasa — jettisoning everything that went before. Yet, at times, they claimed links with antecedents such as the Parthenon (Jeanneret-Gris alias Le Corbusier, and company), the English Arts-and-Crafts Movement (Pevsner et. al.), and Prussian Neo-Classicism (Mies van der Rohe) to give a spurious historical ancestry to their aims and creations. Now all sorts of barmy links and precedents are being claimed for the works of Deconstructivists by Deconstructivist architects and their supporters.

As this book points out, “architects and architectural critics have become expertly adept at fancy wordplay, sounding impressive while promoting the deconstructivist style’s unnatural qualities. This linguistic dance is used to justify a meaningless architecture of fashion.” Quite so, except that to some of us, blessed with a Classical education, it does not even sound impressive. We know it is simply empty jargon, meaningless pseudo-language, and ranting drivel of the worst sort. Cults invent their own liturgies and fraudulent language. Deconstructivism is a perfect example of this.

Deconstructivism is just another phase in the creation of the inhuman world dreamed of by Modernists. That world of uninhabitable cities, incessant noise, violent and pornographic “entertainment”, destruction of natural resources, an uncivilized, dangerous, selfish population, and all other attendant horrors, is rapidly becoming a nightmare of the most ghastly kind, in which even the buildings are distorted, misshapen, and menacing.

Architects are trained nowadays to destroy: they are brainwashed into killing off living organisms such as cities, and have no feeling for old buildings other than to wreck them too. They are also trained to worship, starry-eyed, the few “star” architects who have gained favor with the arbiters of taste — the journals — so that when the stars go out or fall from the firmament, they have nothing left to worship. What is to become of them? They cannot do anything expect ape the once-fashionable and that which is passé, so (empty-headed and unskilled as they are) they really ought to be retrained to do something useful in a completely different field. Probably a mindless job — which seems to be the most common these days, and one for which the products of most architectural schools are eminently suited — is appropriate.

This book is the beginning of a long-overdue counterattack.

Professor James Stevens Curl is one of the world’s leading architectural historians, and the author of “The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture”, 1999.