veronica critical theory paper.pdf

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Veronica Lee

Paris Program: Critical Theory

Professor Michael Loriaux

12 December 2012

A Possible Impossibility: Derrida’s Deconstruction as Architecture’s Approach

We might be tempted to speak of a new textual economy, an economy in

which we no longer have to exclude the invisible from the visible, to

oppose the temporal and the spatial, discourse, and architecture. Not that

we confuse them, but we distribute them according to another hierarchy,

a hierarchy without an ‘arché’, a memory without origin, a hierarchy

without hierarchy.

-Derrida1

Initially put to work in literary and philosophical texts, Jacques Derrida’s

deconstruction has entered the discourse of architecture, albeit problematically, as the

style or movement called Deconstructivism. The link between philosophy and

architecture is not a new one, but the link that deconstruction poses concerns a specific

analysis of architecture’s language of meaning. Bernard Tschumi’s folies at Parc de la

Villette, Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and Frank

Gehry’s Santa Monica House are three structures associated with Deconstructivism.

Despite resisting the label of a “Deconstructivist architect,” Eisenman, Tschumi, and

Gehry all create architecture that embody a deconstruction much closer to the spirit of

Derrida’s work, through their fundamental troubling of the “form/function” and

“presence/absence” hierarchies that stand as cornerstones to architectural theory.

One contested area of architectural discourse is the issue of what precisely

constitutes Deconstructivist architecture. However, this is not the right question to ask;

1 Jacques Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” in in Rethinking Architecture: A

Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Taylor & Francis C-Library, 2005) 327.



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the transformation of ‘deconstruction’ to the adjective ‘deconstructivist’ is problematic

because the adjective carries the connotations of a style, which departs from the

intentions of Derrida’s conception of deconstruction. Deconstruction is better understood

as what architecture can do, rather than what a type of architecture is. The 1988

exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at the Museum of Modern Art

entitled “Deconstructivist Architecture” does not declare Deconstructivism as a new style,

but instead as a “confluence of a few important architects’ work of the years since 1980

that shows a similar approach with very similar forms as an outcome”; however, a better

title for the exhibition would not have used the adjective “deconstructivist” but instead

the noun, “deconstruction.”2 Before its connections to architecture were established,

Derrida’s literary deconstruction meant neither a methodological technique, nor a simple

analysis. However, deconstruction is frequently categorized as Derrida’s method, an

assertion that requires several qualifications.

The word deconstruction was translated from Martin Heidegger’s destruktion and

was formed from the seemingly oppositional words “destroy” and “construct.” These

contrasting words reflect the impossibility of creating perfect structures in writing.

Derrida’s literary deconstruction, as he discusses in his book Of Grammatology,

intervenes in a text, revealing how given foundational oppositions are not as binary as

they may appear, which is a revelation that is exposed in the way that language presents

meaning. Deconstruction happens in a text through examining linguistically established

hierarchies and revealing how a privileged term inherently depends on a term that it

represses. Derrida emphasizes that the hierarchy that deconstruction tries to escape is a

2 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (Boston: Museum of Modern Art, 1988)

7.



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violent one that is “governed by idealization and debasement.”3 The hierarchy is violent

because the privileged term is taken for granted in common language to the extent that if

its elevated position were jeopardized, the whole meaning of the context in which the

opposition exists would be exposed as impure and problematic.

One possible way of posing a deconstructive intervention in the text is exposing

repressed, supplementary terms. To use supplementarity as a foray into deconstruction,

Derrida shows how the idea of a supplement deconstructs. He points out that the

definition of a supplement is an alien that was not there previously but which adds to the

whole, yet it itself is not part of the whole: “Whether it adds or substitutes itself, the

supplement is exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that

which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it.”4 This definition therefore

indicates that a supplement jeopardizes the wholeness of the thing being supplemented

because if it were whole to begin with, there would be no need for the supplement.

Supplements indicate a way into deconstruction because they reveal instability in the

term previously considered whole. One example that illustrates supplementarity is the

word, “power” in political science discourse. Power is not defined in its essence, but

instead understood as “an effect that A has on B if A gets B to do something B would not

otherwise have done”.5 In discourse, the word power is supplemented with adjectives like

“compulsory”, “institutional”, “structural”, and “productive”; in these cases, it is not the

word “power” that does the work of meaning, but instead its qualifying adjectives. For

example, the word “compulsory” supplements “power” and reveals that power depends

3 Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006) 24.

4 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997) 145.5 Michael Loriaux. Sciences Po, Paris. 11 September 2012. Lecture.



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on its supplement in order to convey meaning. Through the paradoxical definition of a

supplement, deconstruction shows how meaning in language is not pure.

Applied to architecture, deconstruction must presume that architecture functions

as a sort of writing, whose logic of meaning can be destabilized. Traditionally,

architecture has followed the law of “form follows function” in its construction and held

the values of harmony, unity, and stability. Derrida asserts that deconstruction can

happen by challenging the telos of architecture that, “architecture must have a meaning,

it must present it and, through it, signify. The signifying or symbolical value of this

meaning must direct the structure and syntax, the form and function of architecture.”

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Visual aesthetics and physical properties are architecture’s language of conveying

function as meaning. Architecture’s language also conveys its cultural meaning in terms

of “shelter, domesticity, industrial productivity, beauty, truth, and social value.”7 In

architecture, Derrida’s idea of différance is present in the ways that meaning is derived

from function. Similar to how language has sounds and written markings, architecture has

the physical construction itself; for example, the value of harmony can be conveyed by a

symmetric aesthetic design. No matter what forms the architecture’s language assume,

the meanings are always linked to the value of human function.

Architecture is traditionally anthropocentric, meaning constructed based on the

scale of human beings. Through perpetuation of visual conventions, people recognize a

door as a door and a window as a window by thinking about their functions for human

beings. Deconstruction in architecture is something that people experience; if

deconstruction happens, one must not passively take for granted architecture’s function as

6 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in

Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Taylor & Francis C-Library, 2005) 308.7 Margaret Soltan, “Architecture as a Kind of Writing” (PDF: Oxford University Press, 1991) 408.



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a tool designed by humans for humans. In other words, deconstruction in architecture

challenges anthropocentric meaning by making the viewer work to come to terms with

the meaning of architecture. In order to understand how Deconstructivism developed as

an architectural movement as inaugurated in the 1988 MoMA exhibition, one must

investigate the past architectural discourse for which it was a response.

Russian Constructivism was a movement that tried to challenge architectural

tradition through its attempts at creating structures with a truth to materials. However,

Russian Constructivism’s geometrically skewed compositions ultimately failed in their

attempts to create pure structure due to physical constraints that prevented its

materialization.8 As indicated in names of the movements themselves, Deconstructivism

responded to Constructivism with the prefix, “de” which in French means “of” or “form”

and in Latin means “un.” These layers of linguistic meaning suggest that

Deconstructivism both draws from and departs from Constructivism. Deconstructivism

takes Constructivism’s use of unconventional forms but deviates from its attempt to find

pure structure. Another movement that Deconstructivism developed as a response to was

Modernism.

The movement of Modernism pursued the goal of aesthetic or architectural

autonomy in attempt to free architecture from anthropocentrism; for example, Le

Corbusier designed buildings in hope of expressing a pure architecture that did not

presuppose human habitation. However, the distinction between ornament and structure

to function remained at the heart of Modernism, as “formal purity was associated with

functional efficiency.”9 So, Modernism kept the traditional language of architecture

8 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 15.9 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 16.



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stable through its dependence on aesthetic functionalism. The distinction between

ornament and structure would be deconstructed by Derrida’s notion of the supplement.

Modernism views ornament as a supplement, an unneeded extra, to structure. However,

Derrida’s deconstruction of the supplement shows that the supplement—ornament—

inhabits the privileged term—structure—and the former is actually a necessary part.

Deconstruction shows that there can be no such thing as a pure architecture in terms of

separating form and function, which the architect Peter Eisenman realized in his later

projects. The deconstruction of the ornament/structure dichotomy is just one example of

how architectural practice has been affected by Derrida’s literary deconstruction and his

interdisciplinary analyses; another example is Eisenman’s mobilization of the

implications of Derrida’s philosophy in the built structures themselves.

Derrida’s close relationship with Eisenman, with whom he created a submission

for Paris’s Parc de la Villette design competition in the early 1980s, reveals discussion

about the possibility of deconstruction in architecture. In his essay, “Why Peter Eisenman

Writes Such Good Books, ” Derrida describes their collaboration on their Choral Works

project, which aimed to destabilize presence and origin and therefore question

architecture’s values of representation and the aesthetic object.10

Deconstruction’s

paradoxical effect of simultaneously “destroying” and “constructing” also challenges the

nature of architecture’s physical presence in the world and the meaning of presence and

absence. To Eisenman, the paradoxical goal of architecture is to “convey its simultaneous

‘presence’ (as an existing object) and ‘absence in presence’ (those things which are

10 Jacques Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” in Rethinking Architecture : A

Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Taylor & Francis C-Library, 2005) 318.



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‘repressed’ by building and destroyed or missing).”11

In other words, architecture is a

sign that is physically present in space, but the presence of meaning that architecture has

to humans in terms of its function is not inherent in the physical object. The human

meaning is instead absently represented; Derrida says, “The sign represents the present in

its absence.”12

Although their project never materialized physically, Choral Works

mobilized philosophical discourse about Derrida’s notion of différance in architecture.

Derrida, who has written explicitly on architecture, deconstructs the boundary

between aesthetics and function in his design of Choral Works through an investigation

différance. Différance is a key notion in Derrida’s thought because it is a condition for

deconstruction. Différance is a play on the French verb différer that incorporates both

meanings of ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’ in time; it differentiates between meanings and

defers presence both in spoken and written language. Language is not meaningful in and

of itself; words are only meaningful in their connections to other words; however,

“différance is [also] the possibility of meaning or truth” because we must be able to

derive meaning despite the differences and deferrals.13 For Derrida, différance constitutes

textuality, which is the condition in which language means, signifies, and defines our

encounters with the world. Textuality refers to words, their contexts, and intertextuality,

which is the contexts of their contexts: “text has been redefined by Derrida as the

infinitely deferring movement of differentiation… [and] a heterogeneous, differential and

open field of forces.”14 Textuality, however, is not limited to language: textuality “leaves

11 Charles Jencks, “Deconstruction: The Pleasures of Absence,” in Deconstruction Omnibus Volume, ed.

Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, Andrew Benjamin (New York: Rizzoli International Publications,1990) 131.12

Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” (Mann-O’Donnell PPCT course reader 2012) 9.13

Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell , ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University

Press, 1997) 102.14 Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida 33.



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its ‘mark’ on everything—institutions, sexuality, the world web, the body… like

language, all these structures are marked by the play of differences, by the ‘spacing’ of

which différance is one of the names.”15

Derrida’s most famous statement, “there is no

outside of the text,” means that there is always context and differentiation in any system

of meaning, and the language of architecture is the system of meaning that is questioned

in Choral Works.

Derrida reveals and emphasizes différance in the project’s title to demonstrate a

deconstruction of the architectural language of a public park. In his project with

Eisenman, Derrida links the word “choral” to Plato’s “Chora” ( or Khora) in the Timaeus,

which means a receptacle, space, or interval (impossible origin); it is “an abyss, a void of

empty space, it is also an infinite play of reflections”16

and a “mother, nurse, sieve,

receptacle, impression…amorphous.”17 So, Chora is the space out of which stuff becomes,

which is in other words, an emptiness that generates. Chora is also related to Derrida’s

différance because of its complex meaning: “différance is the nameless name of this

open-ended, uncontainable, generalizable play of traces. And Khora is its sur-name.”18

The word, “choral” has many contexts, one of which is a relation to music and production

in the words chord, chorus, and choreography. Through these layers of signification,

Derrida and Eisenman inscribe musicality in their architectural project, which challenges

the consumption of architecture as a silent, static object. Choral Works’ musicality is tied

to the notions of resonance and layering, which are key themes of Derrida’s work.

Derrida’s resonance, although also related the idea of haunting phantom ideals, may

15 Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell 104.

16 Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell 84.

17 Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell 94.18 Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell 105.



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relate to the resonance of meaning to an audience or viewer in Choral Works. Resonance

and layering are articulated in architecture through the symbolic form of a musical

instrument. The musical title makes reference to their project’s shape, which is a play on

the form of a musical lyre.

Inspired by a passage in Plato’s Timaeus, Derrida’s draws a sketch of the project

that looks like a lyre and a sieve. By relating chora as a space to chora as a sieve, Derrida

attributes the sieve’s filtering quality to their architectural project.19 One interpretation of

what Choral Works may filter metaphorically are layers of meaning, including Eisenman

and Derrida’s intentions and the infinite new meanings for the site of La Villette.

However, the musical form that is not quite a literal representation of an instrument and

the différance that pervades the title dispel any one clear meaning; “the truth of Choral

Work, the truth which lyre and layer says and does and gives is not a truth: it is not

presentable, representable, totalizable; it never shows itself. It gives rise to no revelation

of presence.”20

Through its refusal to settle on one meaning, Choral Works has no

preordained function and demonstrates subversion where form does not follow function,

which is consistent with the spirit of Derrida’s deconstruction. Différance ensures that the

words’ meanings are never fully brought to presence or stably established; instead,

language is caught in a chain of supplements that defer meaning. Architecture’s

“form/function” hierarchy is deconstructed because Choral Works lack of predetermined

function requires that function be derived from form. Furthermore, the logic of function

is confronted with its own alterity, which is its symbolism. The alterity of Choral Works’

function is that the viewer who cannot understand meaning through architecture’s

19 Jacques Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books” 323.20 Jacques Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books” 325.



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traditional formal language must deduce meaning symbolically. The realization that form

is not transparent creates new possibilities for ways of meaning.

The linguistic properties in the title of Choral Works are inscribed in

architecture’s writing in space, which deconstructs architecture’s autonomy. Choral

Works connects philosophy to architecture through the notion of writing, as it “opens a

space in which two writings, the verbal and the architectural, are inscribed, the one within

the other, outside the traditional hierarchies.”21 Put a different way, the boundary between

architectural theory and architectural practice is deconstructed, resulting in a new

understanding of architecture that is not bound by dividing and categorical discourse.

Choral Works attempts to perform a multiplicity of meanings in architecture, with

an emphasis on signification’s differentiating and deferring. Although Eisenman and

Derrida’s Choral Works never materialized as the design for La Villette, their play with

différance linguistically and symbolically in visual form gave deconstruction the potential

to intervene in architecture’s language of representation. Choral Works demonstrates that

examining différance is one foray into deconstruction because the differences and

deferrals of a text’s meaning reveal how categories fail to capture a signified

unambiguously. In Choral Works, the title is the category that leaks because it equates

architecture as “chora,” which “is as ambiguous as pharmakon, something between

container and contained.22

In addition to demonstrating deconstruction in Choral Works,

Derrida asserts that Bernard Tschumi’s folies in Parc de la Villette, “put into operation a

21 Jacques Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books” 319.22 Geoffrey Broadbent, Deconstruction, a Student Guide, ed. Jorge Glusberg (London: Academy, 1991) 77.



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general dislocation... They deconstruct first of all, but not only, the semantics of

architecture” in his essay “Point de folie—maintenant l’architecture.” 23

Tschumi’s folies beat over 470 entries for the Parc de la Villette design

competition, and the deconstruction it demonstrates concentrates its focus on the

implications of différance’s spatial deferral of meaning. The park itself, now including

gardens, galleries, and promenades, is 125 acres of public space that was formerly the site

of a national meat market and slaughterhouse. Often cited as an example of

Deconstructivist architecture as in the 1988 MoMA “Deconstructivist Architecture”

exhibition, Folies does demonstrate Derrida’s deconstruction, but in its specific

intervention into the meaning of architectural space rather than through its aesthetic

qualities. Tschumi’s folies is an example of a visual manifestation of Derrida’s spirit of

deconstruction that challenges the oppositional pairs of form/function and

presence/absence.

The word, “folie” in French means madness. In his analysis, Derrida emphasizes

the plurality of madnesses in Tschumi’s project: “the folies are a common denominator,

the ‘largest common denominator’ of this ‘programmatic deconstruction’… of all that

happens to meaning when it leaves itself, alienates and dissociates itself without ever

having been subject.”24

This différance in meaning of folies perpetuates a madness of

asemantics by including folie as also related to foliage, folly, and folio.25

Deconstruction

or architecture’s meaning happens in the Parc de la Villette through the portrayal of the

madness of architecture with elements of: “step, threshold, staircase, labyrinth, hotel,

23 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintentant l’architecture” 307.

24 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 307. 25 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 312.



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hospital, wall, enclosure, edges, room, the inhabitation of the uninhabitable.”26

In naming

his project folies, Tschumi makes an assertion about his project’s meaning that

architecture can deconstruct “form follows function” in its design.

Tschumi’s design is based on three ordering systems of points, lines, and

surfaces.27

The points, called the folies, are the thirty-five red permutations of a cube

located on a grid. The system of lines consists of the pathways that are not strictly

organized like the folies. The surfaces are the green spaces in the park shaped like circles,

squares, and triangles. Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson assert in the MoMA exhibition

catalog that these three systems are individually traditional mechanisms of order, but

when Tschumi superimposes them, the layers interact and interfere in a critical kind of

play that challenges “the status of ideal forms and traditional composition.”28

Instead of

providing an easy logic for visitors to navigate the park, Tschumi’s three ordering

systems design creates madness, where the visitors must decide for themselves how to

proceed. The meaning of architecture is no longer transparent because the logic of form is

seemingly transformed into disorder; however, the architecture of Parc de la Villette does

not destroy meaning, but instead intervenes in the process of meaning.

Having read Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Marges, and Positions, Tschumi was

also in dialogue with Derrida during his designing of the folies. Derrida’s influence on

Tschumi is apparent, as Tschumi explained in an interview that he was trying to get away

from structure, form, and hierarchy in his project at La Villette.29 His attempt at escaping

hierarchy by “presenting an organizing structure that could exist independent of use, a

26 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 317.

27 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 92.

28 Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 92.29 Geoffrey Broadbent, Deconstruction, a Student Guide 66.



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structure without centre or hierarchy (hence the grid), a structure that would negate the

simplistic assumption of a causal relationship between a programme and the resulting

architecture” is compatible with the characteristics of Derrida’s deconstruction.30

In a

way, Tschumi’s structure without a center is a pictorial representation of Derrida’s

deconstruction of origin.

Tschumi’s use of a grid demonstrates a deconstruction of origin because although

a grid has no center, hierarchy or origin, each point on the grid (each folie) plays with the

issue of origin through its modifications of the cubic form. Origin is a phantom ideal for

Derrida because, “origin’ is [actually] the effect of the movement of différance, of

deferred and ‘differentiated’ meaning: the plays of language that project their supposedly

original moment.”31

To Derrida, there can be no pure origin in textuality because any

iteration always already has différance that jeopardizes exact sameness through its

possibility of repetition: “origins are open to their ‘outside’. This is the repli, or folding

over of the exterior at the heart of the interior.”32

In other words, the first iteration carries

within it the possibility of being repeated, not as exactly the same, but with a slight

differentiation, which defers the presence of the original. The spacing that occurs in

repetition also has an implication for time and the present: “an interval must separate the

present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that

constitutes it as a present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself... In

constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called

spacing, the become-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization).”33

In

30 Geoffrey Broadbent, Deconstruction, a Student Guide 69.

31 Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida 34.

32 Penelope Deutscher, How to Read Derrida 43. 33 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” (Mann-O’Donnell PPCT course reader 2012) 13.



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Tschumi’s design of Parc de la Villette, the physical spacing of the folies delays, in time,

visitors’ apprehension of meaning by preventing any understanding of organization and

by not establishing an origin. In addition to Tschumi’s deconstructive play with design,

his folies challenge the purity of form in architecture.

For Derrida, Tschumi’s folies questions the “primary signified of architecture: its

tendency to obey some ‘economy of use’ to be ‘in service’, and at the service of some

function of use.34 Instead of established function, La Villette offers ‘programmatic

instability’; each building functions as a folie and the folies themselves have no fixed and

specific uses.”

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Similar to Eisenman and Derrida’s own ambitions in Choral Work, the

folies attempt to demonstrate différance in meaning through their resistance to being

defined by function. Once again, this architectural différance enables deconstruction of

“form follows function” because the various functions that the folies may have must

comply with the folies’ forms instead of the forms complying with pre-determined

functions. According to Derrida, “Tschumi’s ‘first’ concern will no longer be to organize

space as function or in view of economic, aesthetic, epiphanic or techno-utilitarian norms.

These norms will be taken into consideration, but they will find themselves subordinated

and reinscribed in one place in the text and in a space which they no longer command in

the final instance.”36

At different points in time, Tschumi’s folies have been used as

spaces for offices, restaurants, and information centers of the park. In a sense, the folies

can be seen as visual illustrations of two characteristics of Derrida’s différance:

differentiation and deferral. Each of the red structures is each unique, but also

recognizable as a differentiation of a cube. The cubes are deferred in space, specifically


35 Geoffrey Broadbent, Deconstruction, a Student Guide 70.36 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 310.



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the grid of the La Villette. In addition to deconstructing the form/function binary, the

folies deconstruct presence/absence in architecture.

The spaces that the folies simultaneously give and occupy challenge the

distinction between presence and absence through différance. Referencing

deconstruction’s literary applications, Derrida asserts that language proposes a

spatialization by creating paths to meaning, but these paths never quite arrive at the

signified. He then draws a parallel to architecture with the idea of physical paths being

similar to language’s paths. Buildings’ paths are a key part of what makes a building be

recognized as such, and language’s paths are a “way,” or technique, which gives

language its meaning.37

This metaphorical comparison of paths between architecture and

language is only one layer of Derrida’s analysis. These paths are related to différance

because différance opposes presence in its deferral in space and time. The paths in Parc

de la Villette weave through and between the folies; just as paths in language never arrive

at meaning, the folies that the paths at Parc de la Villette lead to do not provide meaning.

The spacing of Derrida’s différance provides the instability that makes deconstruction

possible because spacing suggests intervals between presences. The intervals of these

spaces are revealed by deconstruction, and used to overturn violent hierarchies like

form/function and presence/absence that are taken for granted. Différance’s theoretical

spacing can be applied to the architectural discourse of space, presence, and dwelling.

The issue of presence in the language of architecture becomes complicated

because although architecture’s language cannot bring meaning to presence, architecture

is the physical presence of an object. The folies are like punctuation marks in the space of

37 Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live,” in Rethinking Architecture : A Reader in

Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Taylor & Francis C-Library, 2005) 302.



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the park; they are, at the same time, marks in space and marks of absence of space

between them.38 The folies are, in a sense, the representation of the infinite chain or

signifiers that are marked with spaces. Additionally, the differentiation of the folies

brings up an impossible presence of the cube as Tschumi himself articulates, “presence is

postponed and closure deferred as each permutation or combination of form shifts the

image one step ahead.”39

For Derrida, temporality is a key aspect of Tschumi’s Parc de la

Villette because permanence over time is a fundamental characteristic of architecture.

The word, “maintenant” in the title, “Point de folie- maintentant l’architecture”

reflects the importance Derrida places on time. In Part One of his essay, Derrida refuses

to translate the French word, “maintenant” to resist any singular meaning; however, its

usual translations include “now” or “currently” but also “maintaining in position” as

signified in the translation of the French phrase, “the hand that holds” (main tenant ).

Derrida is critical of the specific temporality and locus of architecture because discourse

relying on the linearity of time has created ideologies of progress.40

Derrida opposes

ideologies of progress because of their violent inscription of unstable ideals—these ideals

were the starting point for Derrida’s work with deconstruction. In Part Two, Derrida

emphasizes that architecture should not be situated in any one discipline, asserting that,

“architecture no longer defines a domain.”41

Derrida exposes différance in “maintenant,”

which destabilizes the presence of architecture.

Related to time and presence, the meaning of the architectural event is disturbed

through a deconstruction of its origin. Deconstruction intervenes in the manmade



40 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 306.41 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 306.



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technical event of architecture through the paradox of its creation: architecture requires a

building of something that did not exist before, yet this building simultaneously required

an inhabitant that needed to build it.42

The architectural event also includes what happens

to the meaning of architecture over time. Derrida emphasizes the fact that architecture is

an “artefact , a construction, a monument” with a heritage affected by “our economy, the

law of our hearth (oikos), our familial, religious, and political oikonomy, all the places of

birth and death.”43 The event of architecture is taken as natural despite its manmade

history. Derrida uses the paradox of architecture’s conception to show that architecture

can never be autonomous from the past. From the origin of the architectural event,

Derrida moves to the space in which the event takes place, which provides the setting for

a violent inscription of ideals.

Architecture’s presence derives in part from its inscription as a form of writing in

space. Architecture’s writing through building and design has transformed over time in

terms of what purpose it is serving: classical architecture was built for gods, as some

churches took the form of a cross (theocentric), later architecture became anthropocentric

in their transformation into squares and rectangles, and more recently, architecture of the

Modernist movement including projects by Le Corbusier created architecture with

axonometric designs that was supposed to be a self-referential sign, yet failed to fully

separate themselves from the meaning of being a human dwelling. One consequence of

his assertion that “there is no outside of the text,” is that, “writing is a way of living.”44

The writing of architecture is a way of living because the writing determines how

architecture functions. Derrida argues that there are four basic constant parts of

42 Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where The Desire May Live” 302.

43 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 308. 44 Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where The Desire May Live 303.



")

architecture’s inscription that govern its construction: “the experience of meaning must

be dwelling ”, “the architectural organization had to fall in line with the anamnesis of the

origin and the seating of the foundation”, which entails a concern with historicity, its

economy must be a “teleology of dwelling” that puts architecture “in service”, and “the

value of beauty, harmony and totality still reigns.”45

These four types of architectural

writing are challenged by Tschumi’s folies. In his analysis, Derrida sees a deconstructive

madness in the folies because they “destabilize meaning, the meaning of meaning, the

signifying ensemble of this power architectonics. They put in question, dislocate,

destabilize or deconstruct the edifice of this confirmation.”

46

Despite the degradation of

meaning that the folies do, they do not destroy the four traditional ways of architectural

inscription.

Derrida argues that the folies are a type of “affirmative architecture” that provides

a “space of interruption [where] architecture houses and shelters while at the same time

calling attention to sheltering, housing”; in this space, “architecture is no longer reducible

to, or explicable in terms of, the telos or end established for it.”47 If architecture cannot be

understood in terms of its function, it becomes a foreign, deconstructed text. Derrida ends

his analysis of Tschumi’s project by calling the folies, “the red cubes [that] are thrown

like the dice of architecture… that anticipate the architecture to come.”48

This unsettled

meaning is why Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette design has been categorized under the

Deconstructivist movement, although this label oversimplifies and stylizes how Derrida

himself sees deconstruction happen in the folies. Another project that demonstrates



47 Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin, What is Deconstruction (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) 42.48 Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie- maintenant l’architecture” 317.



"*

deconstruction close to the spirit of Derrida’s work is Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the

Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

Eisenman’s Wexner Center is also linked the Deconstructivist movement, but it

challenges this label by putting deconstruction to work in a different way than Tschumi’s

folies. The Wexner Center deconstructs the idealized and naturalized authority of

museum architecture. In text, deconstruction challenges words that name common sense

concepts and ideals that are particularly taken for granted in philosophical and political

discourses. Derrida is especially critical of words that are taken as the foundations of

ideologies, which include the words, “nature,” “democracy,” “nation,” “liberty,” and

“self.” In architecture, some ideals that can be deconstructed are harmony, stability,

permanence, and aesthetic autonomy. Through deconstruction, the understanding of

ideals is destabilized by revealing the ideals as phantoms lacking a secure presence in

language. Derrida’s deconstruction does not deny the existence of those ideals nor does it

propose a correction for their definitions; instead, deconstruction exposes and reverses

the hierarchies of terms in productive ways that make it possible to rethink concepts that

are taken for granted. Eisenman problematizes the ideal of architecture as an autonomous,

stable, and static structure by deconstructing the rhetoric of an exhibition space.

Before his design of the Wexner Center, Eisenman’s architectural practice

developed in response to various aesthetic movements that facilitated his move toward

deconstruction. Eisenman’s early projects, House I through House IV, sought to separate

form from function in his creation of structures that looked like architects’ cardboard

models. The term “cardboard architecture” was initially applied to the Modernist

architecture of Le Corbusier, but took on greater meaning for Eisenman as a “questioning



#+

of the nature of the relative of the physical environment”, a shifting to the conception of

form as a signal, and a concern with the actual and conceptual states of architectural

form.49

To separate form from function, for example, Eisenman rejected conventions of

meaning by placing columns where they did not bear any weight of the roof. However, he

later acknowledged that a complete separation of form and function, as he pursued in

Houses I through IV, is impossible. These projects retained the aesthetics of modernism

and its impossible goal of creating an autonomous architecture. Eisenman’s architectural

practice progressed toward the ideas of deconstruction through a self-critique, influenced

by the work of Derrida.

Pursuing similar effects of Derrida’s deconstruction, Eisenman, “destabilizes the

meaning of architectural conventions by collapsing the gap between signifiers and

signified to an absolute minimum.”50 By changing the relation between signifiers and

signified in architecture’s building, Eisenman’s structures deconstruct meaning and

challenge the binary of form and function. Instead of claiming to separate form and

function, Eisenman dislocates their relationship in the spirit of Derrida’s deconstruction

in a way that escapes binary opposition. An example of this dislocation is the Wexner

Center’s scaffolding that “remains permanent in an effort to form a situation between

completion and incompletion.”51

This intermediary stage between completion and

incompletion deconstructs the ideal of architecture as a finished, permanent product.

49 Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense: Peter Eisenman, Structuralism, and

Deconstruction” (PDF: Journal of Architectural Education, 1993) 90. 50

Constantinos V. Proimos, “Architecture: a self-referential sign or way of thought? Peter Eisenman’s

encounter with Jacques Derrida,” (PDF: Sajah, 2009) 110.51 Constantinos Proimos, “Architecture: a self-referential sign or way of thought? Peter Eisenman’s

encounter with Jacques Derrida,”110.



#"

Another ideal that Eisenman’s design deconstructs is the objective authority of museum

exhibits.

The Wexner Center contests museum architecture’s traditionally and “coercive”

role as a “veiled” institution that “function[s] as an apparatus for an ideology of aesthetic

detachment, disinterestedness, and autonomy.”52

This ideology is that museums are

discursive spaces whose logic of meaning manifests as a chronological or thematic

presentation of art that subconsciously shapes visitors’ consumption of art. The Wexner

Center challenges this ideology by using walls, grids, and glass to impede the typical

museum narration; the glassed-in grids cast shadows on the artwork at “unpredictable and

shifting angles,” which makes visitors conscious of the museum architecture possibly

even before they look at the displayed artwork.53

Indeed, even the unorthodox angles in

the shapes of the walls, corners, and ceilings intervene in visitors’ perception of the

exhibit. Essentially, “the spaces at the Wexner Center refuse to allow architecture to be a

blank receptacle or background for the work of art.”54

This effect demonstrates the spirit

of Derrida’s deconstruction because the Wexner Center makes visitors aware of the

relation between form and function and creates a new logic where the meaning of a

museum as an “invisible apparatus for ideologies” is possible through aesthetics.55

Eisenman’s use of architectural components in nonconventional fashion makes viewers

participate in the deconstruction of the meaning of architectural forms.

For Eisenman, deconstruction is possible in architecture because architecture has

a language—the language of building. In his early work, Eisenman was fascinated by the

52 Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense: Peter Eisenman, Structuralism, and

Deconstruction” 96.53

Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense…” 98.54 Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense…” 98.55 Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense…” 98.



##

idea of Saussure’s sign, and he attempted to find a connection between semiotics and

architecture. He concluded that the three parts of semiotics—semantics, syntactics, and

pragmatics—do exist in architectural language: “pragmatics relates form to function,

semantics relates form to iconography, and syntactics distinguishes between the relations

of the physical forms of space or building and the conceptual spaces of a structure.”56

In

aesthetic terms, syntactics could also be described as, the “functioning in the alignment of

doors and windows, symmetry and proportion, but always playing a secondary role to

semantics in architecture.”57

If architecture has a language, then there is a gap between

architecture’s language and its meaning. The gap that Eisenman is interested in occurs in

the syntactic dimension because of its subjugation to the semantic and pragmatic

dimensions. Another way that Eisenman’s work demonstrates deconstruction is through a

reversal of the hierarchy of meaning in architecture similar in some ways but also

departing from Tschumi’s challenging of “form follows function.”

Eisenman’s linguistic connection enabled him to create a series of rhetorical

strategies to address his concern with the tropes of centering and presence in architecture:

L-shapes to signify instability, excavation to signify a concern with temporality and past,

scaling to play with anthropocentrism in structural proportions, and topological geometry

to address geometry.58

These methods of decentering are present in many of Eisenman’s

projects including the Wexner Center, which he designed based on a shift of two grids

and he “builds the abstracted fragment of this armoury as a ruin,” which makes the past

an important narrative.59

Whereas Tschumi’s folies brought différance in presence and

56 Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense…” 91.

57 Thomas Patin, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense…” 89.

58 Charles Jencks, “Deconstruction: The Pleasures of Absence” 126.59 Charles Jencks, “Deconstruction: The Pleasures of Absence” 128.



#$

absence to play spatially, the Wexner Center enquired into différance in the semantics of

temporal presence because it engages architecture’s past forms, including the aesthetic of

Modernism. Like Derrida, Eisenman was concerned with the condition of the present and

presence in architecture:

The need to overcome presence, the need to supplement an architecture

that will always be and look like architecture, the need to break apart the

strong bond between form and function is what my architecture addresses.

It does not deny that architecture must function but rather suggests that

architecture may also function without necessarily symbolizing that

function, that the presentness of architecture is irreducible to the presence

of its functions or its signs.60

The critical change between Eisenman’s Houses I through XI and the Wexner

Center is that the distortion of form has become an integral part of the structure itself.

The attempt to escape the opposition of form and function leads Eisenman to postulate a

state of betweenness in presence where distortion becomes a possibility of the

architecture and not a failure. This betweenness called presentness is part of Eisenman’s

response to Derrida’s many questions about Eisenman’s architectural practice after their

collaboration on Choral Works. In their exchange of letters, Derrida asks Eisenman about

the relation between religion and architecture, technology’s effect on people’s conception

of space, and the relation of architecture to ethics and the problems of war, homelessness,

capitalism, and culture.61

Although he never confidently says that his architecture

60 Peter Eisenman, “Architecture: a self-referential sign or way of thought? Peter Eisenman’s encounter

with Jacques Derrida” 111. '" Constantinos Proimos, “Architecture: a self-referential sign or way of thought? Peter Eisenman’s

encounter with Jacques Derrida,”115.



#%

demonstrates Derrida’s deconstruction, Eisenman’s notion of presentness in architecture

retains deconstruction’s attempt to escape a hierarchy between presence and absence:

“presentness is the possibility of another aura in architecture, one not in the sign or in

being, but in a third condition…my architecture holds that architecture could write

something else, something other than its own traditional texts of function, structure,

meaning, and aesthetics.”62

Overlapping with what Derrida argues that architecture

should do, Eisenman asserts that: “you have to reinscribe these motifs within the work.

You can’t (or you shouldn’t) simply dismiss those values… you have to construct, so to

speak, a new space and a new form, to shape a new way of building in which those motifs

or values are reinscribed, having meanwhile lost their external hegemony.”63

Through a

qualification of Derrida’s literary deconstruction, deconstruction can potentially happen

in architecture through challenging the ideals of beauty, harmony, totality, and coherence.

Whereas Eisenman’s Wexner Center demonstrated deconstruction of form and function

in a museum, another architect, Frank Gehry, designed buildings that have become the

aesthetic of Deconstructivism.

Yet another inclusion in MoMA’s “Deconstructivist Architecture” exhibition,

Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica House in California mobilizes the ideas of Derrida’s

deconstruction despite the architect’s own rejection of the label. Derrida considers the

“hegemony of the aesthetic, of beauty, the hegemony of usefulness, of functionality, of

living, of dwelling” as architectural assumptions that can be deconstructed. Gehry’s Santa

Monica House deconstructs the boundary between form and function through its

revealing of aesthetics as a supplement in Derrida’s sense: “Derrida deconstructs

'# Peter Eisenman, “A Reply to Jacques Derrida,” (PDF: The MIT Press, 1990) 17.'$ Christopher Norris, “Jacques Derrida, In Discussion with Christopher Norris,” in What is

Deconstruction (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) 73.



#&

aesthetics by demonstrating that the constitutional possibility of form is precisely its

violation by a subversive alien, a foreign body that already inhabits the interior and

cannot be expelled without destroying its host.”64

The Santa Monica House is Gehry’s

renovation of an existing building. What makes it special is that the remains of the

original structure seem to have been distorted by strange additions. For example, Wigley

and Johnson observe that, “the structure of the rear wall, which is unprotected by the skin,

bursts and planks tumble out.”65 These planks appear to be ornaments, but are actually

functional parts of the structure. By collapsing ornament and structure into aesthetics,

Gehry’s architecture demonstrates that the supplement, aesthetics, necessarily inhabits

the structure considered whole. Similar to Eisenman’s Wexner Center and Tschumi’s

folies, Gehry’s Santa Monica House shows that the desire for an autonomous architecture

that separates form from function is an impossible ideal.

Gehry’s Santa Monica House also demonstrates a deconstruction of the ideals of

harmony and coherence. The aesthetic of Frank Gehry’s architecture, exemplified in his

Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles,

the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and the Dancing House in Prague, is

characterized by smooth wavy surfaces often with a metallic shine. Gehry’s work departs

from Constructivism’s aim for truth to materials and Modernism’s concern for

functionality; instead, it pursues a new language for architecture. The Santa Monica

House, in particular, has disjointed elements that appear to be on the verge of falling.

This semblance of instability despite structural soundness demonstrates deconstruction of

harmony because the flaws in the architectural logic are turned back on themselves,

'% Mark Wigley, “Postmortem Architecture: The Taste of Derrida,” (PDF: The MIT Press, 1987) 160. '& Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 22.



#'

which forces the creation of a new logic of meaning. This new logic consists in “zone[s]

of conflict in which stable distinctions, between inside and out, original and addition,

structure and façade, are questioned.”66

Although Gehry claims no association with the

Deconstructivist movement, his Santa Monica House distorts forms, breaking down the

assumptions of their functions. His architecture best embodies Johnson and Wigley’s

assertion that Deconstructivist architecture is a space where, “instead of form following

function, function follows deformation.”67 Crucially deviating from Deconstructivism’s

definition as an aesthetic grouping, Gehry’s architecture demonstrates the productive part

of Derrida’s deconstruction through its permanent altering of the logic of architectural

signification through form.

To clarify, Derrida’s deconstruction is not solely the subverting of the hierarchies

of ideals, but also the open-ended and non-teleological opening of new possible systems

of meaning. Deconstruction is a never-ending intervention due to différance’s infinite

reaches. Différance in the textuality of architecture’s writing is brought to play in

Eisenman and Derrida’s Choral Works, Tschumi’s folies, Eisenman’s Wexner Center,

and Gehry’s Santa Monica House. The effect of deconstruction is to open the text to its

own alterity and to pose the challenge of progressing from that point. The desired effect

is to avoid thinking in binary oppositions and strict hierarchies. Hierarchies are not

simply overturned, but escaped in a subversive way that forces the text undergoing

deconstruction to confront its différance. Deconstruction in architecture of the

oppositions of form/function and presence/absence have led to the realization that

architectural signification is just as unstable as written or spoken language, but this

'' Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 22. '( Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture 18.



#(

instability does not stop architecture from having meaning. Deconstruction is not

reductive or nihilistic; the emphasis is on the “construct” rather than the “destroy,” and

the result of deconstruction is an architecture that attempts the impossible possibility of

escaping the metaphysics of space and presence.

One of the dichotomies that Derrida deconstructs in “Architecture Where the

Desire May Live” is the separation of theory and practice in architecture, which he

dispels by arguing that architecture is not only technique but also tied to the thinking that

leads to its creation. He links architecture to philosophy through the example of

Aristotle’s “architekton,” which refers to “an art of systems, as an art therefore suitable

for the rational organization of complete branches of knowledge.”68

However, the

architekton of language inevitably remains a labyrinth because meaning is never present.

Despite the fact that philosophy aims to repress architecture as its foundational metaphor,

the “building” that metaphysics privileges and the “architecture” that aesthetics privileges

seals a contract between building and architecture in philosophy.69

The metaphorical link

between architecture and philosophy extends even further: “metaphysics is erected on the

insecurity of an absence rather than the security of a presence…its edifice is always

already inhabited by a crypt that violates it while making it possible.”70

This crypt erases

the distinction between building and architecture, allowing a discourse on metaphysics.

Deconstruction’s effort, in this sense, is to reveal a new way of architectural functioning

by acknowledging the failures in architecture’s communication of meaning.

') Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live” 301.'* Mark Wigley, “Postmortem Architecture: The Taste of Derrida” 166.(+ Mark Wigley, “Postmortem Architecture: The Taste of Derrida” 171.



#)

Critics may argue that architecture cannot demonstrate deconstruction because

architecture requires a telos of function. However, to argue that architecture’s function

prevents it from demonstrating deconstruction while asserting that there can be

deconstruction in language does not acknowledge that the point of language is to convey

meaning, which can be discerned despite the impossibility of its presence. Indeed,

deconstruction’s non-teleological aim does not oppose architecture’s function because

dwelling is what differentiates architecture from sculpture. Architecture may be bound by

structural and physical possibility, but its meanings are boundless and subject to

deconstruction. One must examine what architecture does rather than what it looks like.

Just as language can struggle against but never fully escape the pull of dialectics in order

to mean, architecture can struggle against but never really escape the force of gravity in

its construction.

Deconstruction is itself an architectural metaphor: “[Deconstruction] is not simply

the technique of an architect who knows how to deconstruct what has been constructed,

but a probing which touches upon the technique itself, upon the authority of the

architectural metaphor and thereby constitutes its own architectural rhetoric.”71

The

“putting together” and “taking apart” binary of de-construction has already been

challenged by architecture because every construction is a destruction of a space or

element that could have been. Although Deconstructivism’s definition of a categorized

aesthetic movement oversimplifies Derrida’s deconstruction, Deconstructivism labels

specific works by Tschumi, Eisenman, and Gehry that do demonstrate the spirit of

Derrida’s work by creating architecture that problematizes the distinctions between

(" Jacques Derrida, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live” 302.



#*

form/function and presence/absence oppositions. Deconstruction’s interventions in

architecture ultimately tend towards productive ambiguity in the architectural language’s

way of meaning. Perhaps comparable to a deconstructed literary text, a demonstration of

Derrida’s deconstruction in architecture would endlessly strive toward revealing a

foreignness in the language of architecture, such as the foreignness initially perceived in

Gehry’s projects.



$+

Figures

Figure 1. Derrida’s Sketch for Choral Works from Rowman Wilken; “Diagrammatology”http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/intermingled, 9 May. 2007;

Web; 12 Dec. 2012.

Figure 2. Tschumi’s folies; “Cinegram folie: la parc de la villette- paris”

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/intermingled, Web; 12 Dec.

2012.



$"

Figure 3. Tschumi- Lignes Points Surfaces; “The Uncanny and the Architecture of

Deconstruction”http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/uncanny/bartvanderstraeten.htm; Web; 12

Dec. 2012.

Figure 4. “Parc de la Villette/ Bernard Tschumi” http://www.archdaily.com/92321/ad-

classics-parc-de-la-villette-bernard-tschumi/; Web; 12 Dec. 2012.



$#

Figure 5. Wexner Center for the Arts; “Talk at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio”http://www.dinaview.com/?p=1051; Web; 12 Dec. 2012.

Figure 6. David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy Exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts;“David Smith’s Plane Geometry” http://starr-

review.blogspot.fr/2012_03_01_archive.html; Web; 12 Dec. 2012.



Figure 7. Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica House; “Gehry House”

http://openbuildings.com/buildings/gehry-house-profile-41230; Web; 12 Dec. 2012.

Figure 8. Drawing of Gehry House; “English 236”

http://transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/courses/liu/english236/materials/class18notes.html; Web; 12 Dec. 2012.

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