"Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction",
by Nikos A. Salingaros
October 1, 2004.
Reviewer: Thrasymachus.
Nikos Salingaros' new book, "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction," has recently become available. A description is available here on Salingaros' website. I am pleased to have been sent a review copy.
The book is a collection of previously published essays, some of which were already familiar to me, given that I generally read whatever I can find of Salingaros online, but much of it was new.
The most important essay is The Derrida Virus, where Salingaros pins down Deconstruction's true nature: It is a virus, using infected hosts as carriers to spread its damaging and meaningless (beyond its own reproduction) content. Included with his The Derrida Virus essay is another important section of the book, Background Material for 'The Derrida Virus' which goes into greater detail about the exact mechanisms involved.
Elsewhere, Salingaros makes the beautiful comparison between software emulators and the effect that Deconstruction has on seemingly reasonable people. Infected individuals convincingly emulate symptoms of schizophrenia when they move to the topic of Deconstruction. When they get onto Deconstructed topics, they display a reliable simulation of brain damage.
The essays dealing with Deconstructionist Architects were some of the best. Death, Life, and Libeskind looks at Libeskind's WTC design, and compares it to his design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. For the Jewish Museum, Libeskind uses a geometry of death to create his effect, a valid commemoration of the Holocaust. Yet in the WTC design, a site meant to represent new hope and rebirth, Libeskind uses exactly the same disorientating and sickening geometry though he labels it with different words. Architectural Theory and the Work of Bernard Tschumi is another hard hitting essay, and goes along well with a look at The New Acropolis Museum.
One gets the impression that these architects have missed their true calling. They aren't meant for creation. They should be designing bombs so that they can literally deconstruct buildings.
As a non-architect, I feel that "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction" is most valuable for the vocabulary it imparts. James Kunstler once described a simple test to me. He said, "go out and try to find a building built before 1940 that is truly ugly. You'll have a hard time. After that, go out and try to find a building built after 1940 that isn't. It will be just as hard." One problem that non-architects have is describing their dissatisfaction with the built environment of today. We live in it, and have to deal with its effects every day, but we aren't trained to talk about it. Those people who are talking about it may as well be talking gibberish (and as Salingaros makes the case for, often are). Salingaros' book provides an important set of words and ideas for talking about ugly buildings, and for detecting when the experts don't know what they are talking about.
At the same time, I have some reservations about this book. In the first essay, Salingaros admits that he has been described as speaking "almost like a fanatic." And it is true that his essays seem to have that quality quite often. On the other hand, when one considers institutional purges of traditionalist architecture departments like this one, one comes to the realization that it may just take a fanatic to fight fanatics.
Salingaros' book also includes an interview with Christopher Alexander. Having read some of Christopher Alexander's works, I remain to be convinced that what they represent is an entirely new paradigm, or that his methods represent the true way of recapturing our ability to build the beautiful buildings of the past. While it is a break from pseudoscientific gibberish that seems to come out of Deconstruction, I am not at all convinced that its scientific or mathematical foundation is as well established as it needs to be to fulfill the claims made about it by Salingaros. The mathematical ideas (and I include in this published works that I have read by Salingaros, a Professor of Mathematics) have one or two interesting points, but the content is very basic. This is not damning, but considering the claims made for it, one might expect something somewhat more involved. The same goes for Alexander's science, which includes a great deal of pop-science, and lacks rigor overall. Again, one or two interesting ideas are present, but they are not as developed as they should be.
What it will take to convince me that Alexander represents something major and important is to see more examples of the actual buildings that come from Alexander's methods. I do think that there is a great deal of truth at the core of his approach, and that I have gained much from reading him, but I remain a skeptic overall.
Still, "Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction" is quite a worthwhile read. There is a foreword by James Curl and two extremely fine introductory essays by James Kalb and Michael Blowhard. Lucien Steil provides the endnote.
The book can be ordered here. The PDF version is a great value, though this may be the sort of book that you will want to read on paper instead of the screen.