What is Deconstructivism? Gehry, Hadid and Libeskind

Deconstructivism is a movement in architecture that took its name from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1988. Its buildings break with right angles and symmetry through fractured, leaning and seemingly unstable forms. Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas are among the best-known names.

Facts

The exhibition that gave the name

In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, organised by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. It brought together seven architects: Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Bernard Tschumi.

They worked in different ways and were not a group, but their projects shared something: they broke the building's closed form into fragments, let walls lean and planes slide apart. The name combined two sources, the Russian Constructivism of the 1920s and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction.

Gehry and Bilbao

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, opened in 1997, became the movement's great popular success. The building is a collection of undulating, gleaming forms clad in thin titanium sheets that reflect the sky and the river. Gehry's office used a computer program from the aircraft industry to be able to calculate and build the complex forms.

The museum transformed a declining industrial city into a tourist destination, and since then the expression the Bilbao effect has been used of cities hoping that a spectacular building will attract visitors and investment. How often the effect can actually be repeated is debated.

Libeskind and the Jewish Museum

Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, completed in 1999 and opened to the public in 2001, shows that fractured form can carry meaning. The building has a lightning-like zigzag plan, and its zinc façade is slashed by narrow, slanting window slits like wounds.

Inside the museum there are voids that run through the whole building and that visitors cannot enter, an image of what was destroyed in the Holocaust. Here Deconstructivism's forms are used not as spectacle but to create feelings of loss and disorientation.

Hadid and Koolhaas

Zaha Hadid began with sharp, angular forms, as in a fire station for the furniture company Vitra from 1993, and later developed flowing, undulating buildings such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku and MAXXI in Rome. In 2004 she became the first woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award.

Rem Koolhaas and his office OMA designed the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, two leaning towers that meet in an overhanging angle high up. The form challenges the idea of what a skyscraper should look like and has earned the nickname “the big pants”.

How to recognise Deconstructivism

Look for buildings where few walls are vertical and few corners are right angles. Forms seem to collide or slide apart, the façade may be clad in metal that reflects the surroundings, and the windows sit at unexpected angles. The building should feel in motion, almost as if it were not finished.

The movement merges into today's parametric architecture, where computers are used to shape buildings, and into contemporary sculptural landmarks. Read more about the period on the page on contemporary architecture, and compare with the guide to Postmodern architecture.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Where was the exhibition that gave Deconstructivism its name shown in 1988?