The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt

by Mark Wigley

Nowhere, Mark Wigley asserts, are the stakes higher for deconstruction than in architecture - architecture is the Achilles' heel of deconstructive discourse, the point of vulnerability upon which all of its arguments -depend. In this book Wigley redefines the question of deconstruction and architecture. By locating the architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, he opens up more radical possibilities for both architecture and deconstruction, offering a way of rethinking the institution of architecture while using architecture to rethink deconstructive discourse.

Wigley relentlessly tracks the tacit argument about architecture embedded within Jacques Derrida's discourse, a curious line of argument that passes through each of the philosopher's texts. He argues that this seemingly tenuous thread actually binds those texts, acting as their source of strength but also their point of greatest weakness. Derrida's work is seen to render architecture at once more complex, uncanny, pervasive, unstable, brutal, enigmatic, and devious, if not insidious, while needing itself to be subjected to an architectural interrogation.

Wigley provocatively turns Derrida's reading strategy back on his texts to expose the architectural dimension of their central notions like law, economy, writing, place, domestication, translation, vomit, spacing, laughter, and dance. Along the way he highlights new aspects of the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida, explores the structural role of ornament and the elusive architecture of haunting, while presenting a fascinating account of the institutional politics of architecture.

Mark Wigley is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Princeton University.

Genres: Architecture, Philosophy

296 pages, Hardcover

First published September 21, 1993

About the author

Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus at Columbia GSAPP. He served as Dean from 2004 to 2014. Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture and is the author of Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998); White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995); and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993). He co-edited The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationalist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001).

In 2005 he co-founded Volume magazine with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman as a collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO (Rotterdam), and C-lab (Columbia University). Wigley curated the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at The Museum of Modern Art, and others at The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam.

Mark Wigley was awarded the Resident Fellowship, Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism (1989), International Committee of Architectural Critics (C.I.C.A.) Triennial Award for Architectural Criticism (1990) and a Graham Foundation Gran (1997). He received both his Bachelor of Architecture (1979) and his Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I haven't actually finished this yet. 12 more pages, so any week now. Yeah, I love to read Wigley reading Derrida reading Heidegger reading Kant as much as the next guy...well, no i don't (and neither does he). I suspect for you acidic post-structuralist types, this is great stuff. It seems well conceived and realized, with jazzy little title names ("Doing the Twist"). i will share a quote from one of the few lines that does not include someone else's quote (from my favorite chapter "Spaced Out," on page 69 - also my favorite), Wigley writes, "Inasmuch as space is not a static receptacle of inscriptions but an effect of ongoing inscription, what the tradition attempts to subordinate is not so much space as the gesture of inscription that produces space." I could probably figure out whatever it is that he's talking about, but when "inscription" turns up more than once in any given sentence then all bets are off. I'm going to read a damn baseball book on my commutes from now on!

[Gloria · Rating 2 out of 5]

wigley is a smarty pants

[Hank Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Logic, space, structure, gender and politics, media... and some radical possibilities about morphological structure and metaphor ... and the reexaminations of traditional architecture and philosophy and particularly deconstructive theory and Jacques Derrida ideas... still working through this one... ..

[Windry · Rating 3 out of 5]

jadi, dosen saya kerap menganalogikan arsitektur dekosntruksi seperti tahu mentah yang dipotong-potong acak dengan garpu lalu disusun lagi *ngga nyambung mode on*