by Giuseppe Santonocito
Adesso l’architettura. Jacques Derrida
Scheiwiller, Milano 2008
(pp. 373, € 24,00)
In 1985, when Bernard Tschumi asked Jacques Derrida to work
with Peter Eisenman on the design of a garden for the Parc de La
Villette in Paris, the French philosopher was at the height of his international
fame but had never made a direct foray into the world of
architecture.
Derrida always appeared somewhat perplexed by the ease with
which his deconstruction schemes were seized upon outside their philosophical
framework. But in that particular case, the outcome of the
joint venture was more productive due to the theoretical impact of
Derrida’s thoughts than it was for the design consequences (the work
with Eisenman was never executed).
Pointe de Folie – Maintenant l’architecture, the essay Derrida
wrote for the occasion, was received and elaborated (not without
misinterpretations) by a group of young architects who gave rise
to a current that Philip Johnson formalised as Deconstructiviste
Architecture in a MoMA exhibition in New York in 1988.
Adesso l’architettura, the book published by Scheiwiller and edited
by Francesco Vitale, gathers a number of sporadic writings as yet
unpublished in Italian (although Pointe de Folie is missing). Covering
more than a decade, the texts effectively enable us to reconstruct the
course of Derrida’s reasoning on architecture and how it has held up
over time, nearly 25 years after that invitation for La Villette. Derrida
saw architecture as the last bastion of metaphysics, “The art that is most resistant to what counts as destabilisation
or deconstruction, because it is the
soundest art” (p. 186), and he embarked on
a systematic dismantling of its institutional
axiomatics. After all, Derrida’s deconstruction
had always focused on institutions
and, more specifically, their rethinking and
de-institution.
No differently from all the other western
institutions, to Derrida’s eyes architecture
could also be accused of having congealed
around a huge costructum, an archi-structure
of fundamental values – habitability, functionality,
monumentality and aesthetics – that
over-determine its practices like a hierarchical
canon.
For the French philosopher, deconstructing
this artefact meant questioning the priority
of practice over theory, asking architecture
to exercise thought, the first and most
important action of which was to rethink
itself.
As was typical of his elliptical and antiargumentative
style, Derrida displaced the
fundamental concepts of architecture to the
limits of their meaning, but without denying
them. He attempted to return the presumed
transcendencies (metaphysics) to a plane of
immanence where nothing is an absolute sign
and everything – including architectural lemmas
– must be reconsidered in the light of
ideas of traces, deviation, deferred worldliness,
deferral and transhumance.
Deconstructed architecture, the architecture
of the event, of non-saturation and
of incompleteness, is a thinking practice
that poses the question of space as an open
problem, without trying to control and define
it once and for all (the greatest aspiration
of modern architecture), leaving it free to
embrace all the possibilities for the future.
Careful reading of the sequences of Derrida’s considerations in
Adesso l’architettura reveals two highly interesting, albeit contradictory,
things. On one hand, we see the frequent misunderstandings
between the philosopher’s reasoning and the architects’ interpretations.
Where the former raises problems and demolishes certainties,
the latter often see solutions
and new working models (the two
texts A proposito della scrittura.
Jacques Derrida e Peter Eisenman
and Replica a Daniel Libeskind are
significant in this regard). On the
other hand, we see how Derrida’s
interpretation is extraordinarily
relevant to contemporary urban
phenomena, such as identifying
the problem of the post-political
city’s transience and the
ensuing responsibility towards
future generations that belongs
to a lasting architecture which is
“maintained” alive (maintenant).
The architecture of the next millennium,
said Derrida, can only
“maintain” itself up to its task
via the, paradoxical, concept of
abandoning the attempt to define
space. But then it would probably
also have to give up the name of
architecture.
Derrida and architecture
Adesso l’architettura. Jacques Derrida Scheiwiller, Milano 2008 (pp. 373, € 24,00) Adesso l’architettura, the book published by Scheiwiller and edited by Francesco Vitale, gathers a number of sporadic writings as yet unpublished in Italian (although Pointe de Folie is missing). Covering more than a decade, the texts effectively enable us to reconstruct the course of Derrida’s reasoning on architecture and how it has held up over time, nearly 25 years after that invitation for La Villette.
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- 04 June 2009