“Derrida.... asked me why architects should be interested in his work, since, he observed, ‘deconstruction is anti‐form, antihierarchy, anti‐structure – the opposite of all architecture
stands for.’ ‘Precisely for this reason,’ was my response” ( Bernard Tschumi)


Who is Jacque Derrida (1930 – 2004) ?
He is a philospher who works on the borders of concepts not to show oppositions but to show that concepts spill over one another, as soon as concepts are contaminated with that which is considered exterior or opposite to them, they are no longer what they are or what we thought they are.


Deconstruction in Architecture (Notes and How to) :

• Using the ambiguity of poststructuralism to create works of ambiguity and scandal
• Revolting against modernism
• Advocating acontextualism and creating an architecture that would undo the notion of a
building into a solid physical object
• Acontextualism: removed the building from its context
• Deconstruction: removes the building from itself


What does Poststructuralism entitle : 
• It is an an attack on structuralism
• The text is an independent structure that could be studied independently of an authorial intention
• The elimination of the author from the text
• Writing is a compliment to speech that threatens to carry meanings from the author to a place where he has no control over it
• There is no ONE meaning, instead there are READINGS
• There are no truths
• The practice of an art contains its theory, not as truth, but as a filter through which the work can be seen
• Studies the tension between the writer’s desire to establish meaning and language’s ability to escape his control.


Background and influences of Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: 
• Departure of religious faith
• Cultural pluralism
• Nietzsche: Absurdity of the world, nostalgia, passion
• Freud: the human self as a fragmented entity strange to itself
• Derrida: changes in the perception of the human condition made it impossible to construct coherent creations

Who is Bernard Tschumi :
 (born 25 January 1944 in Lausanne, Switzerland) is an architect, writer, and educator, commonly associated with deconstructivism. Son of the well-known Swiss architect Jean Tschumi and a French mother, Tschumi is a dual French-Swiss national who works and lives in New York City and Paris. He studied in Paris and at ETH in Zurich, where he received his degree in architecture in 1969.
-wikipedia


Architecture and Limits I, II, III – Bernard Tschumi (1980‐81)
Works at the limits :

• There are productions at the limits of literature, music, theatre and architecture
• These positions inform us about the state of art, its paradoxes, and its contradictions
• They are a luxury in the field of knowledge
• These works of the limit provide isolated episodes amidst the mainstream of commercial architectural production
• The twentieth century has dropped the Vitruvian triology and moved to more radical questions at the limits
• Appearance was replaced for linguistic theory in architecture
• Structure and materiality is no longer an issue since anything can be built using modern technology
• Functionalism has been replaced by the relationship of the body to the building, senses, movement,Building and architecture
• Architecture does not exist without drawings, buildings do
• Architecture goes beyond the process of building
• There are unbuilt architectural projects (not buildings) that inform us about the state of architecture more than the buildings of their time
• Building is about usefulness, architecture is not necessarily soArchitecture and art
• Architectural drawings refer to something outside themselves
• Art paintings refer to themselves
• Criticises historians for dismissing some works as being “paper architecture” and as art
• These works are the strategic areas of architecture and they decide its direction
• Architecture does not need to adhere to any norms (linguistic, material, structural) but can distort
them all
• Rejection implies fear of change


Notes Toward a Theory of Architectural Disjunction – Bernard Tschumi (1988) :

Order:
• Questions the notion of unity
• No beginning and no end
• Repetitions, distortions, superimpositions

• Challenges the idea of order

Limits:
• Derrida’s work at the limits 
• The act of making architecture and not architecture itself

Disjunction:
• It is not a concept, rather an effect
• Its implies limits and interruptions
• Superimpositions and repetition
• At no moment can any part become a totality, each part leads to the other




“The concept of disjunction is incompatible with a static, autonomous, structural view of architecture. But it is not anti‐autonomy or antistructure; it simply implies constant, mechanical operations that systematically produce dissociation (Derrida would call it differance) in space and time, where an architectural element only functions by colliding with a programmatic element, with the movement of bodies or whatever. In this manner, disjunction becomes a systematic and
theoretical tool for the making of architecture.” (Tschumi)





                                                                                                                                                                   
References :
Google Image search | Tschumi Sketches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Tschumi
https://www.archdaily.com/548021/bernard-tschumi-on-his-education-work-and-writings/541468abc07a80f112000076-bernard-tschumi-on-his-education-work-and-writings-image
http://www.tschumi.com/projects/featured/
http://traac.info/blog/?p=907
Book : Architecture and Limits I, II, III – Bernard Tschumi (1980‐81) http://www.tschumi.com/publications/35/

Get the Book on Amazon: