Deconstructivism

Deconstructivist buildings are broken into separate, angled pieces. Walls tilt away from vertical, volumes appear to cut into one another, and windows and grids are set at skewed angles instead of in regular rows. Exteriors are often clad in sheets of titanium, zinc or stainless steel, curved or folded over irregular steel frames. Frank Gehry's office modeled its curved forms with CATIA, software developed for designing aircraft.

Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain (1997) is clad in titanium panels, and his Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) in stainless steel. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin (completed 1999) has a zigzag plan and zinc cladding, cut through by tall, empty concrete shafts he called voids. Zaha Hadid's first built work, the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1993), is a set of sharply angled concrete planes. Postmodern buildings of the same years borrowed columns, arches and other historical ornament; Deconstructivist buildings use none.

The name comes from Deconstructivist Architecture, a 1988 exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. It showed seven architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Bernard Tschumi. Their sources included the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction and the angled compositions of Russian avant-garde artists of the 1910s and 1920s, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. Earlier work in the same direction included Gehry's remodeling of his own house in Santa Monica (1978) and Tschumi's winning 1982 competition design for the Parc de la Villette in Paris.

Eisenman's Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, opened in 1989. Through the 1990s and 2000s the architects from the exhibition built large museums, concert halls and libraries, including Gehry and Vlado Milunić's Dancing House in Prague (1996) and Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library (2004). The number of visitors the Guggenheim Bilbao drew after 1997 gave rise to the term "Bilbao effect" for cities commissioning landmark buildings to attract tourism.