We can never look at fractured facades without remembering the house at 18 West 11th Street in New York, site of the Greenwich Village Explosion, caused by the accidental detonation of the Weathermen's Bomb Factory on 6 March 1970 (check the wonderful period image of Dustin Hoffman 'surveying the damage' - he was living in the street at the time). The house was rebuilt by Hardy, Holzman, Pfeiffer in 1978, with an angled, canted facade that hints strongly - perhaps too literally - at the blast that came from within the former structure. HHP recently fragmented too, a three-way architectural divorce.

In their original incarnation, the architects designed the HQ for Best Products in Richmond, Virginia. We suspect it was SITE's work for Best Products that popularised the notion of architectural deconstruction as entertainment. For SITE, the structure was the statement, not some manifestation of a laboured metaphor. Best were forward-thinking but pragmatic; they liked the returns generated by making a bigger architectural splash, but their enthusiasm tailed off as project costs rose and ennui set in.



And yet every 'ruptured' project that followed has swaddled its theatricality in a cloak of theory. HHP's 'bomb memory' facade was actually a fairly trite architectural device. By 1978, Best Products' retail experiment was peaking; while the distance between artfully constructed fake 'ruins' to the evocation of failed terrorist attack seems enormous, they were in fact closely linked. So what is deconstruction's agenda? The Deconstructivists were, in part, railing against modernist orthodoxy, just as their initial allies (and later bitter enemies), the post-modernists. While po-mo took the literal, narrative path, decon went down an abstract, emotive route.

As Mark Wigley wrote in the catalogue to MoMA's 1988 show Deconstructivist Architecture, this was work 'ability to disturb our thinking about form'. And form, obligingly rolled over and collapsed, sagging dramatically under the weight of computation. A recent proposal cemented our thoughts about 'implosion architecture's' essential dishonesty, Morphosis' design for the Cooper Union's Albert Nerken School of Engineering. This is a building which appears to have burst its front - even the section view appears to describe a progressive collapse, with floor plates colliding and twisting. Compared to the slashed plan and facade created by Libeskind in Berlin, or the lime slice explosion that is Lab Architecture's Federation Square development in Melbourne, the Morphosis project appears to monumentalise an unknown event. Nonetheless, it still carries with it the rather drab shadow of innovation for innovation's sake.

What happened to the Best Stores? Most were swept away. The Indeterminate Facade suffered the post-modern indignity of being turned from a ruin into a plain box. The fractured facades of 21st century deconstruction will, perhaps inevitably, suffer a similar fate.



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A is for Architecture, a weblog / artist Ben Wilson's Wireframe Lamborghini / Miles Thistlethwaite previously painted some Washing Line Portraits (our gallery here). Now he's moved on to Paper Bags. We also love the Chetwynd Road series. posted by things at 08:00 / 0 comments