"ANTI- ARCHITECTURE AND DECONSTRUCTION"

"Not another architecture student"'s very first book review.

For several weeks now, I've been reading an interesting book, recommended and included by INTBAU on their literature list. The book dealing with very important issues, written by Nikos A. Salingaros with friends. Salingaros is a mathematician and scientist who some years ago got tired of nonsensical "scientific" and "philosophical" gibberish (rather similar to the products of the brilliant and funny "Post-modernism generator") used by architects to promote their work, without really using scientific principles in their architecture.

In this book, composed of articles and essays, the author argues against what he calls the "virus" of modernism, post-modernism and deconstructivism, and its lack of organized complexity. He draws interesting parallels between the "new sciences", dealing with fractals, complexity, neural networks emergent processes and self-organization, among others. His view is that a lot of contemporary architecture just projects an image of the results of these processes onto its buildings, without really understanding or following these principles. He also argues that a lot of architects are creating "anti-architecture", because they deliberately break with the patterns of traditional knowledge in building and design, based on human sensibilities. As a replacement for anti-architecture and deconstruction, he suggests an architecture of "Reconstructivism", based on scientific research, traditional teachings and environmental psychology. He is a friend and admirer of Christopher Alexander (another scientist-gone-architectural theorist, made famous by the classic "A Pattern Language"), and elaborates on themes from Alexander, such as hierarchical complexity, human scale and connectivity. He also proposes some characteristics of an "architecture of life", and "an "architecture of death". (Guess which one Deconstructivism is.)

The book is a bit heavy, but fun to read, and would probably be rather provoking to many practising architects and architecture students, at least those who believe in an architecture completely disconnected from the past. It's also rather funny, with headlines such as "DECONSTRUCTIVE ARCHITECTURE", "EMERGENCE VERSUS DECONSTRUCTION" and "EXPLAINING THE UNLIKELY SUCCESS OF MODERNISM", followed by sentences like "Anybody who's seen "Night of the Living Dead" has seen deconstruction in action." and "I was puzzled to read an entire chapter in Jenck's book (2002b) entitled "Fractal architecture" without hardly seeing a fractal (the possible exceptions being decorative tiles).".

I miss pictures, but as I understood, the book was published on a rather small budget. I hope his next publication will have images. I'm also a bit disappointed that this kind of important literature can't be found in the bookshops, but it can be bought on Amazon for next to nothing.

I recommend this book to all architects and architecture student, as it deals with very important matters, and though the chapters sometimes seem a bit unconnected (rather ironic), it's well worth picking up on the way if you plan to at some point make a building which is to be used by people.