Automated architecture: violence and nihilism as strategies of 'making' in the tactics of Coop Himmelb(Ⅰ)au

摘要

The avant-garde architectural culture of the 1980s was dominated by the movement imperfectly described as Deconstruction and celebrated in the 1988 MoMA exhibition Deconstructivist Architects. Drawing on the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida, the aim of the architects collected in the exhibition was to destabilise architecture by dismantling accepted notions of space, structure and form. Of the architects who have pursued this mode of enquiry, the Austrian partnership of Coop Himmelb(1)au represent one of the most pervasive models of interrogating space by reducing its conceptualisation to a single moment, captured in sketches and models and then, finally, in architecture. Outside architecture, artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, composers like John Cage and, more esoterically, the evolution of Industrial Punk music, all marked the emergence of this dissatisfaction with architecture and the political systems it symbolically represented. While Deconstruction became the term under which these nihilistic tendencies of 'making' were grouped, many had their genesis much earlier in the revolutionary critical practices of the 1960s in art, music and philosophy.