Andrew Benjamin

From 1975 to 1990, publisher Andreas Papadakis put out many books on architecture and even more issues of Architectural Design, Art & Design, and other journals. He embraced many styles at the time, primarily Postmodernism and Deconstructivism, or Deconstruction. The latter "style," made most famous in the 1988 MoMA exhibition, Deconstructivist Architecture, was explored by Papadakis in numerous publications in the late 1980s, many of them devoured by me in the architecture school library in the early 1990s. Most hefty -- both in terms of size and intellectual heft -- is this omnibus volume of projects, texts and interviews, many of them previously published in AD and Art & Design.

The volume is split into four parts: Constructivist Origins, Theory and Philosophy, Deconstruction and Art, and Deconstruction and Architecture. While the first two parts were important for giving Decon some sort of theoretical background at the time, especially in regards to the writings of Jacques Derrida, it's the fourth part where architects (myself included) gravitated. Here are essays by Charles Jencks and Mark Wigley and projects by Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, and other architects, even ones no longer associated with Deconstruction. Nearly 30 years after its publication (and ten years after the death of Papadakis), this omnibus is an important snapshot of a transitional period in postmodern architecture but also a symbol of one publisher's strong embrace of the theories and works of architects before they were famous.… (altro)