378 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
be abandoned, mainly for budgetary reasons. And all that eventu-
ally remained was a book, Chora L Works, which traced the stages
of their collaboration. But Derrida was far from fi nished with
architecture. Though it rather twisted some of his ideas, a decon-
structivist trend soon emerged in architecture, proposing a strange
synthesis of Derridean deconstruction and Russian constructivism.
In 1988, Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley set up an exhibition at
MoMA in New York, bringing together a series of top architects
- Zaha Hahid, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas,
Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and the Austrian agency Coop-
Himmelb(l)au – under the rubric ‘Deconstructive Architecture’.
Although Derrida was not involved, the reaction of the French
press was negative. Jean-Pierre Le Dantec wrote that Derrida had
been ‘vampirized by a coterie’, and Jean-Louis Cohen refl ected
that, rather than being a matter of theory, ‘this coupling of Russian
avant-gardes and the French philosopher seems more to fall under
teratology, or the science of monsters’.^67