Jacques Derrida
French philosopher Jacques Derrida (b. 1930) has had a considerable impact on the world
of architecture. On the one hand, he has been directly involved in the actual design
process through his collaboration with Peter Eisenman on a section of the Parc de la
Villette at the instigation of Bernard Tschumi, who won the competition for the overall
project. On the other, it was he has who coined the term ‘deconstruction’, which has been
associated—very problematically—with an architectural style.
Broadly speaking, deconstruction in philosophy is a project which seeks to expose the
paradoxes and value-laden hierarchies which exist within the discourse of Western
metaphysics. In opposition to structuralism, it stresses the ‘differal’—the play and
slippage of meaning—that is always at work in the process of signification. Although
deconstruction ‘dismantles’ concepts, its links with architecture are clearly only
metaphorical. In the sense in which it is used by Derrida, deconstruction is not a style,
and has little—if anything—in common with what passes for ‘deconstruction’ in
architecture. Nonetheless it has obvious applications within the world of architecture, and
offers a powerful conceptual tool.
Within architectural circles much confusion surrounds the term ‘deconstruction’.
Derrida attempts to dispel this in the interview, ‘Architecture Where the Desire May
Live’. Here Derrida explores the possibility of a way of thinking linked to the
architectural moment. He raises the question of deconstruction, which, he observes,
‘resembles an architectural metaphor’. However, Derrida stresses that deconstruction is
not simply a technique of reversed construction. Rather it is a ‘probing’ which ‘touches
the technique itself upon the authority of the architectural metaphor, and thereby
constitutes its own architectural rhetoric’. Derrida sees architecture as a form of writing,
and hence as a way of living. He calls for a new inventive faculty of ‘architectural
difference’. Architecture must produce ‘places where desire can recognise itself, where it
can live’.
In ‘Point de Folie—maintenant l’architecture’, a dense but poetic piece of writing,
Derrida offers an incisive analysis of Bernard Tschumi’s follies at the Parc de la Villette.
In effect he reads his own philosophical project into the architectural forms. The follies
represent the instability—the play—of meaning. The red fragmented cubes of Tschumi’s
‘follies’ are seen as ‘dice’ which breathe new life into architecture. They give architecture
‘a chance’. ‘They revive, perhaps, an energy which was infinitely anaesthetised, walled-
in, buried in a common grave or sepulchral nostalgia.’ Derrida challenges the accepted
authority of external imperatives, such as economic, aesthetic or techno-utilitarian norms
in architecture. ‘These norms will be taken into account, but they will find themselves
subordinated and reinscribed...in a space where they no longer command in the final
instance.’
Finally, in ‘Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books’ Derrida documents his
own collaboration with Eisenman in the Parc de la Villette. As he illustrates, the work
was not based on a division of labour whereby Eisenman supplied the architectural forms,
and Derrida the discourse. Rather it was a process of collaboration, with Derrida
suggesting the initial idea for the architectural form, and Eisenman inventing the title,