to conceive for itself the idea of construction. One could say that there is nothing
more architectural than deconstruction but also nothing less architectural.
Architectural thinking can only be deconstructive in the following sense: as an
attempt to visualize that which establishes the authority of the architectural
concatenation in philosophy. From this point we can go back to what connects
deconstruction with writing: its spatiality, thinking in terms of a path, of the opening
up of a way which—without knowing where it will lead to—inscribes its traces.
Looking at it like that, one can say that the opening up of a path is a writing which
cannot be attributed to either man or God or animal since it designates in its widest
sense the place from which this classification—man/God/animal—can take shape.
This writing is truly like a labyrinth since it has neither beginning nor end. One is
always on the move. The opposition between time and space, between the time of
speech and the space of the temple or the house has no longer any sense. One lives in
writing. Writing is a way of living.
EM At this point I would like to bring into play the forms of writing of the architect
himself. Since the introduction of the orthogonal projection, ground plan and sectional
drawings have become the primary means of notation in architecture. They also
provide the principles according to which architecture is defined. Looking at floor
plans by Palladio, Bramante, Scamozzi, one can read the transition from a theocentric
to an anthropocentric world view in that the shape of the cross opens up increasingly
in platonic squares and rectangles to be finally totally resolved in them. Modernism,
on the other hand, distinguishes itself by a criticism of this humanistic position. Le
Corbusier’s Maison Domino is an example of this: a new type of construction made of
cubic elements with a flat roof and large windows rationally articulated without any
constructional ornaments. In short, an architecture which no longer represents man but
which—as Peter Eisenman puts it—becomes a self-referential sign. A self-explanatory
architecture gives information on what is inherent in itself. It reflects a fundamentally
new relationship between man and object, house and inhabitants. One possibility of
representing such an architecture is axonometry: a guide to the reading of a building
which doesn’t presuppose its habitability. It seems to me that this self-reflection of
architecture within architecture shows a development which can be connected with
your work on deconstruction because of its starting point which is deeply critical of
methodology and therefore also of philosophic nature. If the house in which one feels
‘at home’ becomes open to imitation and intrudes upon reality then a changed concept
of building has been introduced, not as an application but as a condition of thinking.
Would it be conceivable that the theocentric and the anthropocentric world view,
together with its ‘being a place’, could be transformed into a new and more diversified
network of references?
JD What emerges here can be grasped as the opening of architecture, as the beginning of
a non-representative architecture. In this context it might be interesting to recall the
fact that at the outset architecture was not an art of representation, whereas painting,
drawing and sculpture can always imitate something which is supposed to already
exist. I would like to remind you once more of Heidegger and above all of the ‘Origin
of the Work of Art’ in which he refers to the ‘Riβ’ (rip-break-up drawings). It is a
‘Riβ’ which should be thought of in its original sense independently of modifications
such as ‘Grundriβ’ (ground plan), ‘Aufriβ’ (vertical section), ‘Skizze’ (draft). In
Jacques Derrida 303