Deconstruction and Architecture: A Brief Critique

A post-structuralist architectural sensibility would seek a dislocation or displacement of the metaphysic of architecture, an architecture that has freed itself from the 'repressions' inherent in the metaphysic of architecture<br />
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"An architect friend of mine, a former classmate now teaching at an east coast architecture school, journeyed to Chicago to attend a two day Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) regional conference on deconstruction and architecture. The official title of the conference was "Looking for America, Part II: Decentering / Dislocation," and my friend was drawn to it by some academic work that she was pursuing with regard to the post-war suburb. The conference themes of decentering and dislocation seemed to her peculiarly apt with respect to suburban America; and although my first thought was that she might be disappointed at the content of the conference, which after all had to do with the relationship of literary theory to contemporary architecture, after the conference I saw clearly that her intuition had been correct. For however "radical" the epistemological assumptions of deconstructionist theory, it has a strong affinity with the habits of mind that have produced the post-World War II American suburb. Not only has deconstruction clearly replaced Marxism as the opiate of the intellectuals; it also seems to have become, perhaps unintentionally, the ultimate intellectual justification of the privatization of modern life, the philosophical counterpart to health clubs, self help magazines, and the glorification of processes that exemplify what Alexis de Tocqueville feared 150 years ago as the rise of "individualism," and what Philip Rieff characterized in 1966 as the "triumph of the therapeutic." I suspect this is not how deconstructionists tend to see themselves, as de facto defenders of a contemporary status quo. Indeed, it is as a species of "critical theory" that the deconstructionist attitude is held in high esteem by its practitioners and admirers.<br />
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I too hold critical thinking in high regard, and am well aware of both the "constructed" nature of social reality and the contingent nature of social constructs. So it is not that deconstruction purports to be critical theory that I find problematic; it is rather the intrinsic inability of deconstruction to be critical that is problematic. Philosophy, traditionally understood, is inherently critical, because it has as its admittedly elusive goal a true and comprehensive understanding of reality. And because the proper subject matter of philosophy is everything, it follows quite logically that philosophy has implications for architecture. But deconstruction is anti-philosophy; and purporting to say nothing about reality, it would seem to follow that it would have nothing to say about architecture. That it attempts to do so is only one of what its defenders would call paradoxes, and its detractors contradictions. But perhaps deconstruction is less properly regarded as a philosophical position that has something to say about architecture than a philosophical attitude that one brings to bear upon architecture. Even this understanding is not without its inherent difficulties."