The Construction of an exhibition within architecture culture deconstructivist architecture, The Museum of Modern Art, 1988
Abstract
The 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, was
a minor exhibition that forced architecture to change directions. The tenweek
exhibition showed ten projects by seven architects, staged in three
galleries. Polemics surrounded the exhibition. These polemics, coupled
with Johnson’s reputation and the extreme formal reduction of the show,
fueled interest within the press. The exhibition received more than double
the press of any previous architecture exhibition at MoMA and up to five
times that of the other four exhibitions within the Gerald D. Hines Interests
Program in Architecture. The timing of the exhibition was integral to its
effect. It coincided with the proliferation of architecture exhibitions and
museums across America and Europe. They reflected pluralistic and historical
positions in architecture. New technologies and the media as the message
reflected a broader cultural conditions. They entered into the production and
circulation of architecture and the exhibition. Deconstructivist Architecture
is often thought to have dealt a death knell to postmodern architecture,
despite that “there has never been a consensus as to what Post-modern
architecture is.”1 Yet beyond the beginning or end of a style or movement,
could Deconstructivist Architecture be considered instead, as Sylvia Lavin
suggests in her 1988 review of the exhibition, “as a critical methodology and
analytical strategy?