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?