N.Y. Abuzz Over Deconstructivist Architecture

Only 9 a.m. and already 80 muggy Manhattan degrees. Opening day of “Deconstructivist Architecture” at the Museum of Modern Art. Philip Johnson, the godfather of American architecture, dawdled in galleries still closed to the public. At 82 he remains rail thin and natty.

“I’m not giving interviews for this show but--well,” smiled Johnson, foxy and avuncular with his sleek pate and black-rimed glasses. He stood surrounded by models of neat geometric buildings gone woozy and irrational. A world out of joint.

“Deconstructivist Architecture” has insiders buzzing like beleaguered wasps and art folks standing on the sidelines wondering once again just when it was that so much of the decade’s creative plasma drained from painting and sculpture into architecture.

Part of the reason for critical consternation and theoretical threnody is the exhibition’s subject. On view to Aug. 30 and not scheduled to travel, the relatively small three gallery exercise is devoted to seven architects who sabotage the idea of buildings that are cozy and pleasant or dignified and authoritative, preferring structures that are uneasy and downright subversive of the notion of the existence of perfection.

“Of course they are not really physically uncomfortable,” Johnson smiled, “They just have that look. I like to call it ‘violated perfection.’ ”

L.A.’s Frank Gehry is at the very hub of the show. His Familian House appears to disgorge its own skeleton. A Vienna rooftop remodeling by Coop Himmelblau (Blue Sky Co-op) has the aura of a well-ordered wreckage. A Daniel Libeskind residential development for the west side of the Berlin Wall seems to echo the infamous structure, tilt it up and make an apartment of it. The rest of the international group is equally discomfitting--a Frankfurt Biocenter by Peter Eisenman looks at first like a series of indecisions. A Hong Kong club by Zaha Hadid perches on a mountain like a nervous space ship. Equally odd sensations come from projects by Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas.

The whole concatenation reads like a Molotov cocktail under the hood of classic modernism but primed to blow the ornament off dominant Post-Modernist styles with their nostalgic playfulness and preppy manners. But the show would lose its impact if the had it not been brokered by Johnson, himself widely regarded as a leading Post-Modernist.

This is the same Philip Johnson who in 1932 organized “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” introducing the museum public to the purist modernism that would set the standard for nearly half a century in the work of Gropius, Mies and Corbu. Johnson himself became a renowned practitioner designing pristine examples from his own glass-box house of 1949 to Houston’s Pennzoil Place of 1978.

Then, working with John Burgee he abruptly switched to revivalism in such trademark designs as Manhattan’s AT&T; building with its huge Chippendale pediment. Now, suddenly he is into Deconstruction. What is this, some kind of double-reverse defection? Architecture’s aparatchicks are worried. What audacity. Johnson does not refer to it but he twinkles. He says he has no ideological basis for the show, only an aesthetic one. He forgets that we know he has a degree in philosophy. He is having fun. The first gallery is hung with paintings and constructions by artists of the radical Russian avant-garde of the teens and 20s of the century, abstract art at once monosyllabic and dynamic by the likes of Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitsky.

Johnson explained he had seen a correlation between their off-center use of plain geometric forms and the present group of architects setting up a link that dissolves the always artificial border between art and architecture. Not, he insisted, that these architects are theoretically united, or even necessarily acquainted either with one another or the theories behind the show.

“All artists resist categorization,” he shrugged. “Gehry does it by playing Aw Shucks, Eisenman by talking impenetrable jargon.”

Johnson insists modestly that he is only the “sponsor” of the exhibition, its real curator being 32-year-old New Zealander Mark Wigley, an architect and lecturer at Princeton who took his Ph.D. in the application to architecture of the esoteric philosophical and literary concepts of thinkers like Jacques Derrida.

“We combined my link to Russian Constructivism with Mark’s perceptions of Deconstruction and came up with the portmanteau term ‘Deconstructivist,’ but that doesn’t mean the artists are alike, it’s just a curatorial device for putting them together.

“I wish I could claim this all represented some grandiose and epochal idea like the 1932 show I did with Alfred Barr and Henry Russell Hitchcock, but it doesn’t. It is just some art I could not get off my mind after I had seen Frank Ghery’s house. I couldn’t say why it worked but it did. Maybe I’m just crazy.”

“This work may look discordant but you have to know what you are doing to bring it off. You can dress up bad Post-Modernism with superficial ornament, but not this. These are seasoned people (between 42 and 59). Younger people are impressed with them, but when they try to design in the idiom it just looks bad.”

Wigley entered, boyish and intense. Johnson retired, politely leaving the field to his collaborator. “The show is driving the Post-Modernist theorists crazy,” said Wigley, his British accent tinged with delight. “They have ignored this work for years but they all know that Philip is a great collector with a great eye who has supported many artists before they were well known. They know that if he likes this work there must be something to it.”

When Philip Johnson looks the world listens.