Tschumi Once More

Just when we thought all this discussion of Bernard Tschumi and Deconstructivism had fizzled out, 2Blowhards posts the 9th part of Nikos Salingaros's eight-part essay on Tschumi, his response to reactions to his paper, that I found via That Brutal Joint.



Instead of responding to specific positions in these texts Salingaros creates a dichotomy and structures his response accordingly. In his view of architecture, those that do not ascribe to a scientific view of architectural theory or an architectural framework are religious, a dialectic that parallels a similar view in science but doesn't seem appropriate to architecture. To simplify this maneuver, he contends that people (at least those interested in the debate he started) fall along the lines of Christopher Alexander or Peter Eisenman, scientific or religious.



By using this position, Salingaros conveniently falls back upon his scientific background (which most likely influenced his views on architecture), but most strikingly argues that a cult mentality exists perpetuating deconstruction as a viable theory for architecture. I would have preferred some more direct responses over this approach, because in the end I seem to have read more of the same from the previous eight posts (the essay can be read in its entirety here).



From my days in architectural undergrad, I appreciate the aspiration to apply scientific thinking to architecture - particularly environmental behavior - but the lack of its success in some ways led to the assertion that architectural theory is not objective or scientific. It also seems that if science is going to apply to architecture, it needs to do so at the level of the brain, in how we perceive and relate to our environment. The relatively small knowledge about the brain so far is a large obstacle to this application, but hopefully as we learn more about our noggins, we'll be able to apply this knowledge to how we create our environments. Until then, buildings by Tschumi and the like need to coexist beside buildings by Alexander and the like, and vice-versa. But, also, don't forget about everything in-between.