Deconstructivism is a late-20th-century architectural movement that fragmented and distorted geometry, producing buildings that look like elegant explosions.
Deconstructivism took its name from the 1988 'Deconstructivist Architecture' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, which gathered work by Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Bernard Tschumi. The movement drew on the fragmented Russian Constructivism of the 1920s, on the philosophical deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, and on the new computational tools that made non-orthogonal geometry buildable. Deconstructivist buildings appear to fragment, twist, and lean, refusing the clean rectangular logic of modernism. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), with its undulating titanium skin, became the movement's most influential building and triggered the so-called 'Bilbao effect' of cities commissioning landmark architecture for tourism and rebranding. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001), Zaha Hadid's MAXXI in Rome (2010), and Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003) extended the vocabulary. Critics see expensive sculptural ego; admirers see architecture finally freed from the grid.