"The very idea of deconstructivism now seems hopelessly implausible"

The excess and self-indulgence of deconstructivism stand in stark contrast to the urgent existential issues facing architects today, writes Catherine Slessor as part of our series revisiting the style.

**As the love child of American architectPeter Eisenman and French semiotician Jacques Derrida, deconstructivism had its roots in an unlikely cross-fertilisation. **Yet there is an even more raunchy version of its origin story, which claims that decon was literally born in flames, sometime in the mid-80s, accompanied by Wolf Prix screeching "Architektur muss Brennen!" – "architecture must burn" – as he set fire to assorted installations in a courtyard at London's Architectural Association.

Such a genuinely incandescent incarnation was in soul-shrivelling contrast to decon's quiet, lonely death on a hillside outside Santiago de Compostela in 2013, when the municipality finally pulled the plug on Eisenman's City of Culture of Galicia, barely half-finished and four times over budget.

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Commissioned at a time of biting national austerity by regional premier Manuel Fraga – a former Franco functionary, Eisenman's competition-winning project superimposed a map of Santiago de Compostela's medieval core onto the surface of Mount Gaiás, employing software to adapt it to the hill's contours.

The hectically undulating roof forms were partly derived from the scallop shells carried by pilgrims to the shrine of St James in the city's cathedral.

Johnson deftly pulled the rug out from under Pomo and went over to the dark decon side

Strained to its formal, material and allegorical limits, Eisenman's vision of architecture as topography proved nearly impossible to build. No two windows were the same.

Back in 1988, in happier times, deconstructivism was given a formal baptism at a major MoMA show curated by Mark Wigley, with Philip Johnson hovering parasitically in the background.

Just as corporate America was getting used to the idea of pink keystones and skyscrapers with ironic Chippendale flutings, Johnson deftly pulled the rug out from under pomo and went over to the dark decon side, hucksterishly bestowing his patronage on what he regarded as the next big thing.

Built matter no longer seemed to matter; the decon manifesto could be intuited through sexed-up graphics alone

"The projects in this exhibition mark a different sensibility, one in which the dream of pure form has been disturbed. It is the ability to disturb our thinking about form that makes these projects deconstructive", Johnson and Wigley asserted in the accompanying catalogue, which featured Eisenman, Prix, Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas, all getting their freak on.

There were no photographs of actual, completed buildings, only incomprehensible drawings and shots of models. Built matter no longer seemed to matter; the decon manifesto could be intuited through sexed-up graphics alone.

The cover of the catalogue featured a drawing by Prix's studio Coop Himmelb(l)au "sent by fax", reduced to a migraine-inducing abstraction of distorted red lines on an orange background.

Back in the pre-internet era, when the fax machine represented the acme of communications technology, conduits for disseminating and discussing architecture were considerably more constrained.

Decon became the style du jour

Untroubled by the messy realities of political or social issues – climate change was still thought to be the work of alarmist hippies – architecture's rarefied, Olympian milieu was dominated almost exclusively by white male academics, curators, critics and practitioners.

Within this elite and self-regarding intelligentsia, decon became the style du jour, avidly peddled in architecture schools, museums and magazines. Its inherent formal preposterousness – "we dream of pure form disturbed" – was undoubtedly part of its avant-garde appeal.

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After the infantilising tendencies of pomo, with its pastel colour palette and cookie-cutter aesthetics, it was a relief to do sharp angles again, as architecture moved from the nursery to the torture chamber.

"The deconstructivist architect puts the pure forms of the architectural tradition on the couch and identifies the symptoms of a repressed impurity," wrote Wigley.

No major city was without the hulking conspicuousness of a Libeskind or a Gehry

"The impurity is drawn to the surface by a combination of gentle coaxing and violent torture: the form is interrogated." The seminal "New Spirit" issue of the Architectural Review from August 1986, in which AR editors discovered punk ten years too late, put it more succinctly: "Post-modernism is dead. Some have known from the start that it was no more than a painted corpse."

The decon gang were stamping vigorously on that corpse. Yet if you scroll back through deconstructivism's built legacy, you find no housing, hospitals, schools or transport infrastructure; nothing for ordinary people.

Instead, there is an abundance of posturing, theorising and showpiece art museums. No major city was without the hulking conspicuousness of a Libeskind or a Gehry.

Decon also relished being "subversive". Coop Himmelb(l)au's parasitical extension to a set of lawyers' chambers in Vienna (pictured) was the classic exemplar, erupting from a rooftop corner with the visceral shock of the embryonic xenomorph bursting out of John Hurt's chest in Alien.

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But ultimately, it was just a glorified loft conversion. And all those wilful contortions of steel and glass were a nightmare to keep clean.

Despite its professed affinity with Russian constructivism, decon could never be described as political, but in late 80s France, there was a brief alignment between decon and national identity.

As part of the Grand Projects initiative to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Tschumi won the competition to develop La Villette, originally the site of vast, Napoleonic-era slaughterhouses on the northeast edge of Paris.

Channelling Derrida, Tschumi grafted a series of disparate follies on a grid to define a new public park, effectively "deconstructing" the conventional idea of the park as a place of ordered relaxation.

By the end of the Noughties the decon gang were on sclerotic cruise control

This was, perhaps, decon's most explicit attempt at social amenity. Shamelessly pilfered from the constructivists, the bright red follies were simply objects in a landscape, publicly enjoyable on their own terms.

Yet by the end of the Noughties, as the credit crunch started to bite, Tschumi's follies were a fever dream and the decon gang were on sclerotic cruise control, radical edges long smoothed down into an anodyne, computer-generated mulch, smeared over China, Russia and the Gulf.

Johnson was dead, Eisenman was reeling in Galicia, and Libeskind was putting the finishing touches to New York's fatuous Freedom Tower, amplifying the dubious neo-con narrative of 9/11 as an attack on the freedom of the US. And nobody was burning anything in AA courtyards anymore.

In the current era, beset by far more urgent existential priorities, the very idea of decon now seems hopelessly implausible, a self-indulgent, fin de siècle explosion and stylistic hurrah, architecture's final going-down-swinging party before someone turned the lights back on.

But then again, as the decon gang will tell you, nothing succeeds like excess.

Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.

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"With Richard Rogers gone there is a melancholic sense of slow extinguishing"

The passing of British architect Richard Rogers at the age of 88 marks the loss of one of the architects who shaped the past four decades, says Catherine Slessor.

"Ciao vecchio", saidRenzo Piano, famously, when calling Richard Rogers to let him know that their fledgling practice had won the competition for the Pompidou Centre. "Are you sitting down?"

Vecchio – old man. The joke was that they were both in their late 30s – relative whippersnappers as far as architecture is concerned – but Rogers was four years older than Piano.

Now, with Rogers finally gone at 88 – molto vecchio – there is a melancholic sense of slow extinguishing, a point of light disappearing from a constellation of architects that shaped the last 40 years.

Rogers' star burned especially furiously, a stellar intensity illuminating leaden, dreary, exhausted post-war Britain. Born in Florence, scion of a cultured and well-connected Anglo-Italian family, he was transplanted to gloomy England in the late 30s, but his appetite for the food, cityscapes, atmosphere and general bella figura of mediterranean Europe remained perpetually undiminished.

Rogers' star burned especially furiously

There was no townscape problem that could not be solved by an infusion of cafe culture. An unrealised proposal to drape London's South Bank in an undulating glass roof would have had, in Rogers' view, the wholly desirable effect of blotting out the terrible English weather (and perhaps England itself) and create a microclimate, in both temperature and ambiance, approximating that of Bordeaux.

It's hardly surprising then that France, rather than England, formed a receptive crucible for the building that changed everything, the preposterous Pompidou Centre. I first saw it in 1982, when it was still relatively pristine, a hectic, eviscerated, hell-raising cenobite, gaudily flashing its candy-coloured guts to the world.

Back then, it was operating as Rogers and Piano intended, the free, zigzagging escalators bearing you skywards in a slow, ecstatic swoon to admire the best artwork of all, the aerial tableau of Paris, while in the parvis below, buskers straight out of central casting worked the crowds. Nobody actually went in.

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Decades on, this idealistic conception of civic generosity, always appealing to the better nature of the city has been lost in the paranoia of modern security and creeping privatisation of the public realm.

Moreover, like all high-tech buildings, the Pompidou's maintenance regime is an increasingly huge and Sisyphean challenge. Since it opened in 1977, the Pompidou has cost more to maintain than build, and earlier this year it was announced that it is to close for four years from 2023 for yet another mammoth overhaul.

For Rogers, however, it remains his breakthrough project, turbo-charging a career that had hitherto been confined to pottering about with houses for in-laws.

Creek Vean in Cornwall, designed with Team 4 for his then father-in-law Marcus Brumwell, who sold a Mondrian to pay for it, gave little sense of what was coming, as the confluence of Victorian engineering puissance and Archigram's provocations slowly but surely aligned.

Rogers' vision of high-tech found its moment and its niche

Untainted by associations with modernism, at that time quietly lumbering to its unlamented grave, or the emerging pastel ironies of postmodernism, Rogers' vision of high-tech found its moment and its niche, adopted as the "progressive" style du jour by banks, museums and airports.

In theory, it was neutral, agile and rational, espousing kits of parts and infinitely flexible spaces, but in practice it could be as phantasmagorically fiddly as any German rococo church, memorably exemplified by the Lloyd's building, a self–professed "cathedral of commerce".

Again, it's hard to overestimate the impact of Lloyd's when it was completed in 1986, emblematic not just of a new and daring kind of architecture, but of a City exploding in a post-Big Bang frenzy following Thatcherite deregulation.

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Though in a telling coda, the Lloyd's management insisted on retaining their 18th–century Committee Room, designed by Robert Adam for the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, reconstructed like a stage set or comfort blanket within their new high-tech home, possibly to protect against what Owen Hatherley has magisterially described as: "pure hedonism, architecture with all the crackle and complexity of a Detroit techno track".

Some sense of the distance travelled in the intervening decades can be conveniently apprehended by the Cheesegrater just across the road from Lloyd's, completed in 2014, bigger and duller, rococo fiddles long flattened out, yet still bearing the Rogers imprimatur with its perky yellow lift shafts.

Rebranded as Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, reflecting a carefully managed succession, the practice is now ensconced halfway up the Cheesegrater, an abrupt experiential contrast from its long-standing and more languorous riverside berth at Hammersmith, next to the famous River Cafe, which started life as the staff canteen. Ennobled in 1996, Rogers took the title Lord Rogers of Riverside.

An especially accomplished example of how to humanise a profoundly alienating building type

This is not an original observation, but there is a certain irony in high-tech so evangelistically espousing the advantages of industrial prefabrication and spatial flexibility, rapidly congealing into a bankable and biddable style for a limited cadre of the institutional elite.

Rogers himself was astute enough to understand this, and his mid-career output – the beehive pods of Bordeaux Law Courts and rippling manta ray roof of the Welsh Senedd – showed a certain softening and maturing of the original 'toys for the boys' aesthetic. Barajas Airport, which won the Stirling Prize in 2006, is an especially accomplished example of how to humanise a profoundly alienating building type, its chromatic structure guiding passengers through the airport labyrinth.

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By contrast, Heathrow's Terminal 5 suffered from being bogged down by a 20-year public enquiry and as a result felt stodgy and dated on its eventual completion.

Other less successful projects would have to include the Millennium Dome, a village marquee on steroids that the public has now grudgingly taken to its bosom as a concert venue, and the slick silos of luxury flats at One Hyde Park and Neo Bankside, hyper-rich blandness personified, which have all the depressing hallmarks of a large firm on cruise control.

He grasped that architecture is nothing if not a social art

Typical of his expansive approach to practice, Rogers also turned his hand to engage in policy-shaping as the London mayoral advisor between 2001 and 2008. In assorted manifestos for architecture and urbanism he made the case for sustainability and the high-density city, attempting to inculcate a sense of wider, better possibilities.

Though there were obvious contradictions in his racking up of a largely institutional client list, he grasped that architecture is nothing if not a social art.

And, as the built environment is dragged down to the level of mindless 'Building Beautiful' sloganeering and bureaucratic cheeseparing by the present Conservative administration, such a genuinely engaging and galvanising presence will be missed. Days after Rogers' death, Lloyd's ceremonial Lutine Bell was rung once, signifying the loss of a great ship. Ciao vecchio.

Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.

The photograph is courtesy of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and shows Rogers at the "London as it could be" exhibition in 1986.

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"The annual quest for a national Best in Show seems increasingly problematic"

It was the right choice to give Grafton Architects' Kingston University London this year's Stirling Prize, says Catherine Slessor, but the award is still struggling to find its purpose.

So Grafton Architects have now collected the set. Following the PritzkerArchitecture Prize and RIBA Gold Medal, the 2021 Stirling Prize has been awarded to the Town House at Kingston University London, one of the darker horses on a shortlist of frankly bewildering range and scale, encompassing everything from a featherlight wisp of a bridge to an arboreal mosque.

Grafton was certainly not the bookies' favourite – that dubious distinction went to Marks Barfield's Cambridge mosque. But in resisting the more "televisual" blandishments of Amin Taha's Clerkenwell cliff face, the wispy Tintagel bridge and the arboreal mosque, this year's Stirling jury, headed by Norman Foster - who knows a thing or two about arboreal structures – made the right choice.

Kingston feels more restrained and suburban, in keeping with its peripheral London locale

Kingston forms part of a remarkable series of buildings Grafton have designed for educational establishment from Milan to Toulouse. Arguably it's one of their more understated projects, compared with the swagger and heft of Lima's University of Technology and Engineering, with its vertiginous cat's cradle of balconies, beams and floor slabs, and the Marshall Institute for the London School of Economics, currently erupting from the south-west corner of Lincoln's Inn Fields.

It too has an arboreal structure inspired by the 17th-century stone trees in the fan-vaulted undercroft of nearby Lincoln's Inn Chapel.

By contrast, Kingston feels more restrained and suburban, in keeping with its peripheral London locale, yet still packs a visual and experiential punch with its arrangement of loggias mediating between street and building, sheltering and animating the ground plane in a gesture of civic generosity.

Grafton is greatly drawn to the idea of spatial and civic generosity, which formed the theme of their 2018 Venice Biennale under the nebulous auspices of Freespace, described as a "means of taking the emphasis off architecture as object", according to partner Yvonne Farrell.

[This] seems like the kind of building that is needed now more than ever as things falteringly get back to "normal

Yet curating a Venice Biennale is a habitually poisoned chalice and the critical consensus was that Farrell and Shelley McNamara were better architects than curators. And so it has proved.

After a pandemic year in which students have had a particularly torrid time, marooned in their bedrooms, many suffering from poor mental health, Kingston's basic ambition to provide a place in which to study, meet and hang out, while enjoying views of the city and each other seems like the kind of building that is needed now more than ever as things falteringly get back to "normal".

It is architecture as an armature for activities and interaction, civically thoughtful, formally lucid, soundly constructed, all underscored up by a concern for sustainability both now and in the long term. Though that might sound dull, it's far from it. To date, it has just lacked the catalysing presence of its student and staff users, finally out of their bedrooms and back together in real, tangible space.

Also giving expression to a social and community programme was the Cambridge mosque, but while the florid curlicues of its structure are undeniably delightful, demonstrating the expressive potential of timber, it nonetheless felt architecturally overwrought.

Carmody Groarke's collection of glum sheds in the Lake District struck a chord with readers of the Architects' Journal, who voted it their favourite, but the same practice's more workaday structure to protect Mackintosh's Hill House while it dries out, raising discussion of how to simultaneously conserve heritage while reframing it for public consumption, was surely a more compelling project.

The wispy Tintagel bridge also had its fans – and who can forget that the Millennium Bridge in Gateshead was a shock winner in 2002 – but despite being more elegant than Wilkinson Eyre's clumpy quasi-Calatrava effort, the nagging question still remains about whether a bridge can be a building. And the answer still probably has to be "no".

Which leaves the two residential projects. At one extreme was Stanton Williams' much needed decent-but-unremarkable housing for key workers; at the other, Amin Taha's manorial stone townhouse, better known for its planning imbroglio than its architecture.

Neither had the elusive imprimatur of a Stirling winner, though Peter Barber's McGrath Road scheme, which scooped the Neave Brown Award for housing, seemed like a scandalous omission from the shortlist.

Similar arts awards have been grappling very publicly with issues of relevance, diversity and purpose

Beamed live and direct from Coventry Cathedral as part of the City of Culture festivities – the phoenix metaphor was also inescapable – the awards ceremony itself was an attempt to pick up where we left off 18 months ago, with 2020 consigned to pandemic history and the RIBA awards juggernaut seemingly back on track, with table sales and a champagne sponsor.

But with the Stirling now 25 years old, the idea of the annual quest for a national "Best in Show" seems increasingly problematic. Similar arts awards – the Booker and the Turner, on which the Stirling was templated – have been grappling very publicly with issues of relevance, diversity and purpose.

The Stirling dial is being moved slightly, with the stipulation that buildings must now be in occupation for two years, rather than fresh off the catwalk, enabling, in theory, a more nuanced evaluation, but like all architectural awards programmes, it still treads a fine line between publicly championing design and being a money-making enterprise.

Grafton's win chimed with a sense of reset and responsibility

Entry to the 2022 RIBA Awards costs between £100 and £700, depending on project contract value, with the carrot and stick inducement that as well as the champagne moment of winning, a track record of awards success is seen as crucial to a practice attracting clients and getting work.

Beyond the incestuous parameters of the profession, awards such as the Stirling also reflect the wider national mood.

And in this at least, Grafton's win chimed with a sense of reset and responsibility, as architects confront not only a post-pandemic milieu, but more urgent existential threats such as the climate emergency and tower block cladding scandal. Hopefully, this sense can prevail beyond the froth of awards season. But once the champagne sponsor has packed up its tent, I wouldn't want to bet on it.

Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.

Photography is byDennis Gilbert.

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