Deconstructivism

Paris, 1982. The city holds a competition for a park on the old slaughterhouse grounds at La Villette. Bernard Tschumi wins. He scatters red pavilions across the grass, as if someone has dropped a construction kit.

Then comes the exhibition. In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York shows Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. Seven names: Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelb(l)au and Tschumi. A movement has a name.

The name is borrowed in two parts. From Russian Constructivism come the tilted planes and flying beams. From the philosopher Jacques Derrida comes the word deconstruction – taking apart the obvious. But the style doesn't look broken by accident. Every slanted wall is calculated.

The 1990s bring the breakthrough. Zaha Hadid's fire station for Vitra is finished in 1993, like a bundle of concrete blades. In Prague a house dances on the embankment in 1996. The year after, the Guggenheim Museum opens in Bilbao, clad in thin titanium – and a whole city gets a new face. In Berlin, Libeskind's Jewish Museum zigzags like lightning, with voids that cut straight through the building.

Was it even a style? The architects themselves often said no. But the form is unmistakable.

Postmodernism. Both break with Modernism, but in different ways. Postmodernism quotes history – columns, pediments, colour. Deconstructivism quotes nothing; it takes the form itself apart.