Frank Gehry to Design a Building in Sydney - Page 3

Originally Posted by StephenHero

It's actually pretty easy to understand when you strip it down. Here's an example. Imagine the archetypal house form below which has a longstanding cultural precedent. If you were to ask kids to draw a house, they'd draw one like this below. But if they had never seen a house and you described what its purpose was and then asked them to draw one, they probably would not draw this form. Their drawings would reflect all they knew about a house through the description. Their mind has been influenced by the formal meaning of "house" to coincide with the examples of houses they've seen. Deconstructivists see this as a compromise of the architect's purpose to design better buildings. To the same extent, architects have historically designed houses according to that form, while largely neglecting the purpose of the house. It's a mechanical reaction that ignores designing a better experience. Deconstructivists simply try to reinterpret conventional associations between architectural elements. So instead of a floor that is connected to the wall perpendicularily with two windows cut out, could the wall be separated from the floor and elevated above eye level to create an expansive void instead of the windows? Or instead of a ceiling attached to the wall, could the ceiling be held up above the wall to allow a gap for light to enter? Basically they just attempt to explode hermetic conventional forms into more fluid, transparent, and abstract buildings that hopefully provide richer experiences inside. Instead of designing intuitively with subconscious influences like classical houses, they try to design analytically. But of course it doesn't always work and there are some really bad Deconstructivist cases. But you can catch the drift in these two images from Peter Eisenmann.