Gardens of Delight and Deception

Extract

In a recent issue of Building Design, a journal which every architect in Britain receives, a review of Glasgow’s Garden Festival comments that one would expect it to be about gardens but that it turns out to be also about architecture.

A few weeks earlier the Tate Gallery organised a one-day symposium on art, architecture and Deconstruction. A piece of architecture which the philosopher Jacques Derrida, inventor of Deconstruction, claims as a rare incarnation of his ideas is the Parc de la Villette in Paris, designed by the architect Bernard Tschumi with Derrida’s, and other architects’, participation. One would expect such an architectural ‘demonstration project’ to be about buildings but in fact it turns out to be also about gardens.

And both are also about science and industry.

I want to ask some questions about this conflation of buildings, gardens and technology. My argument asks whether the technique of Deconstruction is applicable, even meaningful, in the context of architecture; it ‘deconstructs’ Derrida’s writing about La Villette, and finally tries to answer the question about buildings, nature, art and technology in terms of power.

Deconstructing architecture

The best way to start the discussion is to start where Derrida starts—with language, and especially the written text. Much of Derrida’s work questions the logocentric basis of Western philosophy. That is, the idea that speech, one step away from directly perceived truth, is the pure form of argument, and the written text, one further step away, is a dangerous and second-best necessary evil, brought into being by the need to give philosophy a history.