A Paradigm of Revelation and Concealment: Deconstruction in Art and Architecture

If presence is, in the philosophy of Heidegger, a construction--a system of thought erected on stable foundations--then deconstruction (as conceptualized by Derrida, essentially as a deconstruction of Heidegger) becomes the revelation of the flaws which are concealed by and within the structure. This is revelation with the intention of making presence a contradictory condition--in Peter Eisenman's terms, a condition of in-between, which contains the possibility of absence inscribed in its present-ness. This, however, is deconstruction as philosophy or meta-philosophy, not as architecture. What then is deconstruction in architectural terms, if it can even exist in architectural terms? Architecture, almost by definition, is the creation of space--this space is not a void, it is not an absence. It is a living or energized space which shelters or houses the presence of meaning. A space of absence, in contrast, is a space of alienation; it is the uncanny or an unsheltering space or the space of a loss which cannot be imagined–traumatic space, unoccupied space, a space in which nothing can be at home, a space of homelessness. It is space as metaphor, not space as presence; and as such, it cannot be a construction. Peter Eisenman has argued that he wants to dislocate the metaphysics of architecture (architecture as an idea of shelter, as opposed to architecture as a concrete sheltering space), to create an architecture that is not a representation; it is a presence. In some of his writing, Eisenman has spoken of an attempt to free architecture from a discourse which exists apart from the building–a desire to conceptualize architecture as an "independent discourse" which makes no pretense of representing or being something other than what it is: "It [architecture] is a representation of itself, of its own values and internal experience." More recently he has spoken of architecture as a presentness, which 1