DECONSTRUCTION AND ARCHITECTURE: A BRIEF CRITIQUE "Good or Evil: you cannot build your life apart from this distinction."                                 --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn   An architect friend of mine, a former classmate now teaching at an east coast architecture school, journeyed to Chicago to attend a two day Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) regional conference on deconstruction and architecture. The official title of the conference was "Looking for America, Part II: Decentering / Dislocation," and my friend was drawn to it by some academic work that she was pursuing with regard to the post-war suburb. The conference themes of decentering and dislocation seemed to her peculiarly apt with respect to suburban America; and although my first thought was that she might be disappointed at the content of the conference, which after all had to do with the relationship of literary theory to contemporary architecture, after the conference I saw clearly that her intuition had been correct. For however "radical" the epistemological assumptions of deconstructionist theory, it has a strong affinity with the habits of mind that have produced the post-World War II American suburb. Not only has deconstruction clearly replaced Marxism as the opiate of the intellectuals; it also seems to have become, perhaps unintentionally, the ultimate intellectual justification of the privatization of modern life, the philosophical counterpart to health clubs, self help magazines, and the glorification of processes that exemplify what Alexis de Tocqueville feared 150 years ago as the rise of "individualism," and what Philip Rieff characterized in 1966 as the "triumph of the therapeutic." I suspect this is not how deconstructionists tend to see themselves, as de facto defenders of a contemporary status quo. Indeed, it is as a species of "critical theory" that the deconstructionist attitude is held in high esteem by its practitioners and admirers.
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