Decomposition and Restoration
2018, Yongzhou
Deconstruction is a concept belongs to the post modernism, which breaks and subverts the styles for the composition of a picture such as representationalism, symmetry and static. It is a consideration and discussion about the speed, space, and time. In this project, when a building has been divorced from the metaphor, symbol and properties etc., it only presents a visual reconstruction of a plane combination. The art historian Stephen Melville had discussed the significance of deconstruction on the research in visual objects. He pointed out, “The question about the object being deconstructed and used to deconstruct is not a question of what the object is, but a question about how it becomes an object of deconstruction.”
A building is based on its material structure and is an integral part of the structure. And the building space has a nature of spirituality, acting as the carrier for spirits. Le Corbusier believed, “Architecture is an act of art, a kind of emotional phenomenon, and it is beyond construction.” (2) However, towards such a spatial combination of spirit and material, I intended to peel off its social cultural attribute, break the multidimensional structure within the construction network, and eliminate its spatial nature. Based on this idea, at the boundary between abstract and representational building, the German photographer Julian Schulze has restored the building into the state of the basic unit through the processing of colors, lights, and composition, making three-dimensional space be a two-dimensional one.
When a geometrically abstracted structure with characteristics of pure forms is broken down by the visual angles under the condition of an accident and then recombined, we can see the allosteric relationship among these basic elements such as shape, line, and color which constitute the image. Like the order and balance in the works of Piet Mondrian, the creator refused to give context or functionality to the creation object, letting it in a state of “being absent”. The Australian modernistic painter Ralph Balson absorbed the geometric constructive approach advocating among the French Cubism, and used the straight-line to constitute a plane geometric abstraction, which to some extent echoed the abstract concept of Mondrian.
Deconstructing the stacks, changes, and interpenetrations in today's multidimensional space into plane schematic structure - this kind of returning to the two-dimensional space is called “restoration”. Though the deconstructivism of that time had eliminated the integrality anduniformity of the building, when we are standing in the angle of contemporary deconstruction to restore the building, its nature and the concept will be no longer the same. In my opinion, the deconstruction in architecture is a process of decomposition and restoration.
1「Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism」（1986）——Stephen Melville
2 「vers une architecture」（2004）——Le Corbusier