1988 MoMA Exhibition

Mark Wigley and Philip Johnson curated the 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Deconstructivist architecture, which crystallized the movement, and brought fame and notoriety to its key practitioners. The architects presented at the exhibition were Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelblau, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. Mark Wigley wrote the accompanying essay and tried to show a common thread among the various architects whose work was usually more noted for their differences.

The projects in this exhibition mark a different sensibility, one in which the dream of pure form has been disturbed.

It is the ability to disturb our thinking about form that makes these projects deconstructive.

The show examines an episode, a point of intersection between several architects where each constructs an unsettling building by exploiting the hidden potential of modernism.
— Phillip Johnson and Mark Wigley, excerpt from the MoMA Deconstructivist Architecture catalog