Digiatl Hadid book

http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/digitalhadid.htm

Post-modernism, Deconstructivism, Folding   Hegel grasped that the New in artistic and intellectual history is always consuming its immediate precursor as its defining opposite, maintaining and carrying it along like a shadow. And this shadow carries a further shadow etc., so that a cultural innovation can only be identified and appreciated by those who are able to place it within the whole historical evolution. Such appreciation therefore becomes a relative, graded and ultimately infinite act. (And it is essential for the culture of architecture to insist that a new architectural position can not be reduced to an isolated form or gesture, but  - like a scientific idea -  involves a whole network of historically cumulative assumptions and ambitions.) This process, which Hegel called sublation, is borne out by the fact that the definition of the New, e.g. of deconstructivism or folding in architecture, stretches across hundreds of magazine and book pages, broadly retracing architectural history, referencing classic as well as modernist tropes.   But  - and this is beyond the grasp of hegelian dialectic -  each time the sequence is traversed it is twisted and retro-actively realigned by current contingencies and emerging agendas. The history of (architectural) history reveals how distinctions and relative newness are redistributed, emerge and collapse under the force of current innovations and concerns, a force that thus works to a large extend against the arrow of time and this has bewitching consequences: A thought might no longer speak the language of its own beginning. As Derrida puts it  "... all is not to be thought at one go ... " and "The necessity of passing through that erased determination, the necessity of that trick of writing  is irreducible".(Derrida 1974) However easy and natural the latest innovations (layerings, deformations) might seem to us now, they did constitute radical violations of the implicit rules of architectural order and for the mainstream audience this oppositional character still dominates their perceived meaning. The innovative architect has no choice but to reckon and work with this dialectic determination by opposition or contrast. It will take time for the differences internal to the new language to emerge from the shadow of the stark difference of new vs old. One argument here is that while the current avant-garde language of architecture  -  with its incredible surge of creative energy and power, fuelled by the ongoing IT revolution, is conceptually still working out the ramifications of a series of dialectical reversals first launched by “deconstructivism”.