About the Author

Jennifer Konrad

E-Mail: jekonrad@uni-mainz.de

Jennifer Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Art History Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg University, specializing in 20th and 21st century architecture. She studied art history, ethnology, and law in Mainz and Dijon (2009–2015). Her dissertation, Architecture as Visual Disruption: The Relationship Between Building Form and Perception in Deconstructivism, was awarded summa cum laude. From 2017 to 2020, Konrad held a scholarship from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and was a junior member of the Gutenberg Academy Fellows Programme (2018–2020). She is a founding member of the architectural project group “Die Betonisten,” which addressed postwar modern architecture and sustainability and has received several awards.

Contributions by Author: Jennifer Konrad

Disruptive Paradox

Deconstructive Architecture and its Subversive Power

Since the 1980s, deconstructivist architecture has attracted attention with its radical de-parture from orthogonal structures and its aesthetic boldness. As a provocative counter-model to traditional building regulations, it has sparked a lasting discourse on form and meaning in architectural theory. But precisely because of their exceptional forms and broken angles, the architects were quickly dismissed by many critics as attention-seeking and purely provocative. Even as the term ‘deconstructivist’ was emerging in in the field of architecture, the prevailing opinion was that architects had nothing to do with the philosophy of deconstruction…