Deconstructing NYC. (Scan).

The proposals for the World Trade Center site unveiled recently by some of the world's leading architects reveal a curious state of affairs: The architecture profession's avant-garde is hopelessly mired in a failed past.

Almost all of the new proposals come out of the fashionable design movement known as "deconstruction." As implied by its name, this style aims to break down established forms into jagged, unbalanced fragments. It makes broad political claims derived from trendy French philosophy, centering on the notion that the universe is nothing more than a collection of parts. Therefore disassembly, or deconstruction, of existing institutions, ideas, and traditions is essential to solving today's problems.

Almost any scientist can tell you that this premise rests on the sheerest nonsense. If science has revealed anything in the last century, it is that the universe is a system, in which wholes are greater than the sum of their parts. Physical, chemical, biological, and ecological systems cannot possibly be understood as mere collections of fragments. There are interactive "field" effects that are critical to keeping physical structures, organisms, even cities, functioning. Life is best envisioned as a sequence of patterns, in which components merge to create new entities on a larger scale. This is repeated from the scale of atoms up to that of organisms, right into full-blown societies and ecosystems. The rich complexity of life emerges from millions of minute, complex, decentralized adaptations.

Applied to cities, the point is that urban zones are not mechanical collections of abstract forms. They are living fabrics that evolve over time. Such places work best, as Jane Jacobs taught us, when there is no tyrannical string-puller, when they, instead, grow in an almost biological process. An intelligent design philosophy must respect history and nature, and incorporate the slow, adaptive processes that brought them into being.

Alas, the "decons" get all the important details wrong. They impose the early ...