Mark Wigley

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Mark Antony Wigley is a New Zealand-born architect, author, and (since 2004) Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York, USA.

Wigley received both his bachelor of architecture (1979) and Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Wigley became Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Auckland in 1987. He also taught at Princeton University, from 1987 to 1999, serving also as the director of Graduate Studies at Princeton’s School of Architecture.

Wigley was awarded the Resident Fellowship, Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, 1989; International Committee of Architectural Critics (C.I.C.A.) Triennial Award for Architectural Criticism, 1990; and the Graham Foundation Grant, 1997.

In 1988, Wigley co-curated with Philip Johnson the MoMA exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture". The exhibition featured the works of seven architects, who were already well-known at the time for a style of architecture that involved in various ways 'deconstructing' conventional notions of architectural convention: Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and Coop Himmelb(l)au. The curators linked the works to the philosophical notion of Deconstruction, as espoused by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as well as the art-architectural historical precedent of Russian constructivism, and several works from this period were displayed in the exhibition. However, of the architects only Eisenman and Tschumi had acknowledged the connection to Derrida and only Hadid to Constructivism.

Mark Wigely is married to architecture historian Beatrice Colomina.

[edit] Selection of writings

"The Activist Drawing: Situationist Architectures From Constant's New Babylon to Beyond" (2001).
Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1998.
White walls, Designer Dresses: The fashioning of modern architecture, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995.
The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993.
(with Philip Johnson) Deconstructivist Architecture, MoMA, New York, Little, Brown/New York Graphic Society Books, 1988.
(edited with Catherine deZegher and Catherine de Zegher) The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 2001.