Smashing Design : Architecture: Jumbled walls, zigzag roofs? L.A.’s first taste of Deconstructivism is soon to be seen on Melrose Avenue.

Come 1992, passers-by may be startled by the structure at Melrose Avenue and Alta Vista Boulevard. At first glance, it may look like an architectural smash-up with its jumbled walls, crazy zigzag roofs, teetering towers and steel piers flying off at all angles.

But these sights will be carefully considered parts of Melrose One, a new shopping center with a groundbreaking set for this fall. It will be Los Angeles’ first truly Deconstructivist building.

Deconstructivism, an extreme twist in the post-Modernist evolution of architecture, is a highly mannered search for meaning that upends established rules of design.

The plans for Melrose One initially may seem the work of a demented designer following his own mad logic--a logic that sets out to confuse settled notions of buildings as straight up-and-down structures.

But there is nothing accidental about Melrose One’s apparent logical confusion.

Designed by architect Wolf Prix of the Viennese firm of Coop Himmelblau for West Coast Investments, Melrose One--which will include a restaurant, a champagne bar, a bookshop and a dress boutique--is a dramatic example of the latest explosion in the architectural style wars.

Deconstructivism, celebrated in a trend-setting 1988 show mounted by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is defined as a fusion of destruction and Constructivism .

The Deconstructivists draw on the powerful, popular imagery expressed by Russian Constructivists in the 1920s. Such populist imagery is strongly influenced by a profound disillusion with Modernist architecture, in particular, and with the whole notion of “progress,” in general.

Where Russian Constructivism was socially concerned and essentially optimistic, Deconstructivism is pessimistic in its conviction that contemporary life has as much potential for destruction as creation.

Writing of Coop Himmelblau’s 1985 Deconstructivist rooftop remodeling of a traditional Viennese attic, the MOMA catalogue essay described “a form that has been distorted by some alien organism, a writhing, disruptive animal breaking through (so that) the roof splits, shears and buckles.”

Yet, as the essay stresses, this radical distortion of standard architectural forms is intended as a revitalization of stale styles: “What is finally so unsettling about such work is precisely that the form not only survives its torture, but appears all the stronger for it.”

Prix, an architect who opened a branch office in West Los Angeles in 1988, explained his Melrose One intentions more simply, saying: “I want to destroy the boxy shape that imprisons the typical Melrose Avenue building. I want to break open the box, slice it, tilt it, mix it all up. Out of this apparent destruction, a new form emerges.”

He calls his Melrose One design “a parody of the box”--a parody “that makes you think about the nature of architectural boxes, in general, and why we’ve allowed ourselves to be trapped in them for so long.”

By creating his artful parody, he hopes his building will be “memorable.”

“As they walk or drive down the avenue, people will see the normal panorama of the street disturbed,” Prix said. “They will take notice. They will know they’re entering a special place--the distinctive Melrose district. They will be forced to see rather than just look.”

Melrose Avenue is the perfect place for an exercise in Deconstructivism, Prix said. The Melrose transformation of a typical Angeleno commercial strip into a fashionable parade ground is, in itself, an expression of a maturing city’s desire to “break out of its box” of boring streets lined with undistinguished one- and two-story shops and stores.

Despite its eccentricity, Melrose One employs standard, local building materials. The zigzag roofs that float freely over its jumbled shapes are folded sheet metal; metal poles thrust at angles support the roof; stucco and wood sheath the tilted walls.

The “flying” roofs are vital elements in the composition, what Prix calls its “fifth facade.” Their seeming confusion acts as a splintered, yet sheltering umbrella for the complex composition below. There, the walls collide or shoot past one another as if on their way to someplace else.

The glass-walled champagne bar that dominates the corner of Melrose and Alta Vista is framed in lightweight steel. The bar includes a private room set on an elevator platform. Parties that rent it can decide just how high up the tower they would like to be to overlook the street below.

In all their designs, from the remodeling of Vienna’s Ronacher Theatre to plans for the new town of Melun-Senart outside Paris, Coop Himmelblau’s architects say they strive for an intuitive response that allows them to “deconstruct” the obvious.

Avoiding the usual two-stage process by which architects first analyze, then solve a building program, Coop Himmelblau designers scribble preliminary ideas on scraps of tracing paper without prior analysis, “with our eyes shut and our minds open,” Prix said.

“With our eyes shut” is a literal statement. The house Coop Himmelblau conceived one cold day in Vienna, and which eventually was commissioned by a client in Malibu, was the result of shut-eyed dreaming without plan or purpose.

Prix and his partner, Helmut Swiczinsky, founded Coop Himmelblau--”Blue Sky Cooperative”--in Vienna in 1968 as a reaction to the cookie-cutter Modernist architecture that then dominated the international design scene.

As he explained in a 1968 interview, published by the London Architectural Assn.: “1968 was a time of disastrous warfare in Vietnam, of space exploration and rock-style rave-ups. There was anger on the streets in Chicago, Paris, New York, London and Berlin. . . . We wanted to see more vitality and fantasy in a kind of highly personal architecture that expressed our weaknesses as well as our strengths.”

Filling their Vienna studio with the discordant sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Prix and Swiczinsky shut their eyes and let their fingers do the drawing. They created an architectural commune in which every fantasy was real and every reality fantastical.

“Like making music, our architecture is a spontaneous feedback process,” Swiczinsky said. “Tossing rhythms back and forth between us produces images free of cliches, we hope.”

Prix, who teaches at the Santa Monica-based Southern California Institute of Architecture, believes “tossing rhythms back and forth” is a reason he needs the radical contrast of traditional Vienna and “unhistoric” Los Angeles.

“Vienna is shut in by its past, while Los Angeles is open to all kinds of wonderful confusion,” he said. “After a few weeks in Vienna, I begin to long for L.A.--and vice versa. Together these two very different cities express the almost unbearable tension between static and volatile forces that could either create or destroy the future.”

Apart from this rather abstract attraction to Southern California, Coop Himmelblau has a more direct desire to tap a reservoir of Angeleno inspiration.

“Like any aesthetic, spontaneous architecture of the kind we aspire to can easily become a cliche,” Prix said.

“I’m excited about Los Angeles because it blows fresh energy through our souls. . . . All architecture is, in the end, a matter of feeling. It has to stand or fall by a yardstick of the emotions.”