In his heyday, Robert Venturi was more theorist than architect. With a grasp of subtle architectural concepts, Venturi sought to define a Pop architecture for an American society that he claimed was bored by orthodox Modernist architecture. His building designs during...
[more]In his heyday, Robert Venturi was more theorist than architect. With a grasp of subtle architectural concepts, Venturi sought to define a Pop architecture for an American society that he claimed was bored by orthodox Modernist architecture. His building designs during the 1960s and 1970s exhibited a combination of earnestness, brashness, and deadpan wit that was thoroughly disconcerting to the architectural establishment. Venturi embraced neither the organic architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, nor the pure-form International School style of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In his book, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" (1966), Venturi called for an architectural tension arising from perceptual ambiguity -- an ambiguity engendered by what he termed a "both/and" style. The both/and concept requires an excess of both form and meaning in order to create a complex, contradictory architecture: "It can include elements that are both good and awkward, big and little, closed and open, continuous and articulated, round and square, structural and spatial." If this sounds confusing, it might help to learn that Venturi's next work, a collaborative effort with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, focused on the most bizarre of all cities, American or otherwise: Las Vegas. "Learning from Las Vegas" describes the casino as a form of indigenous Pop art, an "authentic outburst of popular fantasy."
Venturi seemingly idolized what had traditionally been considered compromised or tasteless forms of architecture, "the ugly and the ordinary." Acknowledging the inevitable constraints of a market economy that co-opts architectural design, Venturi encouraged banalities such as tract houses, massive parking lots, neon signs advertising cheap beer, and the eclectic diversity of "Main Street." Venturi found an aesthetic in the inevitable, a value in cheapness. An oft-debated Venturi building is his deliberately ordinary-looking Guild House (1963), a six-story red brick structure built for the Society of Friends in Philadelphia to house the elderly of modest means. At one time, it boasted a large, nonfunctional TV antenna that served both as a Pop decoration and as a symbol of the pastime of its residents.
Unfortunately, Venturi did not bring his concepts to the material world as successfully as he wrote about them: "Venturi set the tone for a literary conception of architecture in which more emphasis was put on imagery and quotation than on formal integration or material presence." Venturi, without creating trend-setting buildings, has redefined the meaning of architecture in a Postmodern context.
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