Robert Venturi

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

He seems to be an arhitecht of great honesty. He makes buildings that fulfil a function with simplicity. He doesnt care about the Pritzker, and gives his wife equal due. As well he is a great theorist of urban planning and architechture. What thik you all ?

― anthony, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

And he's the man to blame for awful neon signs all over high rise offices, no?

― OCP, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I haven't exactly followed his career, but from what I remember of his buildings they look pretty ugly to me. Look at that horrible house he designed for his mom. I don't know about architecture but I know what I like.

― DeRayMi, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Look at that horrible house he designed for his mom. I don't know about architecture but I know what I like.

I really, really like the Rose Venturi house. It might just be something about contrast with the semi rural setting, I don't know. Incidentally, Ashton Raggatt and McDougall (quite a well known Melbourne architecture firm--did the new Canberra museum, among other things, I think) ripped it off for a health centre out in Maribyrnong which looks AWFUL.

― OCP, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I really like him and his books. The idea of reintroducing elements of the vernacular as an antidote to hi-art archicture was very refreshing at the time. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas posited some concepts that were very useful to me, not only in my study of design theory but in my thinking in general, such as the archetype of The Duck v. The Decorated Shed. Is Denise Scott Brown his wife?

― felicity, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

she is. The Rose Venturi house is really interesting in how it changes and reconcebtualizes mies modernism.

― anthony, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

what's 'the vernacular' in architecture?

― Josh, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

the humble, like a country post office.

― felicity, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

or a gas station.

― felicity, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

are there high art gas stations? or vernacular sky scrapers?

― Josh, Tuesday, 23 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I love the idea of a "high-art" gas station! So much of modern art is premised on the idea of the artist's intentional creation of non- utilitarian "stuff" (events, objects, installations) and secession from the set of activities for which there are historical explanations other than "for art's sake."

I would consider lots of those random office towers that are just kind of thrown up there to be skyscrapers in the vernacular.

One of the things Venturi was doing was to integrate references to truly unselfconscious, vernacular architecture into what would otherwise be "hi-art" (because custom-designed by high-profile architect) structures. Where I think the followers of this school of architecture can get ugly (i.e., the badly executed knock-offs) are where the references are too literal, or where the proportions of reference to original design are imbalanced, or where the referents are inapprproiate to the context, which is why Venturi sometimes gets a bad rap.

― felicity, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Johnson is the same way. The neo classical peidment on the IS sky scraper is funny, but only once.

― anthony, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

weren't lots of modernist (?) architects big on making buildings more utilitarian and functional, in certain senses? where would that kind of thing sit in this high art / vernacular distinction?

― Josh, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Didn't he 'invent' post-modernism? Or was that Charles Jencks?

― Andrew L, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I read the turn against modernism and towards the vernacular not simply to do with concrete qualities of buildings (functionality etc) but as much a rejection of architecture as grand social-planning project with a language necessarily separate from that of buildings and parts of the built environment that simply spring up and/or evolve. It's the anti-Corbusier or the big post-war social housing projects of the 60s (in the UK, at least; not sure about US equivalents). 'Vernacular' architecture is perhaps 'humble' (what a lovely word) but, as importantly, embraces the everyday and the haphazard.

I have never seen a Venturi building in the concrete, but Learning from Las Vegas is sure one of the beautifullest books I ever saw.

― Ellie, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Andrew L: both, if you follow David Harvey's line.

― Ellie, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Vernacular has a connotation of 'indigenous' or responsiveness to the culture in which a thing is situated. I think what Venturi and Scott-Brown (who is his wife) are really getting at is not homeliness so much as pluralism : a rejection of the 'international' for the symbolic. American symbols could be giant dancing hotdogs, but they could also be Greek columns. At least that's what I got out of the books (which are also very funny).

― Dean Air, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

After looking at more photos of Venturi's projects, online, I think I had to moderate my opinion. My first impression when I was exposed many years back was negative, but I don't have a good picture of his whole career. The restored Furness Library, which I've seen up close, is pretty nice, but of course, that's starting with a Furness foundation.

― DeRayMi, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm not going to pretend to get all architectural on your asses, but here at Venturi's alma mater (Princeton), we are pretty much surrounded by his buildings. Damn are they ugly. I don't know if picutres are easily had, but check out the 'colonnade' in front of our Frist Campus Center, in which 'colonnade' appears to be code for 'pointless leftover concrete obscuring the front of the building'.

― Dave M., Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Anthony will be surprised to hear that I am not terribly enthusiastic - he knows that I am generally a big fan of Postmodernism. For the record, I think Venturi exemplifies PoMo less well than Jencks (who applied that term to Venturi's ideology) suggests. His enthusiasm for populist works (which he tends to conflate with the vernacular - dubiously, I think, in the case of Vegas particularly, a town of buildings full of clever, modern calculation) was a necessity of the time, after the highflown elitism to which Modernism sometimes tended, but I think his arguments are flawed - though again the stuff about complexity and contradiction and ambiguity all needed saying. I find his work less interesting than his earliest theorising.

― Martin Skidmore, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

For a "high-art" gas station, get thee to the Beverly Hills Union 76 Station (Rexford Drive at Little Santa Monica Blvd). Sublime Googie. It's the one at the top.

― Spencer Chow, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

He did the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, which I didn't think was all that exciting. I love the books, but I'd have to agree that the architecture doesn't excite me all that much - although I don't think he's terrible or anything.

― Dean Air, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Haha Spencer, nice photos!

Would you believe that I not only filled up at that Union 76 many, many times but I put a big dent in my fender from backing up and (not quite around) one of those big concrete pylons. (Those old Legends have the worst turning radii ever, grrr . . .) I feel a lot better knowing that at least it was a hi-art pylon -- if only the pylon could have been a little more . . . uh . . . conceptual.

― felicity, Wednesday, 24 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

if only the pylon could have been a little more . . . uh . . . conceptual.

Embracing the haphazard can have unforseen consequences...

I filled up there today in honor of this thread. I tried to imagine how you bumped into it - it looks fine now.

― Spencer Chow, Thursday, 25 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

At an extremeley slow and deliberate rate of speed [ < 5 m.p.h.]. That's what made it so pathetic.

― felicity, Thursday, 25 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

n.b. not the structural element, canopy-supporting pylons but the concrete flowerpot/gas pump protection-type pylons. See if you can spot a streak of Tuscan Taupe on one of them next time you fillerup.

― felicity, Thursday, 25 July 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.