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4.0 out of 5 stars
"Nothing is fair or good alone", August 21, 2006
This review is from: Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time (William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) (Hardcover)
It is difficult to imagine an architect more genuinely American than Robert Venturi. His Americaness consists in a horizontal vision of history, in a method that embraces case data as its system, and in an obstinate realism with regards to the punctilious registration of the material furnished by daily life . This is well summarised in one of the two slogans on the back cover: "Evolutionary Pragmatism rather than Revolutionary Ideology." Architecture as Signs and Systems can be considered as a kind of "scientific autobiography" by Venturi and Scott Brown.
The couple from Philadelphia develops the theories contained in their preceding books in the light of their own projects, which are presented here as being demonstrative. It is not easy to distinguish the personal contributions coming from an association that has lasted longer than that of Burnham & Root. Thanks to the book's autobiographical confessions, the decisive influence that Denise Scott Brown had on her husband now emerges completely.
A South African architect and urban planner, Scott Brown was trained in Europe. The interests they have in common for functionalism, industrial architecture from Modernism's beginnings, and the social and urban context of design are the fruits of her apprenticeship at Architectural Association in London. London was the new pulsating centre for post-war architectural culture. It was also the capital of the Modernist Architectural Movement's internal criticism, spawning the Brutalism of which Alison and Peter Smithson (and Team X in general) were primary exponents. Above all, it was Scott Brown's fascination with South African folk art incorporating Western imagery (frowned upon by purists) that prepared Scott Brown for the impurity of Las Vegas, allowing us to understand the other slogan featured on the back cover: "Serious beauty may lie in what you see and can't, at first, accept."
Scott Brown's influence on Venturi was legible as early as 1966, with the publication of Venturi's brilliant manifesto Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, ending with a picture of a billboard-lined street. It is a known fact that Learning from Las Vegas (1972) is based more on her urban studies than his theoretic and historical research. However, Venturi's realism comes from his interest in all that is ordinary and, above all, vernacular. Without doubt, Pop Art was one of the fundamental basis for his vision of architecture as a means of communication for the multiculturalism of the present and future world. This brings him to see Times Square and certain areas of Tokyo (dominated by enormous electronic screens relentlessly bombarding pedestrians and motorists with information and advertising) as a Saint Mark's Square of our times. It is impossible to not see Ed Ruscha's Twenty-six Gasoline Stations (1962) behind today's annoying electronic panels with their giant connotative Venturian writing. Moreover, being a Realist in the USA cannot be the same as in Europe, as Ruscha so clearly stated: "I don't have any Seine River like Monet. I just have U.S. 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles." One of the book's theoretic centrepieces is indicated by its subtitle "for a Mannerist time".
After all the isms (Modernism, Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, etc.) it is time for a new Mannerism in architecture that recognises conventional order instead of original expression, and that recognises and looks for ambiguity for a new era of complexity and contradiction. If it is true that there is no clear and exhaustive definition of Mannerism, as Venturi reminds us by quoting Arnold Hauser, it is also true that Venturi's definition remains quite weak. In reality, the book does not make a fresh proposal. Venturi has written definitions of it on more than one occasion, but here the analysis suffers, possibly due to its autobiographical character and the short pamphlet-like format of its essay.
It remains anchored at the level of slogans, counting on historical examples and several of their own projects to provide all additional specifications. This is a shame, because ever since Mannerism returned as a central theme in international artistic culture around the mid-Sixties, very little repositioning has taken place (concerning architecture) with respect to definitions like the one given by Manfredo Tafuri in Mannerist Architecture of 16th-Century Europe, which was published, incidentally, exactly in 1966: "A cultural practice able to extend its tools and means of communication, attain experimental values through the emancipation of experience, install consultation with history, and lastly, to be based on open and semantically polyvalent linguistic structures."
More recently, Giorgio Agamben noted how Mannerism possesses an almost elective affinity with nihilism, and it is certainly no coincidence that Rem Koolhaas, "who enjoys flying a trapeze across the Olympus", described Venturi and Scott Brown's office as being part of his genealogy, despite the irreducible differences between them. Koolhaas personally interviewed the couple in his latest book Content (2004).
In any case, Architecture as Signs and Systems has the great merit of offering a strong theoretic basis that took shape during a historical period that saw casual pragmatism prevail in architecture and the absence of structured theoretic constructions in just about all disciplines. Moreover, it has the merit of going counter current by explicitly focusing on the taboo subject of form, a theme greatly opposed by new carefree post-critical generations. Aldo Rossi, an architect that Venturi never mentions, defined the designer's task with clarity in 1966 (the same fateful year of his treatise The Architecture of the City): "I think that the first principle of a theory is the insistence on a few themes. I think that it is particularly typical of artists and architects that they focus on a theme to explore, to work on a choice issue from architecture and to keep wanting to resolve that issue."
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in the course of their long and mostly solitary career, have carried out this task with courage and responsibility. It is especially their example that they convey in this book, as a legacy of our times.
(Published on "Domus" no. 883, July/August 2005, pp. 106-107)
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