Customer Reviews

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art papers on architecture)

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I had to read this book for a class specifically regarding Robert Venturi and the postmodernism movement that he became a leading proponent of. However, this book is NOT a manifesto for a postmodern vacabulary- rather, this book looks at all architecture from the Parthenon to the common family home. Let me say that I have read many architectural theory books, but nothing that really inspired me to look at a building and really see what the architect intended like Complexity and Contradiction. This book really focused my attention on the possibilities for great architecture on any level- from museum to treehouse. I feel that anyone with an interest in appreciating architecture should certainly read this book. Because of my studies of Robert Venturi and his contemporaries, I have pursued a degree in architecture and certainly plan to incorperate his ideas and philosophies into my work.

This book is less a manifesto than it is a very interesting look at how architecture has evolved over the last 2000 years. Venturi evocatively shows that there was no straight line approach to architecture, but rather an ever-changing and ambiguous path that Modernists chose to make short cuts through. In this sense, Venturi really does capture the complexity and contradiction in architecture in that there are many lessons to be learned, making this book as valuable today as it was in 1966 when it first appeared.

Being one of the early "gray" architects, Venturi inspired a movement that eventually became characterized as "Post Modern." His early architectural work left a lot to be desired, since it seems less inspired by the many historical examples he favored, like Frank Furness, in this book and more by the banal trends in contemporary architecture at the time, eventually leading to Learning from Las Vegas (1972), where the concept of a building being a "duck," or a decorated shed, emerged.

This book's most appealing aspect is that it is immediately accessible. You don't have to be an architect to understand where Venturi is coming from, much less a grad student working on a dissertation. Venturi avoids all that senseless jargon that characterized architectural theory at the time and later came to engulf Po-Mo talk as well.

Now that the bottom of postmodernism has actually fallen out and is being dragged along the street by the chains of American capitalism, it's "alright" for students of architecture to return to that misjudged canonical textbook of post-modernism, C+C by Venturi. While not as engaging as his other main work "Learning from Las Vegas", this book still leads the reader into a meticulous analysis of the physical composition of major pieces of architecture, and the composition of the thoughts that made them. After reading it, I found myself unconciously applying it's main dichtomy of complexity and contradiction to much of the architecture around me, if that is any testament to its power.

"I like complexity and contradiction in architecture." That's how Robert Venturi starts this superb book. No great proclamation. It was an age tired of great proclamations. Instead, Venturi takes us through an impressively learned tour of his favorite things, a grand overview of great architecture, with acute formal analysis of facade and plan composition, sectional variety, and an accumulating realization that complexity is an inevitable force in the tumult of human, urban life.
Postmodernism has come and gone, but modernism looks as it does today because of this book.

Venturi's Complexity & Contradiction is THE theoretical work for understanding the tactics & goals of post-modernism as a style of architecture. In contrast to modernism & International Style, Venturi promotes and describes an approach to design that incorporates complexities, ambiguities, contradictory allusions as a sort of wit or humor, and a return to historical allusion as an element of design. His goal is to express the 'difficult whole' which is pluralistic American culture, both pop & high culture.
As background, International Style began with the streamlining aesthetic of the Bauhaus but had become by the 1960s a strict approach to design which demanded structural expressionism, especially in high-rise designs of reinforced concrete, steel frames, and glass curtain walls or other fenestration (geometric arrangement of windows). In fact, it was a style based strictly upon geometry -- symmetries, repetitive rectilinear forms, and neutral colors. A typical example is the Seagram Building in Manhattan.
Venturi wishes for a style of design that is more assymetric, idiosyncratic, and complex in its allusions. An example would be Venturi,Rauch, Scott Brown (VRSB's) early commissions, i.e., The Guildhouse.
As a practical matter, the skyscraper as a structure does not easily nor affordably accommodate Venturi's post-modernism. His ideas have had a more pervasive influence upon mid-rise buildings. Few would deny that the AT&T design as a multi-story 'Chippendale highboy' is more interesting & witty than the Seagram Building. (Both are dull compared to NYC's Art Moderne masterpiece -- the Chrysler Building).
Venturi's later writings, 'Learning from Las Vegas' & 'Learning from Levittown' are more accessible to those unstudied in classical Greek / Roman / Ren architectural history. For those who want a more readable intro into post-modernism, try Tom Wolfe's article for Rolling Stone on Las Vegas (early 60s?) & 'From Bauhaus to Our House.' I suspect that Venturi & Wolfe sat around in New Haven drinking martinis and arguing about American architecture in the late 1960s and these ideas are the result.
At its worst, post-modern design can become so eclectic as to be incoherent or so absorbed in history as to look 'revivalist'. Not being a practicing architect, so not enslaved to design ideology for my early career opportunities, I like to think of post-modern tactics as one among many -- the best architects choose the style that suits a specific commission, program, budget, & client's taste.

My own personal favorites of post-modern design, based upon buildability & functionality, and, upon originality & humor:
architecture -- Tigerman's Self-Park & his own 2nd home
infrastructure -- Calatrava's pedestrian bridges (Calatrava is really as much a modernist who expresses structure with flair rather than post-modern)
landscape -- Walker's Tanner Fountain (a rare use of Eastern allusion)

50

I read "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" many years ago, and reread it in its large format printing for this review. This time, I took notes.

The book cogently examines many of the design challenges of achieving built architecture. Here, imperfect plans, awkward site constraints, and conflicting goals and plans are all seen as permissible; sometimes even desirable. The author dives very deeply into the taxonomy of complexity: dualism,double-functioning, both-and, and many other manifestations of the non-simple and contradictory.

I admire the book, without liking it. Part of the reason must be my own lack of sympathy with the imperfect, however universal and inescapable it may be. I liked best his insights into the architecture of famous architects. These gave me new viewpoints and enriched my understanding of their work. I also felt that he overstated his case, perhaps as a needed corrective to the prevailing wisdom.

The book is, in part, a reaction to Modernism, capitalized, which has been one of an endless sea of architectural fancies. This focus is understandable for the time in which the book was written, but may be less useful now as Modernism fades as a dominant theme and becomes absorbed into more recent architectural approaches.

All pictures and drawings are in black and white. I found that I disliked, or had reservations, about the attractiveness of many examples used to illustrate Venturi's discussion. At the same time, any wrong impressions I had as to past architectural perfection were firmly corrected.

This is a difficult book to sum up because it covers many sub-topics, minutely defines numerous shades and nuances of meaning, and presents all with an impressive breadth of scholarship and insight. At the cost of some exaggeration, what Venturi presents as admirable, often even worthy of pursuit, I often found unsettling to view. My reaction is crystallized in the Vanna Venturi house, about which I have read widely. It was an excellent house for his mother, the subsequent owners like it, and I am happy not to live with it. I think the author is at his best when explaining and dissecting theory, and at his weakest when converting his views to actual built structures.

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venturi's book highlights the inherent complexity in today's post-modern society, coupled with the depth of comprehension often mistaken by critics. A must buy for Architecture students!

Didn't even open this book but if you are an architectural major this might be a great book.