Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room [Hardcover]

Robert Venturi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1996 | ISBN-10: 0262220512 | ISBN-13: 978-0262220514 | Edition: 1st

Robert Venturi is the author of "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" and "Learning from Las Vegas" (the latter co-authored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) - the one celebrating complexity in architecture, the other the uses of symbolism in commercial and vernacular architecture and signage. This collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a generic architecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualities become shelter and symbol. Venturi, who along with his partner, Denise Scott Brown, made the vulgar acceptable and found virtue in the commercial, the kitsch and the ordinary, is considered equally as a theorist and an architect who communicates his architectural ideas, formal and verbal. These essays, letters, reports, lectures, manifestoes and polemical texts offer a view from the drafting room - commonsense responses, urgent and diverse, in part a reaction against the conceptualizing of architecture today invaded by other disciplines and made obscure. Seven of the essays were co-authored with Denise Scott Brown. The voice is personal - expounding on the unglamorous side of practice; sometimes vituperative and corrective in addressing clients, theoreticians and critics; often humourous in looking back on past projects and opportunities; instructive in describing early influences and tastes; and reflective in assessing his own impact on the profession. The lead essays can be described as an argument embracing reference and representation in our information age, whose technical basis is truly of our time and whose iconographic basis derives from a long tradition in architecture including hieroglyphic Egyptian pylons, early Christian basilicas, scenographic Baroque interiors, and even eclectic Romantic architecture and 20th-century commercial billboards. The essays include Venturi's 1950 MFA thesis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While writing a speech about the visual antecedents of the World Wide Web, I came across a copy of Robert Venturi's Learning From Las Vegas, and realized that much of what Venturi has to say in the '50s about Las Vegas architecture had great similarities to the appropriation of physical metaphors in cyberspace, and the compression of space and time into flatspace.

Iconography and Electronics... is a thought-provoking collection of Venturi's essays, screeds, and articles (episodically) exploring the use of electronics in architectural design (despite the title's promise). Regardless of what you think of Venturi's architecture you are sure to be stimulated and challenged by his proposed marriage of the physical and the digital. However, if you've not read much architectural theory before, be forewarned: Venturi, like most in his field, prefers a turgid and dense style that sometimes seems to be the illegitimate spawn of early 20th century continental philosophy and MFA thesis proposals. Nonetheless, this book is Recommended.

From Library Journal

Venturi is probably the best-known architect of his generation-the generation that came to maturity in the 1960s and has continued to chart most of the architectural currents of the last 30 years. He helped to overthrow the dictatorship of the International Style, ushering in Postmodernism through his shocking and illuminating writings and buildings. This book brings together 50 examples of his scattered writings and speeches of the last ten years. It also includes his valuable 1950 Princeton M.F.A. thesis, a solid gold bar of illumination and insight. Venturi's writings are like his buildings: salty, dispassionate, and filled with good sense, they reward reading at every level with their toughness and compassion. Mostly architects, critics, historians, and students of architecture will be interested in this valuable collection by one of the great architects of our times. For all subject collections.
Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architecture Ctr.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 374 pages
• Publisher: MIT Press; 1st edition (May 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262220512
• ISBN-13: 978-0262220514
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,680,909 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Electronic shed, October 9, 2000

By 

Michele Sbacchi (Palermo, Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room (Hardcover)

No longer a relationship with engineering as in the last two centuries but with electronics: this will be the challenge for architecture in the future. Not surprisingly it is the clever mind of Robert Venturi to state and, more importantly, to clarify this problem in his latest very insightful book, Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture. Venturi is not new to this kind of pioneering reflections: his seminal Learning from Las Vegas very profoundly analyzed another crucial topic, the role of architecture in a motorized society. This time he again manages to focus on a crucial theme going well beyond the mere assertion of the problem. The book is, in fact, a collection of recent essays, and yet it has the strength - but not the monotony - of a special study. The arguments touched are various but they are all contextualized as against a common background: that of the new digital era in architecture. Doing so, Venturi manages to approach the problem from different positions that can open unthinkable perspectives: invention and convention, the relationship between architecture and publicity, the architectural object as a part of the landscape of popular culture are just some of the many topics faced. The theme treated is a very popular one, as we all know: the way architecture, and particularly those procedures involved with its making - which we call "design" - , are affected by the digital revolution. This revolution, as Venturi notes, is causing not only a mere change in terms of tools used to design (files vs. drawings, computers vs. drawing boards etc.) but it is bringing about, more importantly, a cultural change. What has been misunderstood in the far too many writings on this topic is that the digital revolution not only is changing our tools but also our goals. And, as usually happens in these cases, this very attention on the mere instrumental changes overshadows the more important content changes. Fortunately Venturi make architects reflect on this second aspect. The so-called "virtuality" will be more a more a condition to accept, a concept to face. With its ever-increasing presence in our culture it will eventually change the way we think and, particularly, the way we think architecture. One of the most important outcomes of this fact is a difference brought about in the idea of "object", a circumstance of paramount importance for designers. The broken link with materiality has indeed introduced a conception, quite widespread, in which objects are less defined, changeable and ephemeral in a new way. This change - notoriously foreseen by Lyotard - has eventually generated a different idea of the building. The exterior part of the building is the one more involved: in fact in contemporary architecture facades are no longer thought of as fixed elements. All the elements of definition - frame, corners, moulding - have lost their role. Facades, rather than exterior faces of material objects are considered nowadays as surfaces, and particularly mutant surfaces. So writes Venturi: "Here is architecture as iconographic representation emitting electronic imagery from its surfaces day and night." Recent buildings by architects like Herzog & De Meuron, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas are quite symptomatic to this respect. But we cannot forget the pioneering intuitions on "transparency" by Colin Rowe. Not surprisingly Venturi - always sensible to problems of communication performed by buildings and consequently very interested in the theme of the facade - tries to cope with these new conditions. He does so without falling in one of useless categories of pro or anti-virtuality. Instead he is preoccupied of being late in understanding the problem: "Architecture was too late in stylistically acknowledging the industrial revolution ....: let us acknowledge not too late the technology of now - of video electronics over structural engineering: let us recognize the electronic revolution of the Information Age". Venturi's reflections are always the architect's ones. In every phenomenon he is concerned primarily by problems of form and of visual impact. This special approach is particularly clear in his singling out a fundamental topic: the new kind of iconography brought about by electronics. Again Venturi's interest lays on the cultural mutation rather than on the pragmatic one. As we know electronics has introduced a new condition in all graphics - not only in those architectural: digital drawings are constituted by dots rather than by lines as in traditional "analogic" representation. Venturi make us realize that this is not a mere representational problem because this variation eventually introduces conceptual changes to the way architecture is conceived. Representational means are not neutral. Of course this is related to what Venturi theorize on the dissolution of architectural elements and especially of facades. What in the past was a choice - think of Seurat or of Byzantine mosaic - now has become a must. For Venturi the connection between decoration and its physical support - a basic theme in architecture - has to become totally free: "What S.Apollinare Nuovo does inside we can do inside and/or outside". A careful observer of popular culture, Venturi includes in his observation also elements like Light Electronic Displays, which are not a real product of digital production but are one of the most explicit representations of an iconography regulated by dots. This, of course, is not contradictory to his idea of a facade as projection surface. After all an old idea, - think of the inscriptions in S.Maria Novella by Alberti - consistently studied by Venturi and now rethought under the light of dramatically new circumstances.