Just when you thought ruling-class architecture discourse couldn’t be surpassed by Trump’s complaints about DC’s “Brutalist” architecture, we now hear of the passing of Robert Venturi.
The co-author of Learning From Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi is widely credited with kickstarting the postmodernist movement and is one of the most important postmodern theorists of the 20th century. Through both their built work, academic output, and written texts Scott Brown and Venturi helped to spark a movement in architecture that broke through the hegemony of modernism which had prevailed for much of the 20th century.
Like Goldberger’s pandering to developers with promotional criticism, what we got stuck with is the boutique hegemony of post-modernism and the facadism of strip malls, replete with the reactionary sensibility of the real problem of architects as developers and vice-versa. What the field got was a meta-discourse that would be important academically, even as most of its practitioners designed like contractors.
Venturi and Scott Brown created a rationalizing discourse that extended the nature of academic canons easily commodified as style products. Venturi’s teaching at Yale could give both the fervor of a variety of theorists and affect the history of design even as a couple of blocks away, binge drinking could give us the worst POTUS until the present one, and a SCOTUS nominee who was a sexual predator.
Still, getting your university to spring for a student weekend seminar in Vegas could be useful for future footnotes in capitalist building history. Having the possibility of a theoretical discussion of a language of architecture that allowed for post-structural creativity only made more acceptable the continuing boredom of developer-architecture, of which Trump is a peculiarly low-brow exemplar.
With Venturi, historical quotation made revisionism and the “counter-revolutionary” acceptable in architecture or was it the banishing of the term, “revivalism”.
“Less is a bore” … more or less.
The architecture of Robert Venturi, although perhaps not as familiar today as his books, helped redirect American architecture away from a widely practiced, often banal, modernism in the 1960s to a more exploratory design approach that openly drew lessons from architectural history and responded to the everyday context of the American city.[11] Venturi's buildings typically juxtapose architectural systems, elements and aims, to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent in a project or site. This "inclusive" approach contrasted with the typical modernist effort to resolve and unify all factors in a complete and rigidly structured—and possibly less functional and more simplistic—work of art.
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For example: remember that The Truman Show’s covert fascism as modernist fantasy is also a reflection on the Disney Epcotism of Celebration Florida.
Established in 1994, Celebration has the flavor of a southern American village from the 1930s. About 2,500 homes of limited styles and colors are clustered around a small, pedestrian-friendly shopping area. The first residents moved in during the summer of 1996, and the Town Center was completed that November. Celebration is often cited as an example of New Urbanism, or neo-traditional town design.
Architect Robert Venturi says that he is not a postmodernist. However, there is certainly a retro look to the Celebration, Florida bank designed by partners Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Molded to fit the shape of the street corner it occupies, Celebration's local bank is as planned as the community. The design playfully resembles a 1950s-era gas station or hamburger restaurant. Colorful stripes wrap around the white facade. More significantly is that the three-sided facade is reminiscent of the old J.P. Morgan financial institution, the House of Morgan at 23 Wall Street near the U.S. Stock Exchange building.