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Vanna
Venturi House, Philadephia, 1959-64
Making the Common Uncommon
Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown and Associates
By Ellen S. Wilson
The Heinz
Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art
November 8 through
February 2, 2003
“Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates is
almost alone in continuing the project of Modernism—engaging in an
artistically unpreconceived way the real conditions of contemporary
society, construction, and culture.
-- Robert Miller, AIA, Washington, DC
Architectural Record, May 1998
The architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates
(VSBA) introduces itself by posting this quote on the firm’s web
site. That Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are revolutionary architects,
and proud of it, is clear not only from what they design and what the
critics say, but from what they themselves have said and written about
architecture and its place in society.
Their approach to a project includes a respect for its built environment
that was rare when they first began working together in the 1960s. As they say in the opening of their
influential book Learning from Las
Vegas, “Learning from the
existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.”
It was Venturi and Scott Brown who declared “Main Street is
almost all right;” “Billboards are almost all right;” and that buildings
should look like buildings. Both have found it easier than some to think in
unorthodox ways, to stand aside from the prevailing influences of their
time, and analyze. “Architects,”
they write, “are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the
environment, because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not
revolutionary, utopian, and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anything but
permissive: Architects have preferred to change the existing environment
rather than enhance what is there.”
VSBA, however, brings an appreciation
for what was there, not to mention a playful exploitation of it. When Venturi was awarded the prestigious
Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1991, the jury citation stated: “His understanding of the urban context
of architecture, complemented by his talented partner, Denise Scott Brown,
with whom he has collaborated on writings and built works, has changed the
course of architecture in this century, allowing architects and consumers
the freedom to accept inconsistencies in form and pattern, to enjoy popular
taste.”
Out of the
Ordinary: The Architecture and
Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates, is the first
retrospective of the firm’s work in architecture, urban planning, and
decorative arts. Organized by the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition contains drawings, photographs,
models, and decorative arts objects, as well as replicas of some of the
large-scale decorative elements that often adorn their buildings.
A Shift in
Architectural Thinking
“Venturi and Scott Brown have been more influential as
thinkers than as the direct inspiration for architectural form and style,”
says Tracy Myers, associate curator of architecture, at Carnegie Museum of
Art. “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972) were
responsible for making people look beyond architect-designed
buildings. They are responsible for
creating a shift in thinking about architectural style, for leading people
to recognize that there is much in the everyday environment, in vernacular
architecture, that is worthy of celebration.”
Scott Brown, born Denise Lakofski in 1931, spent a privileged
childhood in Johannesburg. Her
mother grew up in Zambia, where she dressed as a boy and hunted in the
bush, and later studied architecture at the University of
Witwatersrand. Scott Brown knew from
an early age that she, too, wanted to be an architect and enrolled at
Witwatersrand. In 1955, after three
years of study in London, she married Robert Scott Brown, whom she had met
at Witwatersrand, and the couple spent three years traveling and working in
Europe, London, and South Africa.
She then applied to the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of
Land and City Planning, where she studied housing, economics, statistics,
and urban sociology. Urban planning
came to be one of the most important aspects of Scott Brown’s work, drawing
on her natural interests, the diverse influences of her background, and her
own inclination toward social science.
Robert Scott Brown was killed in a car accident in 1959. Denise Scott Brown completed her degree,
joined the faculty at Penn, and threw herself into her work. She met Robert Venturi, who was also
teaching at Penn, at a faculty meeting in 1960, and the two found that,
despite their very different backgrounds, they shared many of the same
views. They married in 1967.
Venturi’s father was a produce merchant in Philadelphia and
his mother an active socialist, and both had an interest in architecture
and design that they instilled in their son. Venturi studied at Princeton for both
undergraduate and graduate degrees and then traveled in Europe. His master’s thesis stressed the
importance of context in building design and became the first of his many
arguments against the International Style and its insistence that buildings
stand isolated from both time and place.
A house Venturi designed for his mother in Philadelphia
between 1959 and 1964 is, according to David B. Brownlee in the catalogue
that accompanies the exhibition, “the most significant house of the second
half of the twentieth century.”
Myers elaborates. “You might say that Mother’s House liberated
architects from the formal dictates of both strict historicism and
so-called International Style modernism.
The house alludes to or incorporates elements of both but does so
with a thoughtfulness that erodes the extreme seriousness of pure
stylists. It’s almost as if Venturi
was saying, ‘I know what the rules are, but I’m tweaking them to create
something that simultaneously is recognizable and gives you pause. If you think you know what a house is,
look at this and think again.’”
A house
the firm designed for a Pittsburgh couple similarly toys with the typical
residential form. Its humpbacked
roof echoes the shape of a stone bridge on the property, while the color
scheme and window framing device on the entrance façade assume the form of
broad sunbursts.
An Appreciation for
Whimsy
Clients were not always happy. Grand’s Restaurant (1961–1962)
in Philadelphia provided another opportunity to subvert the dictates of the
International Style and its emphasis on a clean, unadorned exterior. The storefront restaurant owned by Harry
and Marion Grand was labeled with large, brightly colored signboards and
decorated with an oversized, three-dimensional coffee cup of blue and
yellow panels that split the owners’ name in half. It was only a short time before the
Grands moved the cup up and out of their name and eventually, they
substituted a plastic, internally lit sign for Venturi’s original. The cup had done its work, however, and
the firm began to be known for decorated exteriors and an appreciation of
whimsy. A replica of this cup is
included in the exhibition.
Another of the firm’s early projects, Guild House (1961–1968),
a home for the elderly, was commissioned by the Friends Neighborhood Guild
and came to be, as Brownlee says, “both a social product and a social
symbol.” A dark brick building with
simple lines, Guild House contains apartments that are traditional in form,
admit plenty of sunlight, and are easy for the inhabitants to
interpret.
The one controversial element was an aluminum sculpture on the
roof that resembled a television antenna.
Venturi wrote in Complexity
and Contradiction that the sculpture was “a symbol of the aged, who
spend so much time looking at T.V.,” a statement that set off a storm of
criticism.
“I can understand why people found it offensive,” comments
Myers, adding that a replica of the sculpture is included in the
exhibition. “But I can’t imagine
that the firm intended to insult anyone.
There is a degree of irony and wit that was misunderstood at the
time.”
Ducks versus
Decorated Sheds
While Complexity and
Contradiction ends with an appreciation of popular culture, Learning from Las Vegas begins
there, stressing that the most important function of architecture is
communication. Another observation
that informs their work is drawing a distinction between the duck, as Scott
Brown called it, and the decorated shed. The term “duck” comes from the
famous Big Duck on Long Island, in which the duck-shaped building itself
signifies its purpose – selling Long Island duckling. Another, and perhaps more glorious,
example of a duck cited by the architects is Chartres Cathedral in
Paris.
A decorated shed, on the other hand, announces its purpose
with external signs and symbols.
VSBA’s Fire Station Number 4 (1966–1968), in Columbus, Indiana,
itself a showplace for modern architecture, is clearly a decorated
shed. Taking to heart its job of communicating,
the station’s hose-drying tower, which rises from the middle of the
building, provides an obvious spot for the super-sized “4” that helps to
identify the structure.
VSBA tends to design more decorated sheds than ducks. A series of successful residential
projects in their early years led to a commission at Oberlin College
(1973-1977) to design an addition to the Allen Memorial Art Museum, a
building designed by Cass Gilbert in 1915–1917. As Brownlee writes, “Never before had
the architects’ respect for context been put to such a test, and they
reveled in it.” The context, in this
case, was not only the elegant older building, but also the rather simple
Midwestern surroundings, with a gas station across the street. The resulting addition, with its clean
lines and subtly decorative brickwork pattern, fit easily into the
campus. The oversized Ionic column
on one of the walkways, a playful bow to the building’s classical heritage,
was, as Brownlee writes, a “spiritual brother” to the porch columns of the
houses across the street.
With the success at Oberlin, the firm began to receive an
impressive list of larger academic commissions, most notably several
buildings at Princeton University, and cultural buildings, such as the
Seattle Art Museum and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in
London.
VSBA’s design for the Hotel Mielmonte Nikko Kirifuri
(1992–1997), in Nikko, Japan, is the firm’s largest commercial building to
date. Venturi’s preliminary proposal
stressed the importance of not only the hotel and spa’s natural context,
but also its “cultural ethos.” The lobby is clearly patterned after a
Japanese village street, decorated with flattened images of flowers and
lanterns, as well as oversized signs indicating telephones, mailboxes, and
other utilitarian aspects of a hotel lobby.
As they wrote in their conclusion to Learning from Las Vegas, “Pop artists have shown the value of
the old cliché used in a new context to achieve a new meaning—the soup can
in the art gallery—to make the common uncommon.” In Out
of the Ordinary, we see work that takes the stuff of everyday life, the
common or ordinary, and finds not only the art within it, but also the art
that can arise from it.
This
exhibition was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the support
of the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program funded by The Pew
Charitable Trusts, and administered by The University of the Arts,
Philadelphia.
The
programs of the Heinz Architectural Center are made possible by the
generous support of the Drue Heinz Trust.
General support for the exhibition program at Carnegie Museum of Art
is provided by grants from The Heinz Endowments and the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts.
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