Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are great architectural troupers. Decades after their seminal books, ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ and ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, they are still actively engaged with the world of ideas, and passing on their experience and views to future generations. They drew a big audience at the University of Westminster for a talk by Denise and a q and a session including Bob and panel co-chairs, teacher/critic Kester Rattenbury and FAT co-founder and teacher Sean Griffiths. Out rolled the analysis and comment, on everything from the Smithsons to functionalism.
As far as the latter was concerned the question was who would decide and who would define? Scott Brown rejected the notion that architecture could ever be value free: ‘It is better to be value aware.” A brief reminder about the difference between public space (street, beach) and civic space (town square) let to a disquisition on architecture failure to come to terms with sociology in the way, say, that it managed to embrace structure.
Yesteryear’s challenges had suddenly become relevant again, with the need for ‘shovel-ready projects’ to kick-start urban regeneration. As Scott Brown observed, ‘When money is short, architectural imagination is needed even more’.
If there was a general point to emerge, it was importance of decoration and signage having meaning in a modern urban context. Bob Venturi, noting the symbolic element of decoration in historical buildings, pointed out that the art contained in cathedrals was not incidental. The content was crucial, and the signs it encompassed were understood.
This was a reminder of the practice’s celebrated distinction between a duck and decorated shed. Artist and teacher Andrew Holmes made the best observation from the floor, wondering whether, in the case of Baroque cathedrals, we didn’t have the example of a duck in a shed . . .
on May 26th, 2009 at 10:25 am
The moderns ’substitute’ for the decoration that we find integral to the beauty of many older buildings, still eludes us. I’m perhaps in a minority of architects who thinks the built work of Venturi Scott-Brown, has been really rather good. Apart from all the rhetoric, they handle form, colour and volume well, and are experts at composition. On thop of this (and this is most important) their buildings are nearly always built well it seems).
The decorated shed thing, and the baroque church thing. I can’t see how they are in the same universe. Just yesterday while I was walking down the street looking at the fine carving in a non-descript, classicalesque church in central Croydon, I wondered at the skill with which this was done. It occured to me that this kind of carving was easier in soft less durable stone. Buildings that still make this work available for us to view, of course could not have been built of soft stone. Thus this human effort to wrought the hard stone into such delicate patterns. This ‘miracle’ wrought by human hands. It occured to me, this is what we admire about architectural decoration, and in our modern times, there is no substitute.
The closest thing I have seen, I feel, is the mastery of architectural metalwork design that Mies started.