Robert venturi

Robert Venturi (June 25, 1925, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - September 18, 2018) was an American architect. He carried out an important part of his work jointly with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, with whom he worked since 1969. Scott, however, was excluded from the Pritzker prize with which he was awarded in 1991. Fifteen years later, both together were distinguished with the 2016 AIA Gold Medal, the most important architecture award in the United States. It achieved prestige when in the 1960s it began the criticism of the orthodoxy of the modern movement, which led to the postmodernism of the 1970s. Its cause he defended a complex architecture that accepted its contradictions. He rejected the austerity of the modern movement and encouraged a return of historicism, added decoration and outright symbolism in architectural design.

Biography

He was born in Philadelphia as Robert Charles Venturi. He studied architecture at Princeton University in New Jersey, and later spent three years as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Venturi then worked until 1958 in the studio of Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn. At that time he was also a professor of theoretical architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Starting in 1964 he worked with John Rauch. In 1967 he married Denise Scott Brown with whom he worked together since 1969, creating Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown Associates.

Venturi is considered one of the most original architects of the late 20th century and is appreciated for having introduced different concepts into his works, which depart from everything that is customary to see in architecture. At the same time he has expressed his thoughts in numerous lectures and classes, and also in various books and articles. He wrote his books mainly with his partner and wife Denise Scott Brown, in which he emphasizes the fact that modern architecture is also based on historical references. As he states, as an architect he tries not to get carried away by habit, but by a conscious sense of the past, carefully evaluating what it means and the convenience and way of taking it into account in his projects.

He published a manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966; in the introduction, Vincent Scully considers it "perhaps the most important writing on architecture since the publication of Vers Une Architecture by Le Corbusier in 1923".

During his more than 50-year career, Venturi has taught at, among others, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities.

Awards

In 1983 he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson Medal. In 1991 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, one of the most important international architecture awards, comparable to the Nobel Prize. His wife Denise Scott Brown refused to accompany him at the award ceremony as she felt the prize should have been shared. In 2013 a group of Harvard students started an online petition to retroactively request the Pritzker award. for Denise Scott. The petition was signed among others by Robert Venturi himself despite the fact that in his 1991 acceptance speech he did not claim to share the award, although he did mention that Scott Brown did more than 50% of the work. After several months of speculation after Following the protest, in June 2013 the Pritzker Prize committee met and decided not to retroactively recognize Scott Brown.

In November 2015 it was announced that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were jointly awarded the AIA Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architecture.

Representative works

Guild House.

The designs of his urban buildings have a characteristic appearance, reminiscent of drawings or paintings, both for the use of colors and for the location of the windows and other elements on the facades. Venturi intends with this to give a cheerful air to the buildings located in an urban environment, generally monotonous. Instead, he is very respectful of the environment when he designs buildings situated in nature, such as the vacation homes he has built in various parts of the United States.

Separation of the modern movement

In his 1966 "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" he defends a position contrary to modern architecture, against its pretense of seeking only difference and novelty. He wants to show the complexity of the architectural form that cannot be reduced to a single logical and aesthetic system (as the moderns defended). He argues that this architecture is not suitable for a period of change such as the 1960s, making this will to change his goal and so he separates from them by calling himself postmodern. Postmodernity means overcoming the modern movement. Accepting the complications of the common man instead of ignoring them and starting from scratch as his predecessors did.

In 1972 he published the book "Learning from Las Vegas" written with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. The first part broadens the results of the seminar organized in 1968 at Yale University; with photos, maps and diagrams in which she demonstrates how typical Las Vegas architecture works. In the center of the second part, two emblematic figures are discussed: "the duck" and "the decorated box". The duck becomes a sculpture; the symbolic form completely appropriates architecture, playing an excessive role. The functional box is decorated according to its function, with an advertising sign on the roof or on the ground.

Influences

Some of the most important are his admiration for Kahn with whom he studied at Yale University. From him he rescues having established a connection with the past and having given architecture an autonomous development. In addition, the trip he makes to Rome is vital, in which he can study the Baroque, a period that fascinates him for its ability to articulate the elements, subordinating them to a global geometric unit and developing all kinds of ambiguities. Finally, it is necessary to highlight his contemporaneity with pop art, whose values, admiration for the commercial vernacular and consumer objects are reflected in his work.

The fundamental sources for Venturi will be the eclectic and classicist traditions (Baroque, Mannerism, Rococo) and popular architecture. He is also an admirer of Le Corbusier, Aalto, Van Eyck (for his defense of primitive cultures and his knowledge). In reference to Mies, it is highlighted that despite the erroneous belief that he was his staunch critic, reality shows the opposite "Of everything that has been written and said in my life, which has been a lot, there is nothing that I regret or want to retire, except perhaps the phrase "Less is Boring." This was a rebellion against the bland simplicity of what I would call late modern architecture. It was a rhetorical phrase. From our current perspective, I have no doubt that Mies is one of the great masters of this century in architecture and all architects should kiss the feet of Mies van der Rohe for all his achievements and what we can learn from him. ”.

All this complexity must be resolved by committing to the whole. This unit maintains control over the conflicting elements that compose them as a whole. It values the tradition that considers artists to have full meaning as long as they are valued in relation to their predecessors. He proclaimed in his book the duality, the richness of meaning, which he opposed to a boring architecture, sensing that meeting only the functional requirements did not fulfill the architectural mission, but rather led to the desolation and exhaustion of the inhabitant. He bases his work on quintessential American consumer culture. These emerging characteristics of a disordered society, difficult for the citizen to understand, are not compatible with rationalism. It is necessary to express these contradictions and uncertainties also on an artistic level.

He concludes that the architect must know how to interpret with new criteria of taste and composition the elements of the modern metropolis and the elements of disrepute, such as urban equipment. He refers to pop art with whom he shares a taste for the vulgar elements of urban culture, which combine to show variety and vitality. In this sense, Venturi's proposal is a reflection of the American society of the 50s and 60s. What stands out most about the buildings that he analyzes in his book (more than 200 works) is exploring themes such as contradictions in compositions as well as the power to express several meanings simultaneously, or have a functional duality. He reduces architecture to a perceptive phenomenon, to a game of forms that transmit messages to our senses. He then highlights his expressive capacity.

Casa Vanna Venturi

Several preliminary projects and models are carried out beforehand. Consider the building substantially classical in its plan and shape and its ornamentation and elevation. However, it specifies that despite being classical it is not pure, it adheres more to the mannerist characteristics that it admits of contradiction with the idea of order. Venturi considers that to appreciate this one must be aware of the contradiction in classical architecture, as in the works of Palladio whom he considers his guide. From the Villa Master of his is that he takes the sloping façade. In this house we see expressed several of the elements of contradiction and complexity explained in the book:

• The plant and the front and the back are symmetrical with a ventral axle but in the perimeter of the plant the extremities vary to accommodate exceptions on the plant.
• Domestic scale that is at the same time monumental with the tilted decks that reminisce the fronton.
• General order and symmetry that get into crisis in the small details like the body that stands out from behind or the windows that open asymmetrically. The opening to reveal the back volume and the chimney are ways to show the mannerist effect of the spatial layers and thus separate to the facade of the house.
• Entry seems huge by the shadow it projects but is actually modest
• The central body of the house is solid, unlike the central spaces of the Palladinian plan.

The symmetry evident at the beginning is then modified by small exceptions. It is worth noting that, although in part he criticizes Wright, the interior is found in this house articulated around the fireplace, a wood-burning stove and a staircase, similar to the English houses of the s. XVII. It is surprising at the time that the windows actually look like windows, and are not simply hollow as the Modern Movement had promulgated.

It is also important to say that there is a recovery of ornamentation, ending the work of his teacher Kahn in the break with all modern ideals. Its classical applied decoration is unusual for the time (mid-20th century). There is an arch on the façade that is made up of the same moldings and is applied to enrich the opening. This combined with the lintel make the scale of the building appear even larger. In addition, decoration is seen on the surrounding walls, almost similar to a drawing. There are decorative elements that are not classic, such as the industrial "band" or the kitchen window. But this is part of the Mannerist desire for contradiction. Finally, it refers to a symbolist historicism of style that seeks the essence of style.

“Some have said that my mother's house looks like a children's drawing -representing the basic elements of shelter- (…). I like to think that it is something that reaches another essence, that of the genre that it is a house and it is elemental”.

“My mother's house was designed when she was already an old widow, with her bedroom on the ground floor, without a garage because she didn't drive, and with rooms for a maid and the possibility of having a nurse -in addition to be also suitable for his beautiful furniture with which I had grown up. Otherwise, she made no other demands on the architect, her son, related to the program or her aesthetics - she was wonderfully confident."

Guild House

• It's a nursing home in Philadelphia.
• Its plant is functional and ingenieril
• Collection of the billboard for the first time deliberately
• Classic composition on the facade
• Golden antenna as a symbol of the life of the elders and culture (pop art).

In his book “Learning from Las Vegas” he proposes two ways for a building to be communicative. That in its form it expresses a function or that it is a functional building with a giant sign. The second option is the one he considers more contemporary. This implies an independence of the façade as an autonomous fact of the functional content. An example of the advertisement building is the "National College Hall of Fame", a building with a similar shape to a gallery that is totally independent from the facade, this being a giant advertisement with an electronic screen. Thus, he opposes Loos considering the building as a functional machine on the inside and a singular work on the outside. What will go on to characterize his work will be a sample of the possibility of adaptability and prevalence of architecture based on the use of conventional elements. It is then located at the opposite pole of the teacher of him Kahn.

The concept of application.

What began as a search for maximum effect with minimum means (as in the Guild House in which mass-produced elements are used to reduce economic costs) ends up transforming into a fall into triviality and decorativism. Taking Morris's wallpapers as a model, he will apply designs to objects and spaces by treating them epidermally. He will consider that what characterizes each building is the wardrobe, the ornamentation, the treatment, the interior structure that constitutes it is then merely a constructive and functional fact.

National Gallery Museum in London. Link between the Sainsbury WingVenturi) and the Wilkins Building seen from the back.

• Casa Vanna Venturi (Filadelfia)
• Celebration City Model for Disney World (Orlando, Florida)
• United States Pavilion for the Universal Exhibition 1992 (Sevilla)
• Art Museum (Seattle, Washington)
• Extension of the National Gallery Museum (London)
• Lerwis Thomas Laboratory, Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey)
• Philadelphia Orchestra Auditorium (Filadelfia)
• Museum of the Manufacturing Arts (Meno Frankfurt)
• Basco Exhibition Hall (Pladelphia)
• Clinical Research Building, University of Pennsylvania (Filadelfia)
• Trubek and Wislocki Holiday House (Nantucket Island, Massachusetts)
• Franklin Court Building (Pladelphia)
• Gordon Wu Building, Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey)
• Faculty of Humanistic Studies, State University (New York)
• Guild House (Filadelphia)
• Children's Museum in Houston.