The Last Modernist

...But the fact remains that postmodern architects have routinely found theoretical justification in the familiar terms of historical "reference" and "allusion"—and these days it matters much less whether a building appeals to the senses than whether the theoretical baggage with which it is laden is au courant...

...And yet this pathologically intellectu-alized structure could hardly engage the interest of the public at large, for its manifold distortions of conventional elements were conceived for cognitive dissonance's sake rather than beauty's...

...For Venturi, Guild House is not "heroic and original" but "ugly and ordinary...

...Coming closer, one sees that Venturi's Corinthian capitals replicate those on the original building...

...This was the modernist world into which Robert Venturi was born—and which he rejected...

...Its most eye-catching element is the series of gaping rectilinear entrance openings cut out of the façade in order to emphasize "the almost sports-palace quality" (to use the Venturi expression) of a great museum's place in contemporary life—a perfect instance of a Venturi editorial touch that is sociological rather than artistic...

...A classical balustrade, cornice, dentils, and string courses make similarly irregular appearances, then vanish...

...This calamitous idea converted the architect from an artist concerned with the imaginative and pleasing use of traditional forms in the design of useful buildings into a sort of oracular sociologist whose mandate was to fathom the deepest significance of modern life and translate his Delphic insights into architectural form...

...Indeed, they introduced the literary concept of "reference" in architecture...

...Similarly undermined was the sense of an ideal, other-worldly life underlying our transient earthly sojourns that traditional architecture, Gothic as well as classical, had always imparted...

...It boasts such familiar, rudimentary features as metal-framed double-hung windows, an expanse of glazed white brick at the entrance level, and a sign identifying the facility in big block letters...

...They've parted with highprofile commissions over the last decade...

...The inordinately ordinary façades they proposed for Philadelphia's Orchestra Hall cost them an important hometown job, which has been entrusted to a heroic and original modernist, Rafael Vinoly...

...Indeed, the classical vocabulary of the nineteenth-century National Gallery facing London's Trafalgar Square is deconstructed in Venturi's major addition, the Sainsbury Wing, which was completed in 1991...

...Belabored art-historical references abound, starting with the broken-pediment motif and the interior and exterior moldings...

...Complexity and Contradiction is nevertheless an especially thought-provoking and learned book, even for those who don't subscribe to the author's viewpoint...

...behind the main façade's "representation" of a classical broken pediment, a window is punched through what at first appears to be a large chimney block...

...Indeed, Scott Brown once declared, "You should know what the real building consists of beneath the skin...

...It will endure...

...Also located in Philadelphia, the structure is very different from the brutal apartment blocks that "urban renewal" often brought in its train...

...He simply espoused a different approach to modernism...

...Guild House was conceived as a variation on the plain old brick-clad postwar apartment building...

...He contributed "Our Monuments, Our Selves," to the March 5, 2001, issue of The Weekly Standard...

...Their profiles are simplified and distorted while backs, seats, and legs are flattened into two-dimensional planes of laminated wood and plastic...

...The glass and steel office-building-box was the direct result of this hopelessly paradoxical formula, and so was the ubiquitous irruption of sterility and ugliness in America's downtowns and suburban office parks...

...The Venturis feel they shouldn't be blamed for postmodern icons like Philip Johnson's slick 1984 AT&T (now Sony) Building in midtown Manhattan, with its famous ersatz-classical "Chippendale" pediment looming over the skyline, let alone the epidemic of crapulous Art Deco knock-offs that has afflicted the nation in recent years...

...Venturi has no use for deconstructionist and other hyper-expressionistic architecture, which revolves around sculptural pyrotechnics rather than a generally applicable approach to design...

...It's true that mainstream postmodernism has generally been more banal and ingratiating than the Venturis' architecture...

...architecture" was published thirty-five years ago as a slender tome entitled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture...

...The conclusion is obvious...

...One of the most noteworthy items in the exhibition, entitled "Out of the Ordinary," is a large model of Venturi's first major building, the modestly scaled suburban Philadelphia house he designed for his mother in the early 1960s...

...This resonance is the reason normal people tend to subscribe to the principle of cultural continuity in architecture...

...she will turn seventy in the fall...

...Its studiously inharmonious interior spaces are contained within bizarre façades with offbeat fenestration and a greenish stucco finish...

...Guild House was originally crowned by a gold-anodized aluminum sculpture of an antenna—"a symbol," Venturi wrote in Complexity and Contradiction, "of the aged, who spend so much time looking at T.V...

...Peter's, and that Whitney Warren erected the gorgeous masonry mass of Grand Central Station on a steel frame...

...The modernist pioneers aspired instead to an architecture conceived in mechanical rather than anthropomorphic terms—an architecture whose expressive elements were scientifically required, in principle at least, to have a structural function...

...But for intellectual and even psychological reasons, modernist architects cannot accept such continuity...

...It is aesthetically flat, and structural realism is a factor here as well...

...And yet Venturi's theory and practice have served, in the main, to compound the confusion that modernist orthodoxy sowed, as the Philadelphia Museum of Art's recent retrospective abundantly demonstrates...

...Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari canned their competition-winning design of 1992 for a new Whitehall Ferry Terminal, whose centerpiece was a gigantic electronic signboard in the form of a clock emblazoned with the seal of New York City...

...They look askance at the traditional work being done by a growing number of New Urbanists who understand that in architecture, sociological considerations should begin and end with the programmatic necessities buildings must satisfy...

...The paint jobs on these chairs are jokes in Venturi's studiously cultivated poor taste...

...A world-view grounded in the redemptive potential of science and social policy encouraged Le Corbusier, Mies, and other modernist pioneers to reject classical architecture's profoundly anthropomorphic qualities...

...When seen at a distance from the great square, the Sainsbury Wing is simply an ungainly mass clad in the same white Portland stone as its neighbor...

...The lamentable consequences of the Venturis' fealty to the modernist idea of the architect as a sociological shaman has extended far beyond their buildings and furnishings...

...screens...

...They accordingly flattened their anti-heroic architecture, thereby reducing their design to a matter of applied sociology in the best modernist tradition...

...As noted in the exhibition catalogue—which, if not enlightening, is at least informa-tive—a critic wrote of the Vanna Venturi House as far back as 1965, "The whole, in its studied disjointedness, appears to express the discontinuity and fragmented quality that characterize contemporary life...

...Finally, nothing in the way of surface enrichment remains save a dado capped by a molding and a slight, sheer protrusion in the wall just above...

...The past has gone nuts, then dissolved into a mute, abstract present...

...Another widely noted Venturi project from the 1960s is a federally subsidized residential facility for the elderly called Guild House...

...Alas, what the Philadelphia retrospective brings home is that the emotional power of the great tradition in Western architecture is irrelevant to the Venturis' work...

...It's also the reason the modernist juggernaut has triggered the rapid growth of the historic preservation movement in recent decades...

...These projects embody cherished regional building traditions that people want to shape their surroundings, rather than the ugly and ordinary architecture that they all too often have to live with...

...Ray Gindroz and other New Urbanist architects have in recent years designed public housing projects as mixed-income neighborhoods, variously consisting of row houses, modest detached residences, and apartment buildings...

...At the same time, its central façade is a weird sort of billboard whose flatness is emphasized by little slits in the brick masonry at the top, and whose arrangement of balconies surmounted by lunette windows lends an oddly abstract, totemic quality...

...The architect, Venturi asserted, should use "conventional elements unconventionally"— and with his mother's house, he certainly did...

...Inside, the stairway's railing runs at an oblique angle to the chimney breast abutting the other side of the stairs...

...But his cultural realism stripped his architecture not merely of transcendent value, but of dignity and gravity...

...Rather than a brave new world, the Venturis saw a flat new world of billboards, neon signs, and T.V...

...Now that they've reached the autumn years of their long practice, the Venturis are perhaps somewhat uneasy about their legacy...

...It was by eschewing absolute abstraction and including references to classicism in the design of the Vanna Venturi House that the architect made it a cause célèbre within his profession...

...This exhibition of the architecture, urban planning, and decorative art of Venturi and his wife and longtime partner, Denise Scott Brown, will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh next year...

...Venturi said that classical architectural elements could be meaningful, but only if they were distorted...

...A door is stashed off to one side of a large entryway...

...It was an effective retort, in its way, to the hyper-reductionist "high-design" boxes of that time, but it failed to reconnect architecture with its enduring human meaning...

...But Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown prefer merely to refer to historic architectural styles...

...Moreover, their work would offer a sort of running commentary, whimsical and ironic in tone, on the condition of architecture in the age of mass production...

...Diaper patterns in glazed brick, façades covered with red-and-white checkerboards, crude geometric abstractions of traditional ornamental motifs—all involving flat or nearly flat surfaces—figure on the buildings Venturi has designed for prestigious universities since the 1970s...

...According to this absurd mechanistic principle, we should somehow perceive that chains hold up the dome Michelangelo designed for St...

...It reflects the notion of employing architectural elements that can register with more than one "taste culture"—in this case, a community of elderly people of limited means as well as Venturi's professional peers...

...That tradition's power lies primarily in its aesthetic resonance—its engagement with instinctive, enduring human preferences regarding mass, space, profile, and surface enrichment...

...That little exercise in socio-realism backfired, however, as the antenna was taken for a snide gesture and promptly removed...

...But his rarefied semiotics laid the foundations for buildings like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where the whole mess "refers" to the "discontinuity and fragmented quality that characterize contemporary life...

...Blind windows grow shallower...

...During the nineteenth century, theorists like Viollet-le-Duc increasingly rejected the idea of cultural continuity in favor of the Hegelian notion that architecture should somehow express the essence of its age...

...Its design spoke instead to the chosen few engaged in recondite efforts to define the appropriate architecture for contemporary society...

...Instead of advocating design which makes its case on essentially formal and artistic terms, the Venturis compounded the modernist fallacy by espousing an "architecture of meaning" which would expand the range of associative values or references available to architects...

...The model is certainly arresting—in the sense that the house might pass for a neurasthenia incubator...

...Hence the characteristic absence of three-dimensional ornamental detailing on their buildings...

...Venturi's generously illustrated argument embraces a great many traditional buildings, and it has contributed in some measure to the modest classical resurgence now underway...

...But his pilasters' staccato arrangement is deliberately jarring, and a lone, out-of-place engaged column—a reference to the Nelson column in Trafalgar Square that is lost on the uninitiated—strikes another discordant note...

...BY CATESBY LEIGH No architect since Le Cor-busier and Mies van der Rohe has had more impact on his profession than Robert Venturi, whose erudite denunciation of the "puritanically moral language of orthodox modern Catesby Leigh is an architecture critic in Washington, D.C...

...It represents Venturi's response to the stultifying rectilinear geometries the current wisdom imposed...

...The puritanical Moderns had said that classical architectural elements were meaningless and should therefore be abandoned...

...He is seventy-six...

...Modernism before them had restricted itself to the secularized ascetic ideal of "high culture...

...Their ideal architecture, in short, was to conform to as ruthlessly realistic a formula as ever was inflicted on an art form...

...His huge new 866,000-square-foot government complex in Toulouse, France, consists of two long buildings enclosing a pedestrian street...

...One entrance also boasts a pair of what resemble chainsaw-sliced slivers of free-standing columns...

...Such work is an affront not only to their sense of modernity's significance but also to their sense of self and their "creative" prerogatives...

...But he never addressed the root of the problem...

...The concept of "taste cultures" Venturi and Scott Brown acquired from the sociologist Herbert Gans...

...The ends of the bright-red-brick-and-limestone buildings boast fragments of a signboard-rendition of a traditional structure with a pitched roof, and the motif is filled out in the profiles of the flat, glass-clad, multi-story pedestrian bridges set well inside the complex...

...This addition represents the most important British commission ever obtained by an American, and here Venturi's vaunted principle of "contextual-ism"—of designing new city buildings with due regard for their preexisting neighbors—inspired him to offer a tortured echo of the classical colonnades and pilasters of the original building...

...And much as he might pretend to make light of them, Robert Venturi takes those prerogatives very seriously indeed...

...The Venturis would add symbols derived from Levittown and pop-culture Las Vegas, along with the pop art of Rauschenberg and Warhol—thus making buildings "hybrid rather than 'pure,'" buildings that were "difficult wholes" endowed with "messy vitality" rather than oppressively simplistic entities...

...Even the chairs Venturi has designed (included in the exhibition) consist mainly of parodies of familiar styles such as the Chippendale, Sheraton, and Queen Anne...