Word: venturi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hooray for the demise of glass-boxed Mondrians, and hello to Robert Venturi's "linguistic" variety...
...Venturi saw the everyday commercial vernacular-McDonald's, Ramada Inn, Burger King, Tastee-Freez, Fatburger. Kentucky Fried-as a source, just as the International Style had used the "styleless" metaphor of machinery, biplanes and ocean liners as its source...
...admit symbolism in architecture. As form, the strip is ugly and amorphous. As symbols, it works." In this way, Venturi gave architectural thinking the most angular shove it had received in half a century: away from beautiful, unitary, abstract form, toward linguistic variety and an ironic, mildly dandified awareness of history and how to quote it. The strip was the tool that opened a most curious can of worms...
...Venturi's own buildings, designed in partnership with his wife Denise Scott Brown, John Rauch and Stephen Izenour, are more restrained in their use of Pop motifs than his polemics. As California's Charles Moore remarks, "Venturi has celebrated McDonald's Golden Arches, but I'd take bets he's never eaten a Big Mac." He has built no big commissions, so his intentions read best in his houses, most recently in a ski lodge at Aspen, Colo. It is a stew of historical references: "An Art Nouveau grandfather clock with arts-and-crafts overtones," says Venturi, and overlaid with...
Moore wants buildings to "freshen one's perception of the familiar," rather than turn Pop into a sequence of quotations à la Venturi. He uses space with originality. It is not the "universal" grid-space, the abstract Raum-with-a-view of Bauhaus thought, but a choppily processional medium, full of ambiguities and kinks, stagy...