Word: venturi
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...remarkable number of today's most celebrated architects are 40 Under 40 alumni from 1966. They include Gunnar Birkerts, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Hugh Hardy, William Pedersen, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, Giovanni Pasanella, James Stewart Polshek, Jaquelin Robertson, Der Scutt, Stern, Stanley Tigerman and Robert Venturi...
Almost immediately, however, the intellectuals' appreciation of some pop began to lose its prickly ironic edge. Robert Venturi, the father of architectural postmodernism, was not joking in Learning From Las Vegas (1972), his analysis-cum-celebration of neon, billboards and America's plebeian pop architecture. Soon the creators of kitsch were sophisticated enough to make fun of themselves even as they were creating new kitsch. The producers of TV's Batman (1966-68) played up the primary-color silliness for camp effect. "Charlie's Angels was great camp," says the show's co-producer, Aaron Spelling, "and the audience accepted...
...decades, however, an avant-garde of populist architectural historians has been looking at the strip and its larger-than-life iconography without conventional middlebrow contempt. The movement's manifesto is Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi's examination of crowd-pleasing architectural symbolism and buildings designed primarily for drivers. The irony is so American, so pop: cultural highbrows celebrating unself-conscious lowbrow vulgarity...
Even his passing, in 1969, came in the nick of time. The American architect Robert Venturi had just published his influential rejection of less-is-more Miesian modernism ("Less is a bore," Venturi punned), and younger colleagues were starting to grumble that the inspirational rigor of the International Style had turned to rigor mortis. Death spared Mies both from seeing any of the lush species of postmodernism and from the ignominy of a public rejection in 1985, when British authorities denied a die-hard Miesian builder permission to put up a high-rise that Mies had designed for the City...
...player and the PC, who wouldn't feel he had seen the future? The playfulness of high-art designers, however, is of a more rarefied kind. Instead of making gadgets, they construct jokes. Sometimes the jokes are academic, such as Michael Graves' neo-Biedermeier chair (1981) and Robert Venturi's line of Chippendale, Queen Anne and Empire parodies (1984). Sometimes the jokes are perverse, and the subject is the material itself. Scott Burton has carved chairs from solid granite (1984) and Gehry's fish-shaped lamp (1983) is made of Formica chips...