Word: venturi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DESIGN Robert Venturi, pioneer of Postmodernism, finally...
...however, the movement that Venturi had provoked was ascendant, ubiquitous. The more popularly celebrated and lucrative careers of Michael Graves and Robert Stern in the '80s and '90s depended on Venturi's breakthroughs in the '60s; Philip Johnson's highboyish AT&T Building, dreamed up in the late 1970s, might have been created by Venturi a decade earlier. "If you invent something," Scott Brown says, "it has a sort of agony to it. Your followers can take that as a point of departure -- it is much easier for them to make it beautiful." Finally Venturi gets to the bottom line...
Occasionally, however, it all works out. The five-story Seattle Art Museum is good-size but hardly expansive. The interior is lucid and properly restrained. It is, in Venturi's famous phrase, a "decorated shed." Around the front doors, the facade is a riot of color, pattern and material: red granite topped by green, blue and yellow tiles, zigzags of terra cotta, bluestone squares and vaguely Moorish arches in sandstone. A grand staircase runs the length of the building, paralleling the street outside; in fact, the stairs become something of an interior street, giving on to an open-front mezzanine...
...floors of permanent galleries have a similar elegant coherence. On each floor a wide corridor runs east to west, with floor-to-ceiling windows at each end, to bring in natural light and let wanderers know where they are. Throughout are refined Venturi details (granite thresholds, for instance) and also Venturi perversity (columns placed a few inches from a wall simply to create an unnavigable isthmus...
...city -- stylish but not quite trendy, unpretentiously cosmopolitan. Seattle seems to agree. On the day the first part of the museum opened to the public in December, there was a line around the block until closing time at 9 p.m., despite a rainstorm. "When people don't like it," Venturi says unconvincingly, "it doesn't bother me too much. On the other hand, I find that I do love it when people like the building." He may be the most influential American architect of the late 20th century, but in the end, like Sally Field, he just wants to know...