Venturi's Confusion

 

Bruno Zeti 'Towards An Organic Architecture' (1950) was, according to Vincent Scully in the intro of the 1977 reprint of Venturi's book 'Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture', a conscious reply to the austerity of Le Corbusier. 

Venturi sits somewhere between Zeti’s acceptance of the sexy organic and chaotic and the simplified but useful functionality of Modernist dreamers.

‘Venturi is more fragmentary,..his proposals, in their recognition of complexity and their respect for what exists, create the most necessary antidote to the cataclysmic purism of contemporary urban renewal which has presently brought so many cities to the brink of catastrophe, and in which Le Corbusier’s ideas have now found terrifying vulgarization.’ (Scully)

According to Scully the argument goes that if Le Corbusier learnt from the luminous austerity of the Greek temple then Venturi took influence from the ornate facades of Italian buildings - their decorative exterior designs curious flow forming a visual analogy to the parallel inside-outside, outside-inside flow of Italian residents physical movements. 

The self-conscious 'liminality' of the facades functions as a moment of transgressive passage between the communal and the intimate as a psychological / intellectual event congealed in ornate material stuff.

Within a couple pages of his Italian-façade-as-porous-threshold observation Scully confidently states that Venturi is one of the ‘very few architects whose thought parallels that of the Pop painters – and probably the first architect to perceive the usefulness and meaning of their forms’.

So, for Scully, Venturi saw a substantial part of architectures job was to act as a waystation, a valve allowing the action of movement between the outside (of the signage and prompts of popular and Pop Art culture) and the space and structure of an interior space (boiled down to essentials in Modernist architectural dreams).

Hmmm, it seems to be half-sensible, a Pop Art frivolity slathered all over Venturi’s twatting with Modernist tropes but isn’t that, ironically, only true on a lazy surface level? Venturi’s complacency is at a conceptual level rather than a formal or visual one.

It is interesting that within Venturi’s actual text as a model of critical application he indicates the literary criticism of Eliot. In some ways this is very revealing of the internal bifurcation within Venturi's critique of modernist constructions. Venturi is attempting to simultaneously react positively to the ‘natural’ everyday decorative demands of the human animal - bolstering his common-sensical polemic about these needs with an overarching and directive theory - whilst simultaneously locating an essentialist core to human requirements.

Venturi’s text is almost a protracted mission statement for seductively decorative yet functional buildings; that is functional as an ambient salve for the troubled psyche of contemporary urban folk (‘I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.’)

As an arch-ironist, certainly within his practice, it is interesting that Venturi has a swing at ‘… the popularisers who paint ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’ and suppress most complexities and contradictions inherent in art and experience.’ And yet his love of ‘messy vitality over obvious unity’ rests on a belief that architecture ‘has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality.’ 

However, what happens when the totalising principle of Popular culture is already ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality’?

Whilst criticising the debasement of Mie van der Rohe’s expression ‘less is more’ by inferior architects (where less is just less, so a fair point) he opines: ‘An architecture of complexity and contradiction, however, does not mean picturesqueness or subjective expressionism.’

However, Venturi has a tendency to overlook the fact that when dealing with a surplus of the insubstantial more less is just more less automatically leading to ‘picturesqueness or subjective expressionism.’ 

By suggestively paralleling op art and pop art he shows the hidden confusion in his hand. 

Pop art is primarily a conceptual art, a questioning critical deep dive into the engines which drive our cultural concerns; alternatively, op art is pop art with the difficult bits removed.   

Returning to Vincent Scully’s assessment of Venturi in the intro to the reprint of 'Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture' Venturi ‘…Like all original architects, makes us see the past anew.’ 

This is what Venturi signally fails to do. If anything through Venturi we see the now as a perpetual past.

A studied repetition of familiar populist décor and forms colonizing surfaces and invading interiors may add a temporary nipple of pacification to proceedings but it doesn’t have the weird gravitas of Pop Art’s ironic acceptance and sarcastic undermining of cultural norms and taste. Venturi’s art is basically one of resignation and repetition.

It’s not all bad though, he did have an awareness of the contingent nature of his own argument and, I believe, a real thirst for movement and progression within popular architectural builds.

He does register that ‘though we no longer argue over the primacy of form or function… we cannot ignore their interdependence’ and ‘… the variety inherent in the ambiguity of visual perception must once more be acknowledged and exploited.’

The fact of surface is of primary concern, and indeed the perceptual apprehension of an objective solidity of surface and forms is as important as the objective fact of the solidity of surface and forms.

That’s why I think that, in reality, he would like the possibility of relegating his own Las Vegas / Blackpool populism to a new status as another component option within an architecture of ambient mutating textures, really old school formal solidity and complex shadowplay, all interweaving and interleaving with the emblems and icons of transient popular culture if desired.

A new position for architecture of both playground engagement and analytical distancing which the new interiors/ archi-builds should allow - for practical, economic and moral reasons.