After an hour in Italy, I wish I'd become an architect. After a week, I begin to think it's not too late. When I gel home, I'll take some stones, pile them up, cover them with stucco, paint my wall a nice earth color, let it age, plain a vine to spill over the top, have a fountain bubbling nearby, and invite everyone over for an aperitivo. The spell of those old stones can hold me clear across the Atlantic. Then I hit Kennedy, and the futility starts to set in; and soon I'm slouched in the back of a broken-down cab, gazing from the expressway over spec housing, gutted factories, commercial strips, and mostly other cars. Arrivederci, architecture.
That's the moment when I grasp the architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The blissful revelation that real buildings can be prettier than postcards, and the rude awakening from the illusion that their effects can be duplicated anywhere with ease: Venturi and Scott Brown's buildings embody those stales of mind simultaneously. Their buildings start out as shrines to the glories of Western tradition that made Italy every young architect's spiritual home. Then the forms are filtered through a sharp, unsentimental awareness that people came to this country to get away from the conditions that made those glories possible. Then they push beyond that deflating idea to see what can be made from the conditions we've created. No place for architecture? Let's have architecture anyway.
Finally, this past May, Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Architectural Prize. If the Pritzker were as distinguished an award as it's cracked up to be, it would be a scandal that Venturi had to wait in line behind such lesser talents as Philip Johnson and I. M. Pei, and that the prize was not made jointly to Scott Brown, his partner for twenty-five years. (John Rauch, a partner largely responsible for the business end of things, left the firm in 1988.) But the timing of the award is useful. This is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, the "gentle manifesto" that set the Post-Modern movement in motion. And it is good to be reminded, now that this movement has run out of the hype that passed for steam, that these begetters of Post-Modernism neither coined the term nor shared the values, at once mincing and crude, that the term came to denote.
Though Venturi was the pivotal figure in nullifying the Modern movement's declaration of independence from history, he was careful not to repeat the error by declaring his independence from a movement as historically rooted as Modernism itself. Modern forms dominate his influential early work. I grew up around the corner from the Philadelphia home that Venturi designed for his mother in 1962, a building often cited as the birthplace of Post-Modernism's revival of tradition. Could have fooled us. With its angular profile, flat surfaces, and quirky windows, the house stood aesthetically on the Modern--that is, the wrong--side of the tracks from the Norman, Georgian, and Tudor mansions where the rest of the neighborhood was living out its upscale fantasy version of William Penn's Greene Countrie Towne. Today, after the Post-Modern deluge of cornices, porticoes, and Corinthian columns, it's hard to see why Guild House, Venturi's 1963 home for the elderly, once had Modernists in an uproar. The building's unorthodox details, such as the small cuts at the roof line that reveal the front elevation to be a facade, or the fat round column at the entrance, only subtly contradict the initial impression that Guild House is an ordinary dumb Modern block of brick.
More important, Venturi's use of un-Modern forms did not so much contradict as resuscitate Modern ideals. His use of sign language from suburban America extended to our own backyard the aesthetic affinity that Modern architects such as Gropius and Le Corbusier once felt for the craft works of exotic and primitive cultures. In drawing on this vernacular, Venturi continued the honorable Modern aim of pushing the gentlemanly an of architecture further along in a democratic direction.
Still, however gentle his intentions, Venturi knew how to jolt. He and Scott Brown bid goodbye to Good Design and headed for Las Vegas. They called their buildings "billdingboards," and they spoke of the need to "accommodate" public taste instead of living to reform it. Tossing aside Modernism's moral stake in "honestly" expressed, architectural structure, the) spoke of buildings as "decorated sheds," and proceeded to decorate exterior walls with stars, stripes, checks, words, and floral patterns lifted from grandma's sofa.
These flamboyant polemics soon got Venturi and Scott Brown pigeonholed as purveyors of architectural kitsch, a reputation they have been at some pains to connter over the years. Venturi has written that "I would like to make it plain that I consider myself an architect who adheres to the Classical tradition of Western architecture." He is right lo insist that his buildings are more than pop cartoons. But why use the term "Classical" to describe an architecture so profoundly at odds with the ideal of order that the term has come to connote: Of course, Venturi and Scott Brown are sympathetic to the traditional association of Classicism with Jeffersonian democracy, even (or especially) in its knock-off version as a Colonial motif for diners and motels. They are populist humanists. Also, Venturi has long found inspiration in sixteenth-century Mannerism, a period when architects pushed the grammar of the Classical orders past orderly bounds. Yet, as John Shearman has observed, Mannerist architecture owes as much to Gothic as to Classical sources. And it has always struck me that the most telling precedent for Venturi and Scott Brown's ideas is the Victorian rage for Venetian Gothic kindled by that arch anti-Classicist, John Ruskin.
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