GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

I think Jencks references Venturi doesn't he, both his architecture and his
books? Anyway, thanks for the reference: I'll check it out. I enjoyed both
of Jencks' books on Postmodernism because they were clear and
liberally-illustrated. I'm not sure that the idea of an "architecture of
realism" really fits in with Pynchon's project all that well though: it's a
question of whose realism? in that epistemological/ontological divide that
McHale (referencing someone else) alerts us to. (Actually, I'm starting to
smell a binary there.)

Isn't one criticism of the sort of architecture that Venturi & co. have
built that people get lost for months at a time in the malls and keep
hitting their heads on things while they're walking around? I understand
that they were concerned to break free from the 'less is more' and 'form
follows function' imprimaturs of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier and Frank
Lloyd Wright et. al., but do they acknowledge their debt to people like
Escher, Kurt Schwitters, the Dadists, Piranesi? Does Venturi endorse
anachoric and anachronistic eclecticism (syncretism?) as part of his project
as well: you know, Ionic and Corinthian facades replete with Gothic
gargoyles and whatnots on and in skyscrapers?

best


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>From: Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>
>To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Sun, Jul 2, 2000, 3:05 PM
>

> If architecture is going to enter into this momo-pomo discussion, here,
> then I would refer everyone to Robert Venturi's great book (written in
> 1962) "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" where he champions
> an architecture of realism in which the manifold complications and
> inconsistencies of life as it is lived are accepted and used as the raw
> material for the creation of art at the highest possible level.
> Mechanisms by which this occurs include (quoted/paraphrased from
> Venturi and Scott-Brown's subsequent book "Learning From las Vegas"):
>
> "double-functioning or vestigial elements, circumstantial distortions,
> expedient devices, eventful exceptions, exceptional diagonals, things
> in things, crowded or contained intricacies, linings or layerings,
> residual spaces, redundant spaces, ambiguities, dualities, difficult
> wholes, (and) the phenomena of both/and (....) inclusion,
> inconsistency, compromise, accommodation, adaptation, superadjacency,
> equivalence, multiple focus, juxtaposition, or good *and* bad space."
>
> With one or two excisions, this list could neatly describe many of
> Pynchon's devices and methods.
>
> Though the book is intended for an audience of architects, it is so
> beautifully written and thoughtfully argued that even you literary
> types (no offense) will enjoy it, and learn from it.
>
> In contrast, Jencks was a journalist, borrowing his licks to suit the
> gig.