GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> I think Jencks references Venturi doesn't he, both his architecture
> and his
> books? 
No doubt he does...

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? 

What I meant by "realism" is something perhaps akin to Realpolitik: you
accept the world and work with what you have, rather than artifically
restricting the problems you choose to address in your work.  Venturi
and Scott-Brown champion "messy vitality" rather than unity, clarity,
or strightforwardness. They learn from and try to use the innovations
of our (now global) commercial culture in the context of civic and
institutiional architecture.


in that epistemological/ontological divide
> that
> McHale (referencing someone else) alerts us to. (Actually, I'm
> starting to
> smell a binary there.)
> 

I'm not equipped with this vocabulary or these references.  Sorry I
can't play...

> 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? 

Venturi and co (who do you mean?  His partners and colleagues?  His
imitators? His admirers?) don't build malls, and people don't "get
lost" or hit their heads in his buildings. I'm sorry, but this is a
silly thing to say...

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?

He is indebted to none of these.  You are thinking, I believe, of the
"Deconstructivist" strain of moderist revival so popular in the 1990's.
 The "Decon" (and I hate that term almost as intensely as I am bored by
their work) seek to express the existential status of contemporary man
through form which is chaotic, psuedo-random, alienating, and either
purposefully meaningless or crammed with (unrecoverable) profundities.
To lump a whole lotta folks together unfairly I mention the most
notorious: Peter Eisenman, Vaha Hadid, Frank Gehry (no doubt the best
of this group, and the worst fit into my little pigeonhole here), the
deplorable Peter Pran, Coop Himmelblau, and on and on...  These folks
might be most indepted to Schwitters, Dada, and Piranesi.  Venturi
clearly is not. And Escher? No architect is never indepted to Escher!

 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?

I can't find anachoric in my dictionary, here... "anachronistic"
eclecticism, not usually but sometimes... syncretism certainly, thats
what pluralism is all about... Ionic and corinthian facades no, but he
does use columns that look like columns on occasion... gargoyles and
whatnots on and in skyscrapers? Almost never! 

Check out the firm's web site:  www.vsba.com 
And the fairly recent books "Iconography and Electronics Upon A Generic
Architecture" and "On Houses and Housing".

Mark


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