GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[David Morris]

>From: "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?

Two books by Venturi, _Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture_ and 
_Learning From Las Vegas_ both point to early PoMo (early '70's to early 
'80's) trends in architecture, which Venturi&Co pursued in their work.  
Mark's word-choice "realism" is poor, but I know what he intends.  It has to 
do w/ the inclusion, even celebration, of low "art" into "high" design.  
Venturi's particular take on this theme pushed the design of a building 
conceived as a "decorated shed" (as opposed to a "Duck", meaning a building 
which is conceived of as a form which must then be stuffed w/ its functional 
spaces), which meant conscious incorporation of billboard design features: 
"applied" to a simple structure and "flat," possibly scaled viewed from your 
car on the highway.

>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?

This sounds more like the much-later (and currently very big) 
deconstructionist school of PoMo (which architects would not call themselves 
PoMo).

>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?

Other early PoMo architects followed more of what you seem to be invoking 
above (the late Charles Moore comes to mind).  This sort of 
pastiche-eclecticism is currently very out-of-style.  There is a sort of 
resurgence today of some modernist ideals: Deconstructionists employ some 
very anti-traditional/abstract forms.  Others have re-embraced the 
vocabulary of "classical" modernism/industrialism.  The "honesty" of 
expressing modern materials and construction methods (as opposed to 
paper-mache eclecticism) is also on the rise.

Charles Jenks has a new book out (which I've not read) which seems to imply 
a new "movement" afoot in the trends above:

http://www.tometa.com/book/bucharles.htm

"Charles Jenks has the uncanny capacity to announce a new movement in 
architecture before it has began. With Post-Modernism, he was looking to the 
past. Now, for the first time, with his new book in morphogenesis he is 
taking a look at the future. There is no quest on that his argument will 
have an important critical effect on architecture at the beginning of the 
new millennium."
Peter Eisenman, Architect

Where should architecture go in the 1990s? In what style should we build? 
What content should architecture, the most public and rermanent of the arts, 
represent? _The Architecture of the Jumping Universe_ presents the ideas 
behind complexity science and chaos theories and shows many examples of 
architecture based on this new language from the work of leading architects 
- Peter Eisenman, Frank O Gehry, Renzo Piano, Charles Correa and Itsuko 
Hasegawa - along with ecological and organic designs. Charles Jencks' own 
recent work is used to illustrate concepts in physics, and an architecture 
based on waves and twists. This clear and concise polemic both advocates and 
criticizes as it seeks to define a new direction for the contemporary arts.

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