GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[David Morris]

>From: "jbor" > conscious incorporation of billboard design features: 
>"applied" to a simple structure and "flat," possibly scaled viewed from 
>your car on the highway.

>Yes, I can see what you mean in that design with an enormous clock on it 
>for the Staten Island Ferry Terminal which won a prize and then the local 
>authorities knocked it on the head at the venturi website mark pointed to.

A situation not unlike the veto of Pynchon's Pulitzer.

Robert Venturi's Polemics in _Learning From Las Vegas_ and in  _Complexity 
and Contradiction_ were breakthroughs in architectural thought at the 
crucial years of the early 70's.  He was arguing against a need for an 
architecture that required a full synthesis of human functions into a 
soon-to-become-discovered self-evident form (Form folows Function).  He 
opposed such fully-designed environments, like the houses by FLWright where 
even the furniture is by the Master - in order to fully integrate the 
vision.  He likened such buildings to those you see out on the highway which 
are big iconic sculptures, like the a duck

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/NYFLAduck.html
http://www.loggia.com/vignette/9914.html

For Venturi, the banality of human functions needn't be so gussied-up (or 
contained), or those that defied the formula of the designer be swept under  
the carpet (put in the basement).  He championed the pragmatic, accepting 
modern reality, which includes the strip-mall.

So he accepted a "reality" which was inclusive of our fallen Post-Modern 
condition:  the decorated shed.  Now what really made this revolutionary was 
that true moderns abhor decoration, preferring only the essential.  As one 
of my truly-modernist teachers told me, "Wallpaper was for the past, when 
there was no such thing as TV."  Decoration is what modernism had 
overthrown.

> > The "honesty" of expressing modern materials and construction methods 
>(as opposed to paper-mache eclecticism)

>The papier-mache and the eclecticism don't necessarily have to go together, 
>do they? (Although, again, I know the sorts of pastiche you are talking 
>about.) Isn't cost a factor?

Pastiche and eclecticism are linked here only in present-day attempts to 
recreate architecural forms which have been resurrected from the past (which 
are now also usually econimically beyond our means).

> >  _The Architecture of the Jumping Universe_ presents the idea behind 
>complexity science and chaos theories and shows many examples of 
>architecture based on this new language from the work of leading architects 
>[SNIP] an architecture based on waves and twists.

>Sounds a little like Gaudi, too.

How would you classify him?

DM
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