A Gentle Manifesto?

Venturi and Scott-Brown describe a new scale of landscape that leaves no time “to ponder paradoxical subtleties.”  A world of bold impact, big spaces and high speeds.  And where Venturi thrives in seemingly blaring contradictions.  

Las Vegas paints a picture of extreme symbolism in the commercialized architecture of post-war america, yet the sign goes much deeper than a brightly lit logo or kitschy building form.  The entrapments of the “decorated shed” are pointing towards the what the building holds, but what happens when the signified changes?  In language the evolution of words and their meaning is much more fluid, evolving alongside society.  But unlike language architecture is physically present; where a string of articulated sounds are fleeting, the duck-shaped building is still there whether the business remains the same.  

In architecture this evolution moves slowly in a self-referential loss of meaning.  Venturi understands these entrapments and exposes them: the split gable roof, a stair to nowhere.  When the suburban landscape of Levittown put up partial picket fences and fixed shutters on rapidly built affordable homes it was referencing bucolic imagery from the generations before who may have had these elements operating in their previous function.  In Levittown they are objects symbolizing domestic comfort.  Move forward to the present and the suburban homes of the upper-middle class refer back to suburban patterns several generations removed.  

Venturi and Scott-Brown are not free from this situational irony.  The Lieb House with its self-effacing 9 on the front celebrated the banal, sitting in a coastal New Jersey Community of beach cottages.  But when Venturi fans saved the building by placing it behind a larger Venturi beach house, it became a guest house: the “9” address no longer relevant.  

When does reality become grotesque?  When does architecture become distorted or extravagant?  The augmented reality of Las Vegas is no less extreme than the Rococo Venturi references in Complexity and Contradiction or Rem Koolhaas’ depiction of Manhattan.