"Pickle Architecture"

 What sells me Pickles? Maybe Larnell Lewis adding 'Pickle' to a Family Dinner: Volume 3 album, Renzo Piano making a pickle reflect light onto a piece of art, or Sean Brock endorsing a jar of them. Denise Scott Brown's thoughts on 'needs' from her 1971 writing, Learning from Pop  really flew under the radar in this week's discussions on designing within reality, metropolitan architecture, and culture of congestion. Architectural behaviorism and behavioristic analysis was a driver for the modernist architectural movement and Scott Brown proposes a counter argument that leads us into this discussion of designing within reality, context, understanding what people want and using pop culture as a reference. 

    

    I enjoyed the notion of analyzing pop culture and mass media that caters towards what people want and deciding to market to them and their subculture instead of prescribing a singular advertisement to all subcultures that sells the same pickle - which is, a utopian architecture prescription.

... Of course learning from what’s there is subject to the caveats

and limitations of all behavioristic analysis—one is surveying behavior which is

constrained, it is not what people might do in other conditions. The poor do not

willingly live in tenements and maybe the middle classes don’t willingly live in

Levittowns; perhaps the Georgian-styling is less pertinent to the townhouse resident

than is the rent. In times of housing shortage this is a particularly forceful argument

against architectural behaviorism since people can’t vote against a particular offering

by staying away if there is no alternative. To counteract this danger one must

search for comparison environments where for some reason the constraints do not

hold. There are environments which suggest what economically constrained

groups’ tastes might be if they were less constrained. They are the nouveau riche

environments; Hollywood for a former era, Las Vegas for today, and the homes of

film stars, sportsmen, and other groups where upward mobility may resemble vertical

takeoff, yet where maintenance of previous value systems is encouraged. 

    Another source is physical backgrounds in the mass media,

movies, soap operas, pickle and furniture polish ads. Here the aim is not to sell

houses but something else, and the background represents someone’s (Madison

Avenue’s?) idea of what pickle buyers or soap opera watchers want in a house... 

- Denise Scott Brown, Learning From Pop (1971)

    I think assessing needs and understanding economical constraints is incredibly important in problem solving as well as learning to thoughtfully market ideas. Taking cues from pop culture to understand what people want and need in order to get them to buy things, or possibly agree with architecture, I think was a successful strategy and might still have some relevance today. 

    Although I can agree counter arguments can be made to this article, especially when Scott Brown discusses the environment and uses Las Vegas as a reference for design, I think the voice is written with respect to a capitalist economy and political system and is still completely relevant to architectural analysis in the United States today. 

What sells us pickles? What sells us Architecture?