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A Conversation with Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown
by Ariel Ben-Amos
April 2004
In 1966, urban architecture was all stark marble plazas, sleek glass towers, and monolithic superblocks. Consider the Pennsylvania State Office Building at Broad and Spring Garden streets. Years ago, this concrete shoebox was the height of bureaucratic taste. Robert Venturi, then a 41-year-old professor with fewer than a dozen buildings to his name, turned this taste on its head with his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Venturi rejected the “puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture,” just as modernist Le Corbusier had responded to the Victorian architecture before him: “I like elements which are hybrid rather than ‘pure,' compromising rather than ‘clean,' distorted rather than ‘straightforward,' ambiguous rather than ‘articulated,' … I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.”
The next year, Venturi married University of Pennsylvania colleague Denise Scott Brown, who would soon join his architecture and design practice in Philadelphia. They followed up Complexity with Learning from Las Vegas. Co-written with Steven Izenour, Las Vegas was one of the first books to advocate that architects pay attention to the vernacular world around them rather than trying to impose their own vision upon it. Where the modernists stuck to an orthodox vocabulary for how buildings should look and what they should mean, Venturi and Scott Brown were willing to accommodate ambiguity, even a sense of humor. Their 1964 design for an egg-shaped fountain at the center of JFK Plaza was to be ringed with the solemn words “Here Begins Fairmount Park.” Approaching automobiles on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway would only have been able to see the words “Park Here,” before pulling into the garage beneath the plaza. (The Fairmount Park Commission went with a simpler fountain and more complicated sign: Gary Indiana's LOVE sculpture.)
Venturi and Scott Brown's designs are all over the city, from the lights on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to Welcome Park near Society Hill to the ghostly skeleton house in Franklin Court on Market Street. They have assumed an active role in local and national planning discussions. Scott Brown was an outspoken critic of a late 1970s proposal to dig a new freeway beneath South and Bainbridge streets and add 14,000 new parking spaces to the neighborhood. She has weighed in on the future of the World Trade Center site on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times and prepared an extensive white paper on the future of Penn's Landing. In the early 1990s, Venturi won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the most prestigious award in the field. Not since the days of Louis Kahn has Philadelphia been home to architects of greater renown.
In his interview with THE INDEPENDENT, Venturi offered praise for one of the works of his forbearers, the PSFS Building at 12th and Market, one of the first Modernist International Style high-rises. “The big ‘PSFS' at the top works very well as an icon,” he said. “It's vivid, and it also gives information. It says “I am the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building. With most buildings today, the architect would not be caught dead having a sign on them. That's considered vulgar or commercial. The wonderful irony is that the PSFS was very high falutin back in its time.”
The interview took place at their offices, in a brick Victorian halfway along Manayunk's Main Street.
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TPI: What are your thoughts on living in Philadelphia?
RV: I loved growing up in Philadelphia. It was such a rich environment for a kid like me, interested in architecture. This was the second largest city in the British empire in the 18th century, so it has Georgian architecture. It has a fine Gothic Revival Victorian period. It has Ecole de Beaux Arts buildings along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and fine 18th century houses above the Schuylkill River. There are great Victorian architects like Frank Furness, whose works were being torn down until several decades ago. And there is great industrial vernacular architecture. This city was the largest heavy-industry center in the world at the time of World War I, so we still have an enormous number of industrial loft buildings, most of which are empty. People are just now beginning to recognize the value of these buildings, because they are adaptable, and because they have become somewhat cheaper to buy. Along North Broad Street and Girard Avenue, in areas that have declined economically, there are fine Victorian houses. These neighborhoods have a combination of residential and church architecture from the middle and late 19th century that should be acknowledged.
DSB: Here, in West Mt. Airy, we could buy a beautiful house that we couldn't afford in New York, London or Paris. It's nice to live in a backwater—there's more room for you. Yet if we had to survive on the work we get in Philadelphia, we would be a very small office indeed. But this would be true for many architects, in New York as well as in Philadelphia.
TPI: What have you been working on lately?
RV: The issue of signs. We are writing a book called Architecture as Signs and Systems, where we talk about the fact that the chic Modern architecture of the 20th century was connected to the aesthetic of contemporary abstract art of the time. But it engaged contradiction because, at the same time, it also adapted an industrial vocabulary. For example, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's building on Park Avenue looked like a factory. In the early 20th century Europeans, not Americans, discovered the validity of American industrial architecture as a basis for a vocabulary of Modern architecture. The American factory building was acknowledged as valid. We are now saying that the equivalent for the 21st century is the American commercial vernacular. Of course Americans are snotty about commercial architecture, “it's vulgar, materialistic, blah blah blah.” We are saying that architecture should not go back to Mies's abstraction. We think we should embrace an ideal of the past, where iconography and signage and symbolism were important. Go back to hieroglyphics, to writing incised upon the temple. Go back to Classical pediments that had sculpture in them. You say, “oh that's art” but it wasn't really art so much; it was explaining the religion at the time. Early Christian architecture and Byzantine architecture are filled with mosaics we now consider to be art, but art was only their secondary function. The mosaics were really signs to teach you, a member of an illiterate populace, about theology; or to convince you to convert to Christianity. Take the stained glass windows of gothic architecture: they were beautiful art, but more important, they offered specific instruction. Now we have billboards. We have light emitting diodes. We have Times Square, the great urban complex of our time, the equivalent of the Piazza San Marco of Venice of the past. The architectural effect of our age should not come from dramatic, expressive, articulated architecture. It should come from the generic loft, the simple building. What is beautiful, then, is not the sculptural effects of the architecture, but the signage on the form. We call that the Decorated Shed. Let's build for the Electronic Age, and for the Information Age.
DSB: We talk about buildings as being Ducks or Decorated Sheds. A Duck is a building whose shape itself conveys a message. It's named for the building, made in the shape of a giant duck, where they sell Long Island duckling, a delicacy. Lucy the elephant in Margate, New Jersey, or City Hall in Philadelphia could also be considered Ducks. Decorated Sheds, on the other hand, are simple structures, like the old industrial lofts found along rail lines in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. These buildings let in a lot of light. They're sturdy and ample. When I was a student, I used to say that the only bad thing about them was that they had some decoration over the doorway. Then, as we were beginning to study Las Vegas, I began to realize that the decoration over the doorway was a much more direct way of signifying in architecture than distorting the whole building to make it look modern. We're interested in the notion of doing architecture in a plain, straightforward way, then putting an appliqué of message on the outside. In the end that's more direct than distorting the structure and function of the building to convey a message.
RV: The Decorated Shed is not only commercial of course. Nassau Hall at Princeton and William and Mary Hall at William and Mary College are loft buildings or Sheds of the 18th century, with ornament around the door or a cupola on the roof that says, “I am not a mill, I am not a factory, I am an academic building.” Even the Italian palazzo of the Renaissance was, in a way, a decorated shed. It was a kind of generic loft building with classical pilasters and columns on the façade, which made it a palace.
TPI: How do you feel about the relation between graffiti and architecture?
RV: We have mixed feelings. I wouldn't want people to put graffiti on buildings we've designed. On the other hand, graffiti on ordinary—or, let's say, ‘generic' buildings—can be richly decorative. Graffiti is not necessarily bad. We feel sympathetic toward the mural, which is a kind of high-falutin graffiti. We finished a campus center at Princeton, the Frist Campus Center, and on the walls inside we have what we call ‘ornamental graffiti.' These are sayings by famous Princeton graduates—John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, people like that. That's a form of graffiti that's valid. There's a tradition of classical buildings having words on their façades.
TPI: The dominant signs of the electronic age are television commercials. How do you put that narrative into buildings?
RV: The tesserae of the mosaics were permanent. Now we have pixels. Our individual elements are constantly changing, and that enhances community. You go to Times Square and you see the news. The whole front of a building can contain electronic stuff, talking about the stock market and what's happening in general, newswires. In Japan, electronic billboards convey changing, dynamic information. They create an aesthetic that is whammo. The electronic medium can accommodate that whammo sensibility. By comparison, the subtlety of modern architecture is old fashioned. Le Corbusier said architecture is the “play of masses brought together in light,” with shadows and shades and all that. Now that you have whammo, the context has to work, and the idea of using convention—slightly tweaked and changed, as appropriate—is more valid for today than that of inventing a new vocabulary. We say: It's better to be good than original. Look at Michelangelo, arguably the greatest architect in history. When he did the dome of Saint Peter's in Rome, it was based on the dome of Brunelleschi in Florence, designed one hundred years earlier. Michelangelo wasn't being original; he was being good. The very idea of originality comes out of Romantic art of the 19th century and is old-fashioned.
DSB: We are very interested in archetypes, in typologies. Imagine a toy train that runs through a small, toy-train town. What would the post office, schoolhouse, and town hall look like in that little town? Those are generic types. When we design, say, a school building, we try to keep the generic in mind.
RV: There's a tendency now for buildings to be dramatic, expressionistic, original, sculptural kinds of objects. But there is another tradition of the building that is not revolutionary but that evolves over time and connects with convention. And it can still be good architecture.
TPI: Has the state of celebrity architecture affected your practice? Do you feel as though you have to shock now? And how does the work that you have done in the past influence your work now?
DSB: We were once young and struggling, but Bob was something of a celebrity while he was young and struggling, because he had written Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Now we are highly out of fashion in the US, but people in Europe, particularly young people, are telling us they see our work as really important for the future. Few museums will hire us today. For them, we are used goods, used by other museums. But we work for wonderful small museums, and there are other arenas for work. We seldom find these new opportunities, they find us. As the font dried up for museums, people approached us to design campus plans, campus centers, libraries and lab buildings. There's been a huge change in the work we do from the 1970s to now. In that time our ideas have grown and changed too. Sometimes people want us to design a building as we would have done in 1964. They think we will still be doing the same thing.
RV: We are thinking of changing my name to Roberto Venturi because everybody is hiring foreign architects. All the new buildings being designed along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway are by foreign architects. You mentioned shock. You can say the idea is to create shock by being original: maybe our approach is to shock by being vulgar—
DSB: —and by being ordinary.
RV: We think “heroic and original” is inappropriate. Ordinary can be appropriate. You accept the conventional and then you tweak it.
TPI: How do you keep seeing things anew?
DSB: I had been looking at popular culture in Africa before I came here, so when I got here, I went on doing what I had been doing, taking photographs of ads, and industrial architecture, and of things that excited me in the everyday environment. When Bob and I first met he was intrigued by my view of Philadelphia because I would see things he was familiar with through my outsiders' eyes. When we drove around the city, I would become a visiting anthropologist, photographing things Philadelphians might miss.
RV: Denise did help me see the ordinary as extraordinary here in Philadelphia. I had a similar experience myself, as an American artist abroad. And living in Rome for two years helped me see the American city and the gridiron plan objectively. Being an expatriate allowed me to be stimulated and thrilled by the ordinary of my own environment when I came back.
TPI: By seeing the extraordinary and then seeing the ordinary?
RV: Seeing that the ordinary has a quality to it that is extraordinary as well.
Ariel Ben-Amos contributed to this article.
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