An Introduction to Architectural Theory

1968 to the Present

Harry Francis Mallgrave, David J. Goodman

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444395983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

A sharp and lively text that covers issues in depth but not to the point that they become inaccessible to beginning students, An Introduction to Architectural Theory is the first narrative history of this period, charting the veritable revolution in architectural thinking that has taken place, as well as the implications of this intellectual upheaval.

• The first comprehensive and critical history of architectural theory over the last fifty years
• surveys the intellectual history of architecture since 1968, including criticisms of high modernism, the rise of postmodern and poststructural theory, critical regionalism and tectonics
• Offers a comprehensive overview of the significant changes that architectural thinking has undergone in the past fifteen years
• Includes an analysis of where architecture stands and where it will likely move in the coming years

Part One

1970s

1

Pars Destruens

1968–1973

If the social and political events of 1968 made manifest the outlines of an architectural crisis of confidence, it certainly did not offer much in the way of details or explanation. In fact, if one simply looks at the professional journals and published texts of around this time, one might be hard pressed to find any evidence of a rupture with past practices. For instance, Vittorio Gregotti concluded his New Directions in Italian Architecture in 1968 with a chapter on the student revolts within Italian schools of architecture, but none of his illustrations suggested a pending break with the modernist tradition. In Europe the most significant project on the boards in 1968 was the complex planned for the Munich Olympics of 1972, a design of Günther Behnisch in collaboration with Frei Otto. Similarly, Robert Stern ended his New Directions in American Architecture of 1969 with Paul Rudolph’s project for Stafford Harbor, Virginia – fully within the mainstream of high modernism. In the same year, Louis Kahn, with buildings going up in Exeter, New Haven, Fort Worth, and India, was representing the Philadelphia School, while one of the busiest offices in the United States, Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, was overseeing the construction of Memorial Coliseum and the Knights of Columbus complex in New Haven. If there was one omen suggesting the demise of modernism in 1969 it was the passing of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe – the last two “masters” of the gilded pantheon.

But journals and books do not always tell the story, particularly in that the principal divide that came out of 1968 was a generational one. Moreover, it was a divide that would oppose the ideological platform of high modernism, not with a unifying counter-strategy but rather with a fragmentation of theory, tentative starts and stops in how, indeed, one could proceed. There was also a sharp political and cultural divide that separated North American and European theory in the years surrounding 1968, which can be illustrated by reviewing the contrary positions of Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi. Both published important books in 1966 in which they voiced their quiet dissatisfaction with the status quo. Both continued to develop their ideas over the next few years, and both, subsequently, would lead identifiable schools of thought that – by the middle of the 1970s – could be characterized as distinct branches on the sprouting tree of “postmodernism.” Nevertheless, the two schools were radically at odds in their theoretical underpinnings.

Venturi and Scott Brown

Robert Venturi was the first to establish his credentials as an apostate. He received his architecture degree from Princeton in 1950 and, after stays in the offices of Oscar Stonorov, Louis Kahn, and Eero Saarinen, he won the Rome Prize in 1954 and embarked on an extended residence in that city. He entered private practice in Philadelphia in 1957 and within a few years had carried out a number of small commissions, among them the design of his mother’s house in Chestnut Hill (1959–1964), the North Penn Visiting Nurses Association (1961–1963), and the Guild House (1961–1966). Equally important for his development was his connection with the University of Pennsylvania, where in the early 1960s he taught one of the first courses on theory within an American architectural program. From his notes for this class he composed a preliminary manuscript for a book in 1963, and three years later, after revisions, it was published by the Museum of Modern Art under the title Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

The book, which aspired to be a “gentle manifesto,” is more complex than a first reading might suggest. To start with, it is a composite humanist tract drawing upon the recent work of Louis Kahn and Alvar Aalto, the anthropological perspective of Aldo van Eyck, the semiotic interests of Tomás Maldonado, the sociology of Herbert Gans, as well as Venturi’s own fascination with both mannerism and the relatively recent phenomenon of pop art. It opens with a plea for a mannerist phase of modernism, which he articulates through a set of formal or compositional maneuvers drawn in part from literary theory. These are strategies for injecting complexity and contradiction into design, which he explains in chapters with such titles as the “Double-Functioning Element,” “Contradiction Adapted,” and “Contradiction Juxtaposed.”

Another novelty of the book is its heavy reliance on historical examples, many of which are mannerist and baroque buildings from Italy and the United Kingdom. They serve to buffer his case for visual complexity and ambiguity, and this use of history to support a contemporary case for design was unusual at this time. Still another aspect of the short book is its frank, polemical tone. In an often cited example, he subverts such high-minded modernist clichés as Mies van der Rohe’s reported adage, “Less is more,” by playfully responding “Less is a bore.” Then again, his examples, repeatedly drawn from architects like Kahn and Aalto, testify to the fact that his rejection of “the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture” was by no means unconditional or even considerable at this date. Moreover, Venturi presents his (often perceptual) arguments for a mannerist phase of modernism with a certain literary aplomb.

But the book on occasions also betrays what would become Venturi’s evolving thought. In scattered places in the later chapters, the theme of formal ambiguity is conjoined with sub-themes that are lurking, as it were, within the text. One is his fondness for “rhetorical” or “honky-tonk” elements drawn from popular culture. Venturi justifies their incorporation into a new and more inclusive architecture first on the basis of their (pop-art inspired) realism and second as a gesture of social protest against a political system currently engaged in an unpopular war.¹ Another sub-theme to emerge is Venturi’s incipient populism. For instance, in arguing against Peter Blake’s comparison of the chaos of “Main Street” with the orderliness of Thomas Jefferson’s campus at the University of Virginia, Venturi insists that not only are such comparisons meaningless but they also raise the question of “is not Main Street almost all right?”² It is a scarcely subtle challenge to modernist sensibilities with regard to the postwar emphasis on large-scale planning and compositional order, and Venturi’s concluding sentence of the book reveals that he was already on the verge of adopting a more radical position with respect to the issue: “And it is perhaps from the everyday landscape, vulgar and disdained, that we can draw the complex and contradictory order that is valid and vital for our architecture as an urbanistic whole.”³

It is around this time – in 1965 or 1966 – that the formidable influence of Denise Scott Brown also becomes evident. This Zambian-born architect, together with her husband, Robert Scott Brown, had come to the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s to study under Kahn. Robert died in a tragic accident in 1959, but Denise advanced her interest in urban studies by taking courses with David Crane, Herbert Gans, and Paul Davidoff, among others. Prior to coming to Philadelphia, she had attended the Architectural Association in London and thus had a front-row seat for the “New Brutalist” phenomenon of the mid-1950s. It was in part this critical perspective (a gritty antipathy toward high modernism) that she brought to Penn, and after joining the faculty she collaborated with Venturi in the course of theory between 1962 and 1964.

The following year Scott Brown took a visiting position at the University of California at Berkeley, where she co-taught a course with the somewhat controversial urban sociologist Melvin Webber. In a now classic essay of 1964 he had taken to task the axiom that cities should be organized around a central downtown hub or regional center. He pointed to the transformation taking place in communication patterns – the fact that many businesses interact not locally but nationally or globally – and argued that in the future it will be these electronic patterns (not such traditional features as urban spaces) that will become “the essence of the city and of city life.”⁴

Scott Brown, together with Gordon Cullen, responded in 1965 with several articles under the title “The Meaningful City,” which analyzed the city under the four themes of perception, messages, meaning, and the modern image. What united these analyses was the idea of a “symbol,” which was at heart a criticism of the city as envisioned by postwar planners. In the view of Scott Brown, planners were failing to understand urban forms and the symbolic way in which most inhabitants read them: “We do not lack for symbols, but our efforts to use them are unsubtle and heavy handed. In the planning offices of most cities even this much is not achieved, and the situation goes by default.”⁵ This focus on urban communication was the new perspective that Scott Brown offered Venturi – when the two architects married in the summer of 1967. From this juncture their writings and ideas became a collaborative effort.

Venturi’s populism and Scott Brown’s urban focus first became evident in a joint studio the two taught at Yale in 1967, which considered the redesign of a subway station in New York City. In the following year, as much of the world was descending into chaos, the two architects offered their Yale students a studio on “The Strip” in Las Vegas. The results were first published in two essays that appeared in 1968, and together they formed the cornerstones of their book Learning from Las Vegas (1972).

In the first essay the two chided modern architects for their elitist and purist displeasure with existing conditions, and especially the commercial vernacular of the city. In their view, the professional establishment was pretentiously abandoning the tradition of iconology and thereby standing aloof from the “architecture of persuasion.” Comparing their recent trip to Las Vegas to the revelation architects traditionally experience when visiting the historic squares of Italy, Venturi and Scott Brown made their point in an overtly controversial way:

Figure 1.1 Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, published by The MIT Press, © MIT 1972.

For young Americans in the 1940s, familiar only with the auto-scaled, gridiron city, and the antiurban theories of the previous architectural generation, the traditional urban spaces, the pedestrian scale, and the mixtures yet continuities of styles of the Italian piazzas were a significant revelation. They rediscovered the piazza. Two decades later architects are perhaps ready for similar lessons about large open space, big scale, and high speed. Las Vegas is to the Strip what Rome is to the Piazza.⁶

In their second essay of 1968, Scott Brown and Venturi drew their famous distinction between the “sign which is the building” (the duck) and the “sign which fronts the building” (later to be named the decorated shed). They candidly expressed their preference for the latter, if only because it “is an easier, cheaper, more direct and basically more honest approach to the question of decoration; it permits us to get on with the task of making conventional buildings conventionally and to deal with their symbolic needs with a lighter, defter touch.”⁷ The implications of this preference for their own practice would, of course, be immense, but so too would their well-defined break with modernism’s technological vision. Actually, they emphatically made this last point in the final pages of Learning from Las Vegas by countering Mies van der Rohe’s “symbolically exposed but substantially encased steel frame” with John Ruskin’s “once-horrifying statement” that architecture is but “the decoration of construction.”⁸

Such sentiments would not go unchallenged, but interestingly the pushback came not from established modernists but from younger architects of the same generation with competing views. In 1970 the Argentine painter Tomás Maldonado, who some years earlier had pioneered courses on communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm, responded sharply to such ideas by insisting that the neon signs of Las Vegas represented neither a populist act nor a condition of visual richness but rather “chit-chat,” a “depth of communicative poverty” that simply pandered “to the needs of casino and motel owners, and to the needs of real estate speculators.”⁹

An even more pointed rebuttal appeared in 1971 in a special bilingual issue of Italy’s leading journal, Casabella, a number that was orchestrated by Peter Eisenman. Scott Brown was appropriately allowed to set the stage with an essay entitled “Learning from Pop,” in which she expanded the lesson plan of Las Vegas by noting that architects should also study “Los Angeles, Levittown, the swinging singles on the Westheimer Strip, golf resorts, boating communities, Co-op City, the residential backgrounds to soap operas, TV commercials and mass mag ads, billboards, and Route 66.”¹⁰ Another part of the new curriculum is the beloved suburban home and its owner’s quaint touches of respectability: sweeping lawns, decorative plantings, driveway gateways, columns, and coach lamps beside the front door (her Yale studio of 1970 was entitled “Learning from Levittown”). Architects should come here to learn, she continues, in part because of the massive failure of urban renewal programs in America, in part because of the liberal culture of elitism that rules the profession. Scott Brown counters with a defiant populist stance:

The forms of the pop landscape are as relevant to us now, as were the forms of antique Rome to the Beaux-Arts, Cubism, and Machine Architecture to the early Moderns, and the industrial midlands and the Dogon to Team 10, which is to say extremely relevant, and more so than the latest bathysphere launch pad, or systems hospital (or even, pace Banham, the Santa Monica pier).¹¹

Scott Brown’s relatively brief polemic was rejoined by much lengthier remarks by Kenneth Frampton, which picked up where Maldonado’s earlier criticisms had ended. With opening citations by Hermann Broch, the Vesnin brothers, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse – as well as some particularly gruesome photographs of an automobile accident by Andy Warhol – Frampton counters her main contention with great seriousness:

Do designers really need elaborate sociological ratification à la Gans, to tell them that what they want is what they already have? No doubt Levittown could be brought to yield an equally affirmative consensus in regard to current American repressive policies, both domestic and foreign. Should designers like politicians wait upon the dictates of a silent majority, and if so, how are they to interpret them? Is it really the task of under-employed design talent to suggest to the constrained masses of Levittown – or elsewhere – that they might prefer the extravagant confines of the West Coast nouveau-riche; a by now superfluous function which has already been performed more than adequately for years by Madison Avenue? In this respect there is now surely little left of our much vaunted pluralism that has not already been overlaid with the engineered fantasies of mass taste.¹²

Frampton further rejects the values of a society that gauges its standard of living by its automobiles, television sets, and airplanes, and it is ultimately the critical theory of the Frankfurt School that he embraces as well as the ideas of Clement Greenberg – where the role of the artistic avant-garde is precisely to resist capitalist culture and its seemingly inevitable production of kitsch.

Rossi and Tafuri

Rossi’s thought during these same years displays a similar antipathy toward modernist ideals, but from a very contrary perspective. The Milan native received his architectural training at that city’s Polytechnic University in the 1950s, and, while still a student, he was invited by Ernesto Rogers to write for Casabella-continuità. Altogether, Rossi penned 31 articles, which included book reviews and essays on both historical and topical issues, such as the...