Friday, June 27, 2008
Learning from Los Angeles 2019...
Or Learning from Las Vegas II
Or In Defense of Post-Modernism in the Dystopian Future
If one were to begin analyzing the architecture and the urban conditions in Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, there would probably be a stunning similarity between the interpretations of Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form and the set/environment design of the landmark cyberpunk film.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown are probably best known for being supportive of the reintroduction of symbolism into constructed works of architecture. From where I come, that means post-modernism and architectural post-modernism is a very big, bad thing. The reason for this comes from when people started to become disaffected with the modern movement and felt that it did not relate or express their current standing in place or history. Someone, somewhere identified lost values and a lost symbolism so ultimately a movement formed to reclaim representations of nationalistic and societal strength and stability. In many cases, visions of modern architecture did not adequately represent the nostalgia that so many people craved so architects were forced to go back to ancient/historical architectural elements that evoked these subconscious symbolic relationships.
At this point, things started to go wrong for architectural post-modernism. Society could not give up the conveniences that modern architectural technology had developed. Instead of building modern, steel skyscrapers that looked like modern, steel skyscrapers, we ended up building modern, steel skyscrapers that had classical elements appliqued to the surfaces. Classical pediments framed the public entrances to skyscrapers and Renaissance-inspired colonades flanked office buildings.
A great visual of this phenomena comes from the 1949 film The Fountainhead. After having designed an office tower, the architect (Howard Roark) has clients marvelling at an inovative structure and the arrangement of the building's layout. They do, however, have a small issue with the design. In front of the architect, they proceed to describe that they might like the building to look more traditional and add elements to the model to illustrate their point. In essence, they take a fairly simple International Style tower and turn it into something that resembles the Grand Central/Met Life debacle.
In essence, these are the accepted characteristics of architectural post-modernism, and thus, the stigma of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. A stigma that is undeserved because it is based on the assumption of that Venturi and Scott Brown are compliant in this expression of symbolism in architecture. Through their writings, especially Learning from Las Vegas, they distance themselves from the architectural post-modernism but align themselves with a larger, more global definition of post-modernism.
And this is why the surface of buildings by Venturi Scott Brown and Associates is so interesting. They recognized the duality between modern construction and postmodern appliqué but did not discredit the layering; they rejected the inappropriate use of symbolism. From the point of this observation, VSBA have been working on a body of work that may be described as a dictionary of [post]modern architectural grammar. And although many of their ideas get lost behind the super-graphics, patterns, and colors, there exists a deep and rigorous experimentation of what can be, or is, architecture.
In the current world of sound-bite information, it may not be possible for many young architects or architecture students to see the work of VSBA for anything more than Guild House or the Vanna Venturi House, but there have been others that radically pushed the boundaries of architecture and design. One such project was the competition entry for the National College Football Hall of Fame. Before the current flashing displays of Times Square, before LED technology, and even before the creation of computers capable of film editing, sequencing and projection, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown proposed a giant electronic billboard in lieu of facade for the Hall of Fame project.
Instead of a mini-replica stadium (which is what was actually built), the building would be a constant highlight reel. Promoting the actual players and game, not the nostalgic feeling of entering a post-WWII memorial football field. And although Denise Scott Brown's billboard was later realized by VSBA at New York's Whitehall Ferry Terminal, the electronic billboard became one of the most iconic scenes of science fiction as commercial blazed twenty-four hours a day in a Los Angeles of 2019.
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