Contradiction In Architecture Research Articles

Robert Venturi’nin ‘Las Vegas’ın Öğrettikleri’ Kitabı Üzerine Bir İnceleme

The aim of this study is to analyze; academician, architect and architectural theorist Robert Venturi’s groundbreaking books in the world of architecture;’Learning from Las Vegas’ and ‘Re-Learning from Las Vegas’, in terms of postmodern urban design. For this purpose, the study focuses onthe different dynamics of architecture and tries to reveal the effects and contributions of the local context to thearchitectural concept and urban design with the contradictions and complexities it creates. The study that dealswith the dynamics of architecture, apart from the space, in terms of local context via Las Vegas Boulevard; examines dynamics such as communication / symbolic / non-architect architecture. Hence, while referring to post-modernism, a period of pivotal architecture, he particularly focuses on ; Learning from Las Vegas; to explain how the Everyday urban landscape of Venturi’s Las Vegas Strip, emerged eclectically and quickly. In the article, the architecture of Las Vegas Strip, which was the beginning of post-modernism in the 1960s, has been discussed in terms of urban design and urban landscape, focusing on the reflections of symbolic (sign) architecture and eclecticism. The everyday design philosophy of the boulevard is examined. While discussing Venturi’s discourse on ‘what we need to learn from Las Vegas’, it is also intended to reveal why he actually praises everyday architecture. Venturi, who is a member of the advisory board of Princeton University's School of Architecture and Urban Design, clearly demonstrated the philosophy of architecture in the book "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" presented in 1966; Again for the first time in this work, he responded to Mies Van Der Rohe, who is known with the phrase "Less is more", with "Less is bore" (less
 boring). Therefore, in the study, the understanding of urban design that emerged in the post-modern period has been investigated through Venturi’s interpretations and works, and an analysis has been made on how architecture, a local context consisting of symbols and hangars has a wide impact in the world.

Preserving the past or past preserving: sustaining the legacy of postmodern museum architecture

The publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1964 signaled the end of Modernism. The reality was that the modern movement had already jettisoned its ideological underpinnings and had become merely another ‘style.’ The avant garde architects in Europe and in North America were ready to move on and saw Postmodernism as a liberating antidote to the strictures of high Modernism. Historic architectural styles, which had been vilified as antiquated and out of step with modern culture, were revived, reinterpreted, and manipulated. However, Postmodernism, which had burned brightly during the 1970s and 1980s, was superseded by other architectural movements, namely, Deconstructivism, Pluralism, during the waning years of the 12th century.Even though new building forms and design theory changed during Postmodernism, building technology remained the same. Exterior walls continued to be built as skins, comprised of either glass, masonry, metal, or synthetic cladding, which were hung of steel or concrete framing. Rubberised membranes covered essentially flat roofs. Moisture infiltration was managed in ever complex composite wall assemblies. More important, environmental systems decoupled nature from interiors and were designed to manage ever demanding humidity control requirements. Through the development of new building technology, Modernism severed design style from traditional construction. In re-introducing historical forms back into architecture, Postmodernism complicated constructability. Moreover, Postmodernism and its successors rarely developed new technological ideas by introducing more intricate building forms, which were based on theoretical ideas rather than technical ones, while continuing to employ Modernism building technology into their buildings. This inherent paradox is the most consequential challenge in preserving Postmodernism. Today, approximately 40 years after its inception, we must consider if, in some cases. is it tenable to preserve Postmodern buildings?This paper reassesses three museums of the Postmodern era through the twin lenses of historic preservation and their legacy as cultural artifacts. It analyses how three iconic Postmodern museums, the Wexner Centre for the Arts in the USA, the Neue Staatsgalerie in Germany, and the Hedmark Museum in Norway, became cultural artifacts and how each of them present technical challenges for their future preservation. These museums represent late 20th century theoretical ideas, which were more a melding of pluralistic influences than design ideology, and the utilisation of Modernist technology. All of which present unique conditions for conservation.

It is time to look back on postmodernism

It is time to look back on postmodernism

Review: John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by Mardges Bacon, and Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years, 1951–1986, by Thomas S. Hines

Review: <i>John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York</i>, by Mardges Bacon, and <i>Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art: The Arthur Drexler Years</i>, 1951–1986, by Thomas S. Hines

Musings on Boredom, Midcentury Architecture, and Public Spaces

The rejection of “boredom” fueled the midcentury reaction against modernism, but little is known about the complicated presence of this mood in the architectural discourse. Far from being a mere rhetorical tool, the quip “Less is a bore” is part of Robert Venturi’s larger interest in boredom and was influenced by his reading of a book referenced repeatedly in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966): August Heckscher’s The Public Happiness (1962). A liberal writer and political activist, Heckscher situated boredom at the core of modern humanity’s alienation. While the concern with boredom was explicitly addressed in the humanities, I suggest that it was taking shape in midcentury architectural polemics under the influence of writings from other disciplines, as well as the emerging artistic practices that were deliberately embracing the “aesthetics of boredom.” Specifically, I will examine Venturi’s reading of Heckscher through two of his (unbuilt) civic projects that directly engage the issue of boredom: Three Buildings for a Town in Ohio (1965) and the entry for the Copley Square Competition (1966).

Aldo Rossi: the \u2018autobiography\u2019 and its fragments

The year 1966 demarcated a borderline in the urban design discipline. Three books published that indicated a change of direction: City architecture by Aldo Rossi, The territory of architecture by Vittorio Gregotti and Complexity and contradiction in architecture by Robert Venturi. Aldo Rossi, in contact with Ernesto Nathan Rogers and “Casabella-Continuità”, shifted the attention to the historic, consolidated city, the monument and urban rules of archaeological fabric, while Vittorio Gregotti developed a research trend that founded architecture on geography. Finally, Robert Venturi opened up the architectural project, revealing its relations with media culture and with the contradictions of the consumer society. Critical essays investigated the phase following the second half of the Sixties, at the time when Aldo Rossi began, in 1976, to travel across America, invited by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies to show his works at a series of exhibitions. His book A Scientific Autobiography, written and developed in America, belonged to this phase, which characterised at an international level by the birth of Paper Architecture (the movement that had placed design at the centre of reflection as the expression of new spatial poetics). The essay aimed to show a change in the paradigm of Rossi’s thought, no longer and solely focusing on past and physical architecture, but unrelentingly entwined with the individual and personal destiny of the Milanese architect. Memory became an active, live field of investigation, as Rafael Moneo maintains on Rossi’s thought, in which an objective vision of architecture no longer counted but one that included the subject and his fragments.

El urbanismo y la arquitectura posmodernos, ¿capricho o necesidad?

Even though there are some characteristics that distinguish postmodern urbanism and architecture, the trend is difficult to understand and it often prompts questioning its validity. This paper aims to demonstrate how and why the postmodern tendency, where current urbanism and architecture develop, represents an important part of the solution to the problems that trouble the world and is therefore a need. For that purpose, two fundamental texts of the movement that lead out to a new architectural reality will be analyzed: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi, and Building Dwelling Thinking by Martin Heidegger.

Cameron McEwan on the ‘difficult whole’ as a critical strategy - The Difficult Whole: A Reference Book on Robert Venturi, John Rauch, and Denise Scott Brown Edited and with contributions by Kersten Geers, Jelena Pančevac, and Andrea Zanderigo With photographs by Bas Princen. Switzerland, Park Books, 2016216pp. Out of print

In the concluding chapter of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966; repr. 2002), Robert Venturi writes about the notion of the difficult whole: On one level, the difficult whole is a formal and compositional strategy at the scale of architecture focused on the organisation of diverse elements, contradictory forms, and opposing scales in the plan and facade. On an urban level, the difficult whole is a reading of how architecture develops a form or counter form within the ideological field of the city. On a last level, the difficult whole is critical thought. It is a strategy to negotiate conflicting desires, architecture and the city, analysis and project, site and programme, form and history, architect and client, and the difficulty of defining a coherent whole. Venturi termed this a ‘difficult whole’, because ‘the whole is difficult to achieve’.

The Legacy of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Other| December 01 2016 The Legacy of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Patricia A. Morton Patricia A. Morton Editor, JSAH and JSAH Online Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2016) 75 (4): 401–402. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2016.75.4.401 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Patricia A. Morton; The Legacy of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2016; 75 (4): 401–402. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2016.75.4.401 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, by Robert Venturi.1 Often identified as the first postmodern manifesto—although Venturi has disavowed this attribution—Complexity and Contradiction had a significant impact on architecture culture as much for what it did not do as for what it did. As a “gentle manifesto,” it eschewed the polemics and vehemence of earlier modernist manifestoes and took a more personal tone. Statements beginning “I like …” or “I find …” shifted Venturi's treatise from a polemic to what he called an “apologia—an explanation, indirectly, of my work” (18). Far from the fervent proclamations of early twentieth-century manifestoes, the mildness of Venturi's tone concealed the radical nature of his program to dismantle “orthodox Modern architecture.” Venturi decoupled architecture and “other things,” the social, technological, and political issues that had informed modernism: The shift to a realistic approach... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966, 144 pp., 350 illus. Library of Congress Catalogue No. 66–30001 (no ISBN); 2nd ed., 1977. $24.95, ISBN 9780870702822 The first edition of Venturi's explosive little book, written in the period 1962–64, appeared in a new series called Papers on Modern Architecture published under the imprimatur of the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. It was preceded by a lengthy excerpt in Yale's journal of architecture, Perspecta , the year before.1 In an introduction written for the MoMA book, Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully hailed it as the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture , “one of the few basic texts of our time—one which, despite its antiheroic lack of pretension and its shift of perspective from the Champs-Elysees to Main Street, still picks up a fundamental dialogue begun in the twenties, and so connects us with the heroic generation of modern architecture once more” (16).2 Most of the initial reviewers confirmed Scully's opinion of the book's import, although they voiced reservations about Venturi's methodology, above all his neglect of questions of function and technology and his skirting of social issues. For some, precisely these omissions, along with the author's explicitly subjective point of view (“I like complexity and contradiction in architecture”), were what made his “gentle manifesto” so radical. Peter Blake, whose image of Main Street Venturi had appropriated from his own book God's Own Junkyard of two years earlier to make the opposite point, deemed Complexity and Contradiction less original. Writing in Architectural Forum , he allowed that “The history of art is bound to be retold in every generation,” but he found Venturi's notion of complexity superficial and his formal contradictions to be contrived: “‘accidentalism’ has been raised to a discipline.’”3 Among other early responses, Colin Rowe, reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review together with Reyner Banham's The New Brutalism: Ethic …

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Book Review| December 01 2016 Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi: Venturi and the Recovery of Metaphor and Precedent in Architecture Thomas Noble Howe Thomas Noble Howe Southwestern University/Fondazione Restoring Ancient Stabiae Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2016) 75 (4): 493–494. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2016.75.4.493 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas Noble Howe; Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi: Venturi and the Recovery of Metaphor and Precedent in Architecture. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2016; 75 (4): 493–494. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2016.75.4.493 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Few people recall, and the history books still do not record, the oppressiveness of the practice, and especially the education, of architecture in the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing was permitted in schools or reported in the journals that was not “orthodox modern,” and no forms from any other century were allowed. Gropius-Mies-Corbu were the Holy Trinity. There were no “alternative modernisms” (art deco, reductive classicism, and so on) of the type that historians now include in the narrative of the architecture of the twentieth century. Even Louis Kahn's luminous monumentality, redolent of Rome and heroic striving, was often suspect. The salient assertion of modernism was that the present is so different that the forms of the past are irrelevant. Modernism is well named, since the Latin word modernus means simply “just recent” (from modo, “just now”). From Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier onward this committed designers to a formal... You do not currently have access to this content.

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi's assertion in Complexity and Contradiction that “the examples chosen reflect my partiality for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo especially” (19) stakes a multifaceted claim for the importance of early modern architecture.1 Quoting Henry-Russell Hitchcock about how the changing interests of architects in certain periods of architectural history reflect their own preoccupations, Venturi proposes that mannerism, baroque, and rococo provide the most apposite historical references for contemporary architecture. But he also suggests that the “eras” of these three styles share principles that are not specific to a particular moment in history. In the chapter “Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification and Picturesqueness,” Venturi affirms that “the desire for a complex architecture, with its attendant contradictions,” is “an attitude common in the Mannerist periods,” which include the sixteenth century, but also Hellenism, and the seventeenth century up to modernism, in the works of “Le Corbusier, Aalto, Kahn, and others” (26). In Complexity and Contradiction , early modern architecture represents both a historical body of references and a sample of suprahistorical design principles. With these claims Complexity and Contradiction resembles earlier essays by Colin Rowe and Anthony Blunt that had tested the relevance of mannerism for modernist architecture.2 It also prefigures later uses of …

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

When I arrived at Princeton University nearly thirty years ago to start my undergraduate education, I secured a work-study job washing dishes on the breakfast shift at Gordon Wu Hall. While the work was tedious, and the dank scullery air left my clothes smelling of eggs, I took pleasure in the design of my workplace. In Architecture 101 the following semester, the first assignment was to choose a room someplace on the campus for analysis through drawings and text. Aware that Wu Hall was a celebrated recent building, and knowing it from daily experience, I chose to write about its entry hall and dining room. In words and novice pencil drawings, I carefully described the postmodernist interplay between modernist and medieval architectural forms staged in the building's facades and primary public spaces. This intimate engagement with Wu Hall was my path into the work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown (VRSB), into Complexity and Contradiction , and into architectural history, theory, and criticism at large. I learned postmodernism in part from these close interactions with Wu Hall and from studying the ways it engaged the campus context. Walking each morning through the quadrangles and passages of Princeton's Tudor Revival dormitories on my way to the dishwashing station, I passed ogival doors, bay windows, and pedimented archways similar to those depicted in Complexity and Contradiction . In Wu Hall, as well as in halls paneled and trimmed with Gothic …

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

In Complexity and Contradiction Robert Venturi presents a critique of modernism, with its rigid systems and fetishization of the functional. Mining the past and utilizing examples as diverse as Borromini's churches and Frank Furness's houses, Venturi addresses the complexity of architectural form, made visible through unexpected juxtapositions and scalar manipulations. He considers intricate baroque ornament and heavy Egyptian columns alongside Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye to impress upon the reader that the study of architecture requires close analysis and historical breadth. The perspective is that of a designer, however, not a historian, a point Venturi makes clear from the outset. The book ends with twelve of the architect's own projects, seven of which were unrealized. The same black-and-white photography that caresses the facades of Roman churches documents Venturi's Guild House housing project for the elderly in Philadelphia. The implicit connection is that of form and memory, and a blending of everyday materiality with historical reference. The polemic thus calls for an architecture of remembrance, the images composed like a dream sequence of memories long internalized. However, the past is not a passive imprint but a reflection of “society's inverted scale of values” (43).1 The central issue is that of representation, of architecture itself as well as the multiple discursive positions that it may enable.2 The book is provocative and visually sophisticated, and its influence in the fifty years since its publication cannot be overestimated. The power of Venturi's argument for historicism lies in its flexibility. Although answers to the questions “Whose history?” and “Which moment in time?” are alluded to in Complexity and Contradiction , they are also left somewhat ambiguous (for example, even though Venturi provides no dates and makes no attempt at geographic specificity, his bias toward Italian baroque comes through). Venturi's claim for using traditional building …

The Manifesto &amp; the Hammer. A Review on How Contemporary Architecture Theories are being built

When Panayotis Tournikiotis wrote Historiography of Modern Architecture in 1999 it started to be obvious the strategies the theorists of architecture have followed to present the words of the so-called pioneers of the Modernity as a kind of consistent discourse that eventually never existed. On top of that, if we see the original writings of those architects we will find that, in most cases, they use the format of a Manifesto - probably influenced by the Avant-Garde artistic movements from the beginning or past century- to express those ideas. Based on Tournikiotis book and comparing his theory to the original Manifestoes it is clear how theorists of Modern architecture used these texts, that were just expressing immediate ideas on one particular matter, as small pieces in their own historical puzzle to build a theory capable of explaining the evolution of architecture since the Industrial Revolution. From the publication of the ?gentle manifesto? Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Robert Venturi, 1966), according to some American authors like Charles Jencks the definition of an architect started to be dependent on his relationship with Modernity. In this way, Piano and Rogers are defined as Late-Modern architects because of their refusal to condemn Modernity (as Venturi and the Post-Moderns did) even though they considered themselves followers, such as Isozaki, Hertzberger or Foster. According to Piano and Roger ?s Manifesto of 1975, Declaration, could be interpreted as an attempt to make Modern architecture more contemporary by defending the idea of using the technique in a way the Pioneers never could, just because technology was not developed enough at the moment. At the same time other architects like Eisenman were somehow claiming a revolution from the basis of modernity, going beyond the question of style that Postmodernity had put on the table with its article-manifesto Post Functionalism (published by the magazine Oppositions in 1976), using two exhibitions of the MOMA to reinterpret the world according to the latest philosophical theories, introducing the idea of mixing disciplines to get a more contemporary (complex) result. In sight of this process the aim of this work is to show how this process has evolved in the latest years, in a way that nowadays the Manifestoes tend to be built to fit their place in the puzzle of the theory of architecture exactly and to secure the position of the architects in the line of argument of the contemporary theorist, necessary accomplice in this process.

“I Will Try My Best to Make It Worth It”: Robert Venturi's Road to Rome

Robert Venturi's Rome Prize fellowship (1954–56) is a familiar, pivotal episode in his early career. But why did he want to go to the American Academy in the early 1950s? Venturi approached his fellowship with rare determination at a time when modernism made the Rome Prize's architectural relevance unclear. What made him certain this opportunity would be the key to his success, and how did this influence the book he published a decade later? As Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture marks its fiftieth anniversary, clarifying why Venturi valued the Rome Prize further illuminates his views on history, context, and meaningful design.

The difficult whole: Siah Armajani, Robert Venturi and the politics of modernist architecture

Since the late 1960s, the Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani has primarily worked on the border between sculpture and architecture, creating large-scale public installations such as reading rooms, gardens and bridges. These works commonly evidence a formal concern with relationships between part and whole. This article connects Armajani’s interest in part–whole relations with the writings of Robert Venturi, arguing that Armajani’s practice establishes a critical dialogue with the history of modernist architecture. However, it also demonstrates that Armajani’s practice complicates the proto-postmodern approach of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) in several ways. Unlike Venturi, Armajani explicitly politicizes the question of part–whole relations, presenting it not as a purely aesthetic question, but as a formal metaphor for egalitarian social relations. By incorporating certain distinctly modernist techniques into his sculptures, Armajani also shows that, contra Venturi, the question of how to safeguard diversity within a social collective was already a concern among modernists themselves. Finally, Armajani's work further contrasts with Venturi’s writing through its turn to the politics of class struggle. Drawing on the writings of the Marxist theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood, the article argues that Armajani drew attention to the limitations inherent in postmodernism’s ‘politics of diversity’, demonstrating its class blindness and thus its failure to sufficiently challenge contemporary capitalist ideologies.

Text, lies and architecture: Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi and Mannerism

Colin Rowe's few published statements about Robert Venturi from 1967–76 convey a distance reinforced by their frequent association with two opposing architectural camps during this period (the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Grays’). Yet their interests and priorities overlapped to a remarkable extent; both applied the lessons of architectural history to contemporary design and shared intense interests in early modern Italian architectural traditions. Perhaps most unusually, both consistently asserted the relevance of Mannerism to modern architecture. In retrospect, it appears curious that Rowe and Venturi were not allies, and seldom (if at all) acknowledged their many parallels and intersections: a lacuna mirrored in scholarship, which rarely considers them as a pair. However, Rowe's three direct discussions of Venturi during this period, all of which mention Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture , its impact and its manifestation in Venturi's design work, provide insights into their distinct but related approaches to Mannerism, history and architectural authorship. They also suggest why these seemingly natural allies kept each other at arms' length, despite their tightly intertwined interests. The parallels and divergences in their writing invite a consideration of the means and ends of presenting architectural history to an architectural audience, and how historians learn from architects.

The resurgence of visual urbanism in the American architectural discourse, 1954–1972

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes On Olmsted's ideas about park design, see Frederick Law Olmsted, Civilizing American Cities: Writings on City Landscapes (1971; New York, Da Capo, 1997). See the articles by Mathew Aitchison, Akos Moravanszky and Jasper Cepl in this Issue; Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (Vienna, C. Graeser, 1889). Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten, 9 vols (Munich, Callwey and Kunstwart Verlag, 1900–1917). Susan L. Klaus, A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens (Amherst and Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 32–33. On Hegemann, see Christiane Crasemann Collins, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism (New York and London, Norton, 2005). On this transition, see Jill Pearlman, ‘Joseph Hudnut's Other Modernism at the “Harvard Bauhaus”‘, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 56 (December, 1997), pp. 452–477. On the history of theory in cultural geography, see, for instance, Donald Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford and Malden, Mass., Blackwell, 2000). On the architectural reception of Jackson's early efforts, see Erik M. Ghenoiu, ‘Charles W. Moore and the Idea of Place’, Fabrications, 18:2 (December, 2008), pp. 90–118. Tridib Banerjee, Michael Southworth, eds, City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch (Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1990), p. 135. Clément Orillard, ‘Tracing urban design's “Townscape” origins: some relationships between a British editorial policy and an American academic field in the 1950s’, Urban History, 36 (2009), pp. 284–302. The pivotal role of Gilpatric has been clarified only fairly recently: see Peter L. Laurence, ‘Contradictions and Complexities: Jane Jacobs's and Robert Venturi's Complexity Theories.’, Journal of Architectural Education, 59:3 (February, 2006), pp. 49–60; ibid., ‘Jane Jacobs before Death and Life’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 66:1 (March, 2007), pp. 5–15; Clément Orillard, ‘Tracing…’, op. cit. On Gruen, see M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Victor Gruen. ‘Landscape and Cityscape’, 1955; republished in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York, Rizzoli, 1993), pp. 194–199. On the Conference, see Alex Krieger and William Saunders, eds, Urban Design (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2009); see also Peter L. Laurence, ‘Jane Jacobs before Death and Life’, op. cit. Jane Jacobs, ‘Downtown is for People’, 1957; reprinted in Editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1958), pp. 157–184; quotation p. 159. John Brinckerhoff Jackson,'Other-Directed Houses.', 1956; republished in Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 187–197. For example, see Reyner Banham, ‘Unrecognized American Architecture: The Missing Motel’, Landscape, 15:2 (Winter, 1965), pp. 4–6. See Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture (New York, Horizon Press, 1957); Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: An introduction to non-pedigreed architecture (Garden City, NY, Doubleday and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1964). On this Conference, see Clément Orillard, op. cit. Christopher Tunnard, Boris Pushkarev, Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1963), Preface. Peter Blake, God's Own Junkyard: The planned deterioration of America's landscape (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), p. 33. Ian Nairn, The American Landscape: A Critical View (New York, Random House, 1965), pp. 31–34. It seems that Nairn's book was based on research carried out several years before Blake's publication: see Gillian Darley's article in this Issue. Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1964). Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities. 1968; (New York, Viking, 1967). Charles Moore, ‘You Have to Pay for the Public Life’, Perspecta, 9-10 (1965), pp. 57–106. The Robert Venturi piece in the same issue was an excerpt from his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966; (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1983). Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. 1972; (Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1997). Venturi and Scott Brown's visual strategies are much clearer in the larger-format 1972 edition than in later editions.

Mannerism and meaning in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

‘This is not an easy book’, opens Vincent Scully's introduction to Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966).1 Nonetheless, the object, as well as the aim, of Complexity ...