Contradiction In Architecture Research Articles

“A little bit more mysterious…”: Ambience and Art in the Dark

“A little bit more mysterious…”: Ambience and Art in the Dark

James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment (review)

Reviewed by: James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment Carol Poh (bio) James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment. Edited by Martica Sawin . New York: W. W. Norton, 2007 Pp. 312. $27.95. "In architecture there are no spectators: there are only participants." This dictum provides the overarching theme of this wide-ranging collection of the writings of James Marston Fitch (1909–2000), a towering figure in American architecture, criticism, and preservation. Wholly self-taught (though ultimately laden with numerous honorary degrees), Fitch joined the faculty of Columbia University's School of Architecture as a professor of architectural history in 1954 and went on to found, with Charles Peterson, the first program of formal study in historic preservation in the United States. His book American Building: The Historical Forces that Shaped It, first published in 1947 and subsequently revised and enlarged, pioneered a neglected subject and remains a standard reference. Organized thematically under the broad topics of criticism, history, preservation, and climate and environment, the essays gathered and edited by Martica Sawin (Sawin was married to Fitch during the last years of his life and is his literary executor) lead us through the evolution of the author's thinking about architectural design and historic preservation. Fitch began his career as a copyist, designing archaeologically correct period houses. He soon came to reject these as deceitful anachronisms, and in "The Houses We Live In" (1933) he complains about "the futility of all this clever and laborious use of archaic detail" (p. 36), the "machines [for climate control] smuggled between floors, concealed in closets, crammed [End Page 289] between walls" (p. 40). Instead, he becomes a devout proponent of modernism—what he calls "pure plan"—and pronounces that "utter honesty is modernism's biggest asset" (p. 31). Fitch offers paeans both to Louis Kahn's Richards Medical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania for its "authentic, almost startling originality" (pp. 41–42) and, even while noting that its construction required the destruction of a large area of the oldest quarter of the city, to Boston's City Hall for its "Miesian precision" (p. 49). He lauds Germany's Bauhaus, established by Walter Gropius in Dessau in 1919, as "a radiant symbol of a whole new way of life" (p. 149); with its "elegance of the economical [and] functional," its implied "responsible handling of material resources," it represented to Fitch a veritable utopia, "the fruitful application of science and technology to the architectural needs of industrial democracy" (p. 154). Its lessons came late to America. By 1932, when the landmark exhibition The International Style opened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Nazi Party was closing down the Bauhaus, and its central tenet—that the designer must be socially accountable—was soon abandoned. Decades later, Fitch would have some choice words for the same museum—"the very temple of modernism itself" (p. 170)—charging that MOMA, with its show The Architecture of the E´cole des Beaux Arts and sponsorship of Robert Venturi's 1966 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, had prepared the ground for postmodernism, a movement Fitch loathed as a "prison house of antique gesture" that threatened "to reverse the whole evolutionary course of architectural theory since the Bauhaus" (p. 64). In "The Palace, the Bridge, and the Tower" (1947), Fitch pays homage to the Crystal Palace, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Eiffel Tower. In each, he writes, theory, material, and technique combined to produce a radically new type; each represented "the full flowering of a structural concept" (p. 89). Other essays under the rubric of "history" discuss Mount Vernon and Monticello, the great "slave-powered" (p. 112) plantations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson's brilliant plan for the University of Virginia, which Fitch pronounces America's greatest architectural achievement. He takes a holistic view of historic preservation as "the stewardship of the whole built world" (p. 173), critical not only to man's psychic and emotional well-being but also an urgent aspect of energy conservation. It is in the realm of microclimatology that Fitch, who was an air force weather forecaster during World War II, makes...

Contradictions and Complexities

When Robert Venturi began writing Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1962, Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) was the subject of dinner-table conversation across the country. Apart from Jacobs's direct influence, among the parallels that emerged from their Townscape affiliations and other interests, the concept of complexity stands out, with Venturi's conception echoing Jacobs's historic introduction of complexity science into architectural and urban theory. While Venturi did not seek to extend the scientific research put forward by Jacobs, favoring instead the complexities suggested by gestalt theory and New Criticism, he cited similar scientific sources and derived similar principles for urbanism, as revealed by his Copley Square project of 1966.

Reconciliations: New Views and Re-views

At certain moments of receptivity, ideas or ways of thinking presciently coincide with frames of mind. I first read Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (published almost forty years ago) at a transitional and skeptical moment. Deploying now-legendary turns of phrase such as both-and, more is not less, and less is a bore, the young architect challenged the hegemony and austerity of modern architecture.1 Venturi's “quiet manifesto” made history and popular culture permissible subjects for architectural innovation. His examination of modernism was not a simple condemnation, however, but rather a renegotiation of old with new ideas, formal concepts with cultural phenomena, and past with future. Alternately praised and criticized as a beacon of (a now-dubious) postmodernism, Venturi's intellectual bridge-building demonstrated habits of the mind that were integrative rather than exclusionary.

Formalism as Politics: Colin Rowe’s Modernism in White + Gray

Formalism as Politics: Colin Rowe's Modernism in White + Gray RONN M. DANIEL Can it be argued that the interest of critical writing lies almost entirely in its method ... that such criticism is understood through the forms of its arguments, through the way that its method, in the process of constituting the object of criticism, exposes to view those choices that precede and predetermine any act ofjudgment? -Rosalind Krauss Yesterday, after playing chess, Brecht said: "You know, when Korsch comes, we really ought to work out a new game with him. A game in which the moves do not always stay the same; where the function of a piece changes after it has stood on the same square for a while; it should either become stronger or weaker. As it is the game doesn't develop, it stays the same for too long." -Walter Benjamin I n American architecture ofthe early r97os, as with many things at that time, color was everything; not whites and blacks, but rather whites and grays. The tonal schism had been developing at least since Robert Venturi's polemical call in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (r966) for "elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure', compromising rather than 'clean', distorted rather than 'straightforward' ... [a] messy vitality over obvious unity." ' Astute critics like Vincent Scully and Robert Stern were quick to give Venturi's formalist ideas a political shade, embedding him within American traditions of pragmatism and populism.2 In this way a new architectural vernacular was born, a gray architecture for the gray flannel suited man. Resisting the gray tide was a "camp of true believers - always anxious for authenticity attempt [ing] to work over the results of the revolution so as to make them strange, arcane, difficult ; interesting to the few and inaccessible to the many."3 These architects preferred analytic rigor to messy approximation and European modernism to American pluralism. They designed buildings which were geometrically complex cubes, contextually inhospitable, and almost exclusively white.4 When the two camps came to confront each other at the "White and Gray Conference" at UCLA in May ofr974, architecture critic and historian Colin Rowe must have found himself a good bit bewildered and amused (jig. I). His predicament was apparent. On the one hand, Rowe was the most important patron of the "whites." His student, Peter Eisenman was their chief ideologue and had founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies which served, temporarily, as the intellectual center for the group. The Institute's journal Oppositions was, at that very moment, re-publishing many of Rowe's decades-old essays. As a studio professor at the University ofTexas at Austin some two decades earlier, Rowe had designed (with John Hejduk, another of the whites) the "9-square" grid project whose combinatorial logic underlay so many of the white designs. And as a critic, Rowe's rigorous dissections of LeCorbusier's early modernism , particularly his essays "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa" (r947) and "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal" (r955-56) gave to the whites their formalist tools. Yet, at the same time Rowe was waltzing with the whites, he was sock-hopping with the grays, whom he had been foreshadowing for years. As ARRIS RONN M. DANIEL Fig. I. Colin Rowe, Texas, I955· (From Alexander Carragone, The Texas Rangers: Notes from an Architectural Underground Cambridge: MIT Press, I995, III, Plate No. JI) early as 1950, Rowe had argued for a connection (as Venturi would later so influentially do) between modern architecture and mannerism.5 In his urban-design studios at Cornell, Rowe had developed compositional strategies based upon inflected contexts, "impure" forms, and deformed typologies, work which would be codified in his 1978 book Collage City (co-authored with Fred Koetter). Alongside of Venturi's own Learning from Las Vegas (I972), Collage City would become the standard handbook of gray urbanism. Thus a paradox at the heart of Colin Rowe's architectural criticism, whites and grays colored from the same pen. How can the historian, eager to categorize and evaluate, account for this influential writer so important to two seemingly exclusive theoretical positions? 6 Where does Rowe fit in twentieth-century architecture's intellectual topography? Perhaps one...

CLASSIC MAKI: PERMISSIVE ORDER AND THE ICONIC IMAGE

In Fumihiko Maki's writings and buildings of the late 1970s and 1980s there is afresh, evident awareness of the notion of complexity as a real and involving attribute of the time, and an increased interest in the possibilities of symbolic representation in architecture. Both of these explorations were deployed to extend the constricting limitations of the dogmas of the Modern Movement. That is, he sought a rejuvenation of a tired modernism, and its transformation into a rich and revealing architecture appropriate to the late twentieth century. In these regards Maki acknowledges his debt to the liberating aspects of the positions of architects such as Charles Moore and Robert Stern, and Robert Venturi, notably Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1965, which had laid the way for a loosening of the constraints of the doctrines of orthodox modernism. Maki's architecture of the time, however, bears little resemblance to the popularist indulgences and excesses of American Post Modern architecture. In his hands the theoretical ideas became translated through the Japanese perspective, and the buildings emerged with a customary elegance and restraint.

The Post-Modern Reader

Preface. Charles Jencks: Post-Modernism - The Ism that Returns. Part 1 Defining the Post-Modern. Charles Jencks: What Then Is Post-Modernism? Jean-Francois Lyotard: Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism? Andreas Huyssen: Mapping the Postmodern. Margaret A Rose: Defining the Post-Modern. Part 2 Literature and Architecture. John Barth: The Literature of Replenishment. Umberto Eco: The Postscript to The Name of the Rose: Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable. Linda Hutcheon: Theorising the Postmodern: Towards a Poetics. Ihab Hassan: From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Pillars and Posts: Foundations and Future of Post-Modernism. Jane Jacobs: The Kind of Problem a City Is. Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Charles Jencks: The Language of Post-Modern and the Complexity Paradigm. Paolo Portoghesi: What Is the Postmodern? Part 3 Sociology, Economics, Feminism, Science. Zygmunt Bauman: Is There a Postmodern Sociology? David Harvey: The Condition of Postmodernity. Robin Murray: Fordism and Post-Fordism. Anatole Kaletsky: 9/15 - The Birthpangs of Post-Modern Economics? Susan Rubin Seleiman: Feminism and Postmodernism: A Question of Politics. Craig Owens: The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism. Tito Arecchi: Chaos and Complexity. John Gray: Evangelical Atheism, Secular Christianity. David Ray Griffin: The Reenchantment of Science. David Bohm: Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World. Charles Birch: The Postmodern Challenge to Biology. Edward Goldsmith: Gaia and Evolution. Index.

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi; Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour; The Yale Mathematics Building Competition by Charles W. Moore, Nicholas Pyle; Venturi and Rauch, 1970-77; Venturi and Rauch. 25 Öffentliche Bauten; Progressive Architecture, LVIII; Venturi and Rauch

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi; Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour; The Yale Mathematics Building Competition by Charles W. Moore, Nicholas Pyle; Venturi and Rauch, 1970-77; Venturi and Rauch. 25 Öffentliche Bauten; Progressive Architecture, LVIII; Venturi and Rauch

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Selections from a Forthcoming Book