FESTSCHRIFT

Festschrift 80
Non sono stati in molti ad accorgersi degliottant’anni
di Robert Venturi.
Non è sorprendente: nonostante egli sia da quarant’anni
esatti, a partire dalla pubblicazione di Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture, una stella fissa per la
formazione di qualunque architetto, la sua figura è rimasta
a lungo in una posizione defilata della cultura architettonica,
insieme a quella di Denise Scott Brown, con cui pubblicò
Learning from Las Vegas nel 1972.
Gli auguri di Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci
VENTURIANA

It was you who let me (a so-called ‘artist’ then, in the late 70’s)
think about becoming an architect: you made architecture not only
accessible but possible (for anyone) to do. All I (or anybody) had
to do was look at what everybody already knows -- once I
(or anybody) became a child again and drew a house, once
I put my house in (everybody’s) order, then that house could
be turned upside-down & inside-out and pushed & pulled as all
get out – it’s still a house, and everybody knows. It’s still a
house, but we can never go home again.

Maurice Blanchot: ‘The disaster ruins everything, all the while
leaving everything intact.’ So did you. Beautiful ruins. Normal art.
Dangerous normalities.



Not doing but taking; not inventing but looking & finding; not
forming but contradicting. Take something; then do something
to it; then do something else inside it.

Take a convention. Then take another, and yet another; the
conventions contradict each other. Let them fight for dear life;
let the games begin. It’s a public forum.



Signs run wild: flags wave, within every word there’s another
word or two that contradicts the first one, an image fades in
& out and dissolves into another, conventions are local and
change with the times. In the 21st century we don’t face
images anymore, and they don’t face us; the air is filled
with images, we breathe images, they enter inside us electronically,
like music – music is ambience, ambience is architecture,
architecture becomes traversable images.



Leonard Cohen wrote/sang (supposedly to the dead Janis Joplin):
‘That’s all, I don’t think of you that often.’ No, I don’t think of you
that often anymore…at least I don’t think I do, do I?…But then again,
we still start projects with the site and the situation, and when
we consider program we still have types in the back of our minds,
though I might not want to admit it, topology shape-shifts back
into typology: in order to stretch out & suck in & twist & warp &
morph, we need something – we need a convention – that can
be stretched out, sucked in, twisted, warped, morphed…Yes,
I might have killed you, the way everybody has to kill the father,
but no, I haven’t left you, and you haven’t left me alone…