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 Michael Sorkin

For Robert Venturi on His 80th Birthday

Robert Venturi is both the victor and victim of an amazing piece
of timing. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is, let’s
remember, a product of the sixties, published one year before
the Summer of Love and just two years short of ’68. These were
times when unauthorized pleasures were thought to be keys
to resistance and the book fit right in: gentle and private,
unabashed in its re-centering of visual pleasure, wryly down on
an enervated dogmatism and prescription that simply wasn’t
delivering the goods, on architecture that was simply a drag.
Droll, substantial, and brief, it argued for a phenomenological
parity that sought its delights, without prejudice, in Bernini and
Aalto, in Karnak , Jasper Johns, honky-tonk and the pleasures of
the piazza, full of redemptive affection for little things.

Complexity and Contradiction was also released a year before
another seminal artifact - Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band - and the affinities are reasonably telling. The Beatles’ songs
and Venturi’s projects both embodied a learned, lightly self-
conscious, pop that combined collagist ironies, appropriations,
and enthusiasms, old-fashioned delight at a lyrical line, dead-pan
combinations of the accessible and the cryptic, and an innocent
subversion of stuck-up conventional styles of form and behavior.
Both loved dress-up, “baroque” departures from dominant conventions.
Both embraced the traditions that bolstered their own inventions.
Both were immediately on everyone’s lips and drafting boards
(images of the Mother’s House clung as tenaciously to mind as
Lovely Rita Meter Maid). And both were rapidly assimilated to other
times, other meanings.

If the Beatles are now the global staple of Muzak, oozing from
every elevator from Shenzhen to Phoenix, Venturi’s influence is
also both ubiquitous and often sighted very far from its original
context. What was materialized in a delicious moment of possibility
has been hijacked by a culture of mis-readers – from Andres Duany
to Jeff Koons – for whom Venturi simply instantiates the extremes
of historicism or kitsch. Indeed, my own first encounters with his
work were narrowed by the reflexive reaction that – with both
Saigon and Detroit burning – any such tenaciously formal theory
could be nothing but business as usual, just more taste which – in
the case of Vegas or the suburban strip – I could only see as
the man’s.

What all this misses – what I missed then - is the decency at core
of the message, all about resisting such reducibility. Complexity and
Contradiction is an argument for tolerance, not a cook-book for
constraint, and Venturi’s relaxed embrace of apparent contradiction
a route around compromise, a call not to surrender unquestioned
anything of value for blind dogma’s sake. His “both/and” sought to
combine idiosyncracy, memory, consent, equity, and common sense
with an unabashed pleasure in form. These are the guns to which
Venturi has stuck and his insistent love of difference, his elemental
kindness, his unebbed artistry, and his sweet humility make him a
hero, especially for these intolerant times. And, whether with Robert
Venturi or the Beatles, the eloquence and the elegance have always
seemed greater for coming from pure hearts.