Venturi's iconic Lieb House in Barnagat Light, NJ, must be moved from its site by Monday or the new owners of the property will demolish it. Jim Venturi, Bob's son, has found buyers who would like to move it to Glen Cove, NY, by barge, but if it can't be done by Monday it will meet the wrecker's ball. Story here.
This house and the house for his mother pretty much made Venturi's career, so it would be a real shame to lose it.
It's a nice little house, isn't it? Would be sad to see it disappear. Not only because it's a work by a master, but because its loss would signify a loss of celebrated funkiness in beach living.
I know, I know, the funky has gone out of most American beaches long ago, but I still miss it. I hate seeing the same damn enormous McMansion on beachfront property that I see in every inland cul-de-sac across the nation. That type of house on a beach represents an ignorance of vernacular in the face of real estate "value".
i will miss it. my friends and i made a special trip to jersey coast to see this house in 1988, a real shame.
it is in loveladies, new jersey.
it is an important and historic piece of architecture. i don't know why people love to hate venturi when he, along with his firm and partners, contributed a great deal to the discourse of architecture in this country and gave two of the most important books ever written about architecture in 20 th century.
a real fuckin' shame!
I like it too - but it will live on in print and photos. Its not a huge investment of materials and character after all. Yes its important, yes its by an important architect but it just doesnt seem "sponge worthy" in the architectural sense.
You're right, Orhan, it's in Loveladies, not Barnegat Light.
But this is baffling to me: the pending demolition of a barely known building by an admittedly important architect, the Grosse Point library, gets everyone here up in arms and even starts a charrette to save it, while this seminal house by an equally important architects begets shrugs and bad jokes.
This house is small, but it IS architecturally significant and appears in many architecture history books. It's not just a cute little box, it's also spatially interesting, which can be glimpsed in the rear view:
In this house and the house for his mother, Venturi worked out some of his spatial ideas (not just the graphic ones everyone associates with him).
But, really, I shouldn't have to explain this in an architecture forum.
i think to appreciate venturi's work requires some homework. therefore it is usually elected to right him off as a postmodernist because professor so and so says so.
i don't know any other living american architect who talked about modern architecture as much as venturi did and still does, in a meaningful way. he made a lot of enemies for telling it the way it is. he is an expert on modern architecture and it would only take a trained eye to see how he comments on it with actual plans, site plans and building elevations, sections, never mind the bigger picture and theory.
It could be that Venturi helped derail architecture into a 30 year fashion show that has proliferated in our cities and universities. These "iconic" structures are as bad or worse than then the modernism they attempted to subjugate. Even worse is his writings which unleashed a lexicographic nightmare out of which we may finally be emerging. I see Venturi as the architectural equivalent of a pseudo-scientist, or quack.
Ok, now the ideological twist of the evilp is revealed (there always is one, isn't there?).
I'll just say that, even if what you say about what followed Venturi were true (which it isn't, it's just a sweeping generalization), to lay it on Venturi himself is simply bullcrap. Venturi attempted to subjugate modernism? huh? wha? He simply pointed out some of its faults, of which there were many, but he did "modernism" as well as his contemporaries did it, just in a different way. If you blame all crappy postmodern architecture on him, then you might as well blame all crappy modernism on Corbusier. But why do I even respond to this nonsense...your statements show me that you don't know shit about architecture and its history.
i gotta say, i like it, but given my home state's penchant for shitty coastal, builder driven crap, it certainly doesn't surprise me that they'd demo this home. just drive around Deal, NJ and you'll see what I am talkin bout.
Maybe I dont know as much about architecture as you Emilio - I'll conceed that. But I know Venturi tried to bring back visual intrest to buildings, and I know he did it rather cartoonishly. My comment may not be academic in scope but I think they get to the point. Its not ideological either - Im stating a fact that the building is not that important beyond the intro to western arch 101 class.
the difficulty with this vs the breuer, emilio, at least for me, is that the breuer was a public building.
a private house is much harder to defend or and the decisions harder to influence: people can do what they want with their property. same issue worked against the stunning rudolph house in ct a couple of years ago.
Well, it's unthinking, grossly generalized statements like the one above and the one about Venturi, statements that make no attempt at any nuance of the person and what he created (Venturi ruined architecture for the next 30 years) that make me say what I said...and just because you stated something about that building doesn't make it a fact or the truth about its importance...and even though I started this thread, I'm outta here.
i will say though, that i would absolutely love, LOVE, to find, buy or work on cutting into an iconic home, vivisect so to speak, a design of my own...i'd drool at the chance. kind of along the lines of an Erased de Kooning
I guess Emilio you are a fan of Venturi's ideology? When agreeing or mobilizing to save a building its important to look at the replacement cost of losing the structure. In the majority of cases they are ornate 19th and early 20th century hard to replace craftsmanship. Impossible to replace actually. In the Breuer case its a one of his few American buildings still in use for it's original intent. In the case above the structure is more important for it's idea less than the specimen. This building could replaced or rebuilt very easily without much effort. Moving it makes sense and i hope they succeed. However, if lost it will always be available as an image, which is what it was intended to be right? I thought this building was about the flattening of composition if I remember my classes. I actually remember this building very vividly from school because I thought it was cool and one of the only Venturi buildings I liked.
You do have a point, evilp, about the replacement cost of this building. It's one of few buildings that I think could be "replicated" in another location fairly simply, and probably be better, as one could keep it looking essentially identical but add better insulation, etc. Usually I'm pretty opposed to that kind of pseudo-reality, but in this case it could be interesting.
Mind, it would not *be* the original, but could be close enough, because one could still walk through it and experience the spatial qualities - which, in Venturi's case, tend to be spectacular but terribly overlooked because the "flat image' is so easy to reproduce then write off as "cartoony".
Oh, god, I just realized this post will probably bring dear Rita Novel, expert at all things Venturan, out to chop off my head...go ahead, Rita, I won't hold it against you if you tell me I'm an idiot ;-)
Ok, back for one more.
My comments were directed not so much towad the saving of the house - that's an event now unfolding and not much can probably be done either way - but on the reaction of some here. I'm no huge defender of Venturi's "ideology", just like to give credit where it is due and not take sweeping exaggerations at face value.
me, i love venturi's writing and think it is up there with corb's seminal texts. very brilliant.
his buildings however leave me cold. i have no reason for this that i am willing to defend, but couldn't care less if any of his buildings were built, dismantled, or preserved. His built work is only important because of his writing. Couldn't prove that but is what i think. very different from ando, gehry, or zumthor for example, for whom no extra txts or explanations are required.
like a joke, if you have to explain the meaning to audience it isn't good. that goes for architecture as much as for comedy.
well I think it always takes time for architecture to be appreciated. But when you demolish it, this chance is lost forever. Look at what happened with a lot of the brutalist architecture from the 50/60's like what they want to do with Robin Hood gardens by the Smithsons in London...
and with jokes if they have to be explained maybe you are standing in front of the wrong crowd? if it appeals to all, it appeals to none. a little explanation/education of the public will only make them more aware and understand the significance of their built environment imho, that's also part of being architects.
I won't miss it. Never seen anything by Venturi that I'd miss. Writing's are one thing, but his designs are some of the most unattractive (visible) architecture.
I am with jump. To each their own, of course, but wow, I'd have a hard time explaining to anyone why this is 'good' architecture.
it's interesting to see how Louis Kahn was so influential on the elevation above. Look at the three-quarter circle that's clipped off center. It really doesn't work too well for me as it is drawn. It intentionally lacks Kahn's symmetry. It looks better in situ than in the drawing.
The sawtooth volume of the exterior space on the second floor is quite interesting and works well. It gives the building that ? impression and makes you look twice.
There are some great volumes here and I like the fun trick with the covered seat on the roof that looks like a passage to nowhere when seen from below in the photograph above.
seems like there is some "complexity and contradiction" to this post....
Jan 29, 09 9:32 am ·
·
It was a windy day in May, 1977, just after the end of 2nd year. The five of us, Ellen, Sue, Ron, Tony and myself, drove down in my 2nd hand VW bug/sedan--like college kids packed in a phonebooth. We reenacted the classic shot of sitting on the steps even, and then went on to look the Frank Isreal houses also on the island. Scully's "historian's revenge" you know.
Ellen works and teaches AutoCad, although the starting date of her CAD experience (1982 on her online resume) is false as it was I who introduced Ellen to CAD in 1983. She's a Prague von Nettleburg and looks a lot like the revolutionary/arrested terrorist in The Best of Youth.
By pure coincidence, reread Sue's "Illustrating Ancient Rome, or the Ichnographia as Uchronia and Other Time Warps in Piranesi's Il Campo Marzio" where she footnotes me, albeit somewhat incorrectly. It was Lost's ultimate ending(/beginning) that lead to today's reading, however.
Tony works and paints (about memory), and his translation of Fasolo's "Piranesi's Campo Marzio will reappear at Quondam soon.
Ron went on to study under Frank Isreal and eventually became an associate at VSBA. Now on his own, Venturi sometimes passed on expansion/renovation jobs of older VSBA residential projects to Ron, some of which happened, but the Lieb House expansion of something like 10 years ago did not.
As for myself, the wind played havoc with my uninhibited hair growth back then to the extent of looking like Gordan Matta-Clark in all the pictures. Plus, I had to pee so bad I wound up doing it on one of Israel's walls.
Gordon would love to now cut up one of his inspirations, and Kahn's thinking "the further wayward adventures of the Fisher House hippie child".
Otherwise:
Acknowledgements
Foreward
Introduction
Preface
1. Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto
2. Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification or Picturesqueness
3. Ambiguity
4. Contradictory Levels: The Phenomenon of "Both-And" in Architecture
5. Contradictory Levels Continued: The Double-Functioning Element
6. Accommodation and the Limitations of Order: The Conventional Element
7. Contradiction Adapted
8. Contradiction Juxtaposed
9. The Inside and the Outside
10. The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole
11. Works
Notes
Photograph Credits
I remember seeing the medical building going up in LA and thinking 'wow, this has to be one of the ugliest buildings, such a shame a decent building wasn't put up in a great location. No space, nothing, just superficial decoration that was ugly at that.' Then I learned it was Venturi.
Sorry, but I really can't see how anyone can look at this and think 'I am proud to be an architect.' or 'so glad this is better than the typical developer cheap crap'.
I think this house is FAR better than than typical cheap developer crap! Every bit of it is considered and intentional, it's balanced and expressive.
And it's not bad, that's not why it's threatened; it's just too small for what today's second beach home owner wants (which is, sadly, typical developer crap).
And no, trace, a name attached doesn't automatically guarantee that something should be saved. I'm not strongly arguing that this house should be saved. But it's a great example of the early experimentation and development of the ideas of a master.
Venturi's projects are easy to dismiss, but a good many of them are very complex in very interesting ways, and his influence is enormous. His influence, like his buildings, is easy to read superficially, but both go much deeper if one takes time to look.
Venturi's Lieb (No. 9) House to be moved (or demolished)
Venturi's iconic Lieb House in Barnagat Light, NJ, must be moved from its site by Monday or the new owners of the property will demolish it. Jim Venturi, Bob's son, has found buyers who would like to move it to Glen Cove, NY, by barge, but if it can't be done by Monday it will meet the wrecker's ball. Story here.
This house and the house for his mother pretty much made Venturi's career, so it would be a real shame to lose it.
I dont think anyone will miss it
whats the address?
I believe it was no. 9 but the name of the street just slipped my mind.
"I dont think anyone will miss it"
one man's brilliant opinion....
the address is 10 Idiotarchitect Street, I think
(and I don't mean Venturi, either)
They should have the neighborhood vote on it's preservation significance. Thats the democratic way to settle these types of disputes.
It's a nice little house, isn't it? Would be sad to see it disappear. Not only because it's a work by a master, but because its loss would signify a loss of celebrated funkiness in beach living.
I know, I know, the funky has gone out of most American beaches long ago, but I still miss it. I hate seeing the same damn enormous McMansion on beachfront property that I see in every inland cul-de-sac across the nation. That type of house on a beach represents an ignorance of vernacular in the face of real estate "value".
Sad.
i will miss it. my friends and i made a special trip to jersey coast to see this house in 1988, a real shame.
it is in loveladies, new jersey.
it is an important and historic piece of architecture. i don't know why people love to hate venturi when he, along with his firm and partners, contributed a great deal to the discourse of architecture in this country and gave two of the most important books ever written about architecture in 20 th century.
a real fuckin' shame!
I like it too - but it will live on in print and photos. Its not a huge investment of materials and character after all. Yes its important, yes its by an important architect but it just doesnt seem "sponge worthy" in the architectural sense.
[img]
You're right, Orhan, it's in Loveladies, not Barnegat Light.
But this is baffling to me: the pending demolition of a barely known building by an admittedly important architect, the Grosse Point library, gets everyone here up in arms and even starts a charrette to save it, while this seminal house by an equally important architects begets shrugs and bad jokes.
This house is small, but it IS architecturally significant and appears in many architecture history books. It's not just a cute little box, it's also spatially interesting, which can be glimpsed in the rear view:
In this house and the house for his mother, Venturi worked out some of his spatial ideas (not just the graphic ones everyone associates with him).
But, really, I shouldn't have to explain this in an architecture forum.
thanks for the pics, Orhan, I posted my last before seeing them.
correction: "side view"
i think to appreciate venturi's work requires some homework. therefore it is usually elected to right him off as a postmodernist because professor so and so says so.
i don't know any other living american architect who talked about modern architecture as much as venturi did and still does, in a meaningful way. he made a lot of enemies for telling it the way it is. he is an expert on modern architecture and it would only take a trained eye to see how he comments on it with actual plans, site plans and building elevations, sections, never mind the bigger picture and theory.
It could be that Venturi helped derail architecture into a 30 year fashion show that has proliferated in our cities and universities. These "iconic" structures are as bad or worse than then the modernism they attempted to subjugate. Even worse is his writings which unleashed a lexicographic nightmare out of which we may finally be emerging. I see Venturi as the architectural equivalent of a pseudo-scientist, or quack.
I will give him credit - the very early post-modernists were interesting
Pizza delivery guys are really gonna miss it..
Ok, now the ideological twist of the evilp is revealed (there always is one, isn't there?).
I'll just say that, even if what you say about what followed Venturi were true (which it isn't, it's just a sweeping generalization), to lay it on Venturi himself is simply bullcrap. Venturi attempted to subjugate modernism? huh? wha? He simply pointed out some of its faults, of which there were many, but he did "modernism" as well as his contemporaries did it, just in a different way. If you blame all crappy postmodern architecture on him, then you might as well blame all crappy modernism on Corbusier. But why do I even respond to this nonsense...your statements show me that you don't know shit about architecture and its history.
Yes, Silverlake, but you better Google map it to make sure where it is, so you're don't deliver a cold pizza.
i gotta say, i like it, but given my home state's penchant for shitty coastal, builder driven crap, it certainly doesn't surprise me that they'd demo this home. just drive around Deal, NJ and you'll see what I am talkin bout.
Maybe I dont know as much about architecture as you Emilio - I'll conceed that. But I know Venturi tried to bring back visual intrest to buildings, and I know he did it rather cartoonishly. My comment may not be academic in scope but I think they get to the point. Its not ideological either - Im stating a fact that the building is not that important beyond the intro to western arch 101 class.
And for your information Emilio - I dont think Corb was anything great either - over rated asshole from what Ive read - and a terrible builder.
the difficulty with this vs the breuer, emilio, at least for me, is that the breuer was a public building.
a private house is much harder to defend or and the decisions harder to influence: people can do what they want with their property. same issue worked against the stunning rudolph house in ct a couple of years ago.
Well, it's unthinking, grossly generalized statements like the one above and the one about Venturi, statements that make no attempt at any nuance of the person and what he created (Venturi ruined architecture for the next 30 years) that make me say what I said...and just because you stated something about that building doesn't make it a fact or the truth about its importance...and even though I started this thread, I'm outta here.
the one above Steven's statement, that is.
the front door is a '10'
i love that!
i will say though, that i would absolutely love, LOVE, to find, buy or work on cutting into an iconic home, vivisect so to speak, a design of my own...i'd drool at the chance. kind of along the lines of an Erased de Kooning
I guess Emilio you are a fan of Venturi's ideology? When agreeing or mobilizing to save a building its important to look at the replacement cost of losing the structure. In the majority of cases they are ornate 19th and early 20th century hard to replace craftsmanship. Impossible to replace actually. In the Breuer case its a one of his few American buildings still in use for it's original intent. In the case above the structure is more important for it's idea less than the specimen. This building could replaced or rebuilt very easily without much effort. Moving it makes sense and i hope they succeed. However, if lost it will always be available as an image, which is what it was intended to be right? I thought this building was about the flattening of composition if I remember my classes. I actually remember this building very vividly from school because I thought it was cool and one of the only Venturi buildings I liked.
You do have a point, evilp, about the replacement cost of this building. It's one of few buildings that I think could be "replicated" in another location fairly simply, and probably be better, as one could keep it looking essentially identical but add better insulation, etc. Usually I'm pretty opposed to that kind of pseudo-reality, but in this case it could be interesting.
Mind, it would not *be* the original, but could be close enough, because one could still walk through it and experience the spatial qualities - which, in Venturi's case, tend to be spectacular but terribly overlooked because the "flat image' is so easy to reproduce then write off as "cartoony".
Oh, god, I just realized this post will probably bring dear Rita Novel, expert at all things Venturan, out to chop off my head...go ahead, Rita, I won't hold it against you if you tell me I'm an idiot ;-)
Dont worry - i get told that every day
Ok, back for one more.
My comments were directed not so much towad the saving of the house - that's an event now unfolding and not much can probably be done either way - but on the reaction of some here. I'm no huge defender of Venturi's "ideology", just like to give credit where it is due and not take sweeping exaggerations at face value.
But anyway...
Steven explains the response pretty well.
me, i love venturi's writing and think it is up there with corb's seminal texts. very brilliant.
his buildings however leave me cold. i have no reason for this that i am willing to defend, but couldn't care less if any of his buildings were built, dismantled, or preserved. His built work is only important because of his writing. Couldn't prove that but is what i think. very different from ando, gehry, or zumthor for example, for whom no extra txts or explanations are required.
like a joke, if you have to explain the meaning to audience it isn't good. that goes for architecture as much as for comedy.
.
well I think it always takes time for architecture to be appreciated. But when you demolish it, this chance is lost forever. Look at what happened with a lot of the brutalist architecture from the 50/60's like what they want to do with Robin Hood gardens by the Smithsons in London...
and with jokes if they have to be explained maybe you are standing in front of the wrong crowd? if it appeals to all, it appeals to none. a little explanation/education of the public will only make them more aware and understand the significance of their built environment imho, that's also part of being architects.
I won't miss it. Never seen anything by Venturi that I'd miss. Writing's are one thing, but his designs are some of the most unattractive (visible) architecture.
I am with jump. To each their own, of course, but wow, I'd have a hard time explaining to anyone why this is 'good' architecture.
Again: the interior spatial things he does are far more interesting and difficult to convey (visible) in a photograph than the exteriors.
it's interesting to see how Louis Kahn was so influential on the elevation above. Look at the three-quarter circle that's clipped off center. It really doesn't work too well for me as it is drawn. It intentionally lacks Kahn's symmetry. It looks better in situ than in the drawing.
The sawtooth volume of the exterior space on the second floor is quite interesting and works well. It gives the building that ? impression and makes you look twice.
Curious building.
IF there taking it down looks like they should take the whole neighborhood down. The rest of the block looks like T-11 siding.
Just my opinion.
I have to say this building is more interesting the more I look at it...
There are some great volumes here and I like the fun trick with the covered seat on the roof that looks like a passage to nowhere when seen from below in the photograph above.
I am for finding a buyer!
seems like there is some "complexity and contradiction" to this post....
It was a windy day in May, 1977, just after the end of 2nd year. The five of us, Ellen, Sue, Ron, Tony and myself, drove down in my 2nd hand VW bug/sedan--like college kids packed in a phonebooth. We reenacted the classic shot of sitting on the steps even, and then went on to look the Frank Isreal houses also on the island. Scully's "historian's revenge" you know.
Ellen works and teaches AutoCad, although the starting date of her CAD experience (1982 on her online resume) is false as it was I who introduced Ellen to CAD in 1983. She's a Prague von Nettleburg and looks a lot like the revolutionary/arrested terrorist in The Best of Youth.
By pure coincidence, reread Sue's "Illustrating Ancient Rome, or the Ichnographia as Uchronia and Other Time Warps in Piranesi's Il Campo Marzio" where she footnotes me, albeit somewhat incorrectly. It was Lost's ultimate ending(/beginning) that lead to today's reading, however.
Tony works and paints (about memory), and his translation of Fasolo's "Piranesi's Campo Marzio will reappear at Quondam soon.
Ron went on to study under Frank Isreal and eventually became an associate at VSBA. Now on his own, Venturi sometimes passed on expansion/renovation jobs of older VSBA residential projects to Ron, some of which happened, but the Lieb House expansion of something like 10 years ago did not.
As for myself, the wind played havoc with my uninhibited hair growth back then to the extent of looking like Gordan Matta-Clark in all the pictures. Plus, I had to pee so bad I wound up doing it on one of Israel's walls.
Gordon would love to now cut up one of his inspirations, and Kahn's thinking "the further wayward adventures of the Fisher House hippie child".
Otherwise:
Acknowledgements
Foreward
Introduction
Preface
1. Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto
2. Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification or Picturesqueness
3. Ambiguity
4. Contradictory Levels: The Phenomenon of "Both-And" in Architecture
5. Contradictory Levels Continued: The Double-Functioning Element
6. Accommodation and the Limitations of Order: The Conventional Element
7. Contradiction Adapted
8. Contradiction Juxtaposed
9. The Inside and the Outside
10. The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole
11. Works
Notes
Photograph Credits
See thats the kind of shit Im talking about^
fucking beach houses and their fucking rich beachgoing owners.
hmmm. venturi and spatial planning? maybe. but not with this project.
i have lived in japan too long. this house looks generic typical to me.
if it wasn't venturi would it matter?
No, it wouldn't. But it is, so it does.
Maybe it doesn't matter a LOT, but it does matter.
Nope. Would have been bull dozed a long time ago.
I remember seeing the medical building going up in LA and thinking 'wow, this has to be one of the ugliest buildings, such a shame a decent building wasn't put up in a great location. No space, nothing, just superficial decoration that was ugly at that.' Then I learned it was Venturi.
Sorry, but I really can't see how anyone can look at this and think 'I am proud to be an architect.' or 'so glad this is better than the typical developer cheap crap'.
lb - so does that mean if there is a name attached it automatically has substance?
I dunno, if it is bad, its bad. Kill it, I don't care who made it ;-)
I think this house is FAR better than than typical cheap developer crap! Every bit of it is considered and intentional, it's balanced and expressive.
And it's not bad, that's not why it's threatened; it's just too small for what today's second beach home owner wants (which is, sadly, typical developer crap).
And no, trace, a name attached doesn't automatically guarantee that something should be saved. I'm not strongly arguing that this house should be saved. But it's a great example of the early experimentation and development of the ideas of a master.
Venturi's projects are easy to dismiss, but a good many of them are very complex in very interesting ways, and his influence is enormous. His influence, like his buildings, is easy to read superficially, but both go much deeper if one takes time to look.
I've taken the time, and I'm never going to get it back
I think this is an interesting project no matter who did it.
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