I guess it would be approporiate to mention Peter Graves....damn he did some but ugly post modern buildings.

All these buildings are still fugly

I didn't know he was an architect! Cool!!


"or is it too old now?"

Yea, so are the things by Imhotep, Ictinus and Callicrates, the master builders of the gothic cathedrals, Brunelleschi, Palladio, Wren, Schinkel, Lutyens, Gaudi, Corbu, Aalto, Kahn...too old...just too old.

that's some ancient sheet emilio.

thanks orhan. good to be reminded of that .

yeah emilio, i kinda wondered if it was the right thing to ask, but you know maybe venturi is to the younger generation of today as palladio or vitruvius were to the architects who followed the chris wren generation. which is to say completely irrelevant. time has a way of alternatively marginalising and drawing close all kinds of ideas, which is i think a good thing. churn is necessary to creativity.

sometimes it is too easy to believe that good ideas will be taken as intrinsically good, and thus timeless. that never works though. to remain relevant architects and their ideas need to be flexible.

I guess frank gehry was never so enamoured of himself that he would decline to be influenced by current trends. Venturi is so fixed in the 50's (never mind the 60's) it is almost a joke. Actually it is a joke. I have a book somewhere in my closet that talks about how venturi and his crew cherry-picked vernacular icons from a particular era, and IGNORED all kinds of stuff that was contemporary to their studies simply because it was the wrong aesthetic. It might have been by Sudjic. can't recall. he thought it was funny (also hypocritical, which is a form of humor if you turn your head the right way). i don't know if that is true, but it could be.

but anyway, iconography to current practice is not such a big deal as it used to be. i would still recommend all of the writings of venturi to anyone pursuing architecture. but now i wonder is that like recommending vitruvius? i kinda suspect it is. actually i hope so. that means we are really ready for something new.

just in time.

"McDonald's is influential. Does it make it cuisine?"

Ah, but probably thanks in part to Venturi, Izenour, + co., early McDonalds outlets are themselves historic landmarks...

yesterday there was a story on the news about mcdonald's and i was totally jonesing for a double cheeseburger and went out and got one. it was fucking awesome.

mmmm, mcdonalds.


intellectuals can talk about mcdonalds whether it is cuisine or not.


substantiation is only for angels. but what the hell. OK, it turns out it was sudjic who said all that humorous stuff. he really finds venturi funny. and jane jacobs too.

He says in 100 mile city "...for all the radicalism of Learning From Las Vegas, Venturi, and Scott Brown are full of nostalgia for redundant technology. The light bulbs of the flashing signs of the Las Vegas strip from the 1950's appeal to them, but the vacuum-formed, back-lit perspex which has replaced them - just as Burger King has taken over from the diner - does not. The Las vegas they wanted to learn from is no more the real Las Vegas than Jane Jacob's nostalgic view of Greenwich Village was the real New York".

I have no idea if this is true. In fact i suspect it is at least a litle bit misleading, but it does raise the question about whether that particular research is still relevant to this particular generation. Which is the real question isn't it?

But really if we are forced to rely on observations of the city made some 40 years ago to tell us about what to see today we are probably in trouble (doesn't mean it wasn't good stuff for its time though).

anyway, to get back to a more important topic... anyone here got stock in mcdonalds? cuz they is doing goood this year.

since i'm currently on a committee developing the signs regs for our land development code, i have to chuckle a little ruefully at what sudjic says above. we've been having arguments in this committee which wrestle with similar things.

e.g., why do we like when old ads are painted on the sides of buildings - and try to protect them - but wouldn't allow them now? why would we protect/grandfather a huge neon when we are disallowing similar sized led displays?

things that look ugly now probably/possibly won't in the future. weird.

re: Sudjic's assertion that Venturi didn't embrace vacuum-formed lit letter signage, when I worked on the Out of the Ordinary exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2001, the name of the exhibition was spelled out in those plastic letters above the entry to the gallery, in the gorgeous grand entry hall of the museum. And Venturi loved it. Maybe he didn't appreciate those "main street" letters in 1993 when 100 Mile City was written, but he came to later.

"things that look ugly now probably/possibly won't in the future."

Time has a way of nostalgically applying aesthetic qualities that were not present in the origin.

DAMN i ALWAYS MIX UP PETER AND MICHAEL.....AND THE BROTHER FROM GUN SMOKE.

"buildings, whores and politicians are all respectable if they last long enough, mr gittes." paraphrased from an old movie about an older time.

what about the aspect that the fictional presence continues with not demolishing the building?
if the story (building as fiction) isn't there, is there still story?
i am always fascinated with re located buildings and their permutations.
there is one near by, brought from a far away municipality and now serving as local "heritage" museum out of all things...

lieb house became almost a gypsy wagon, a used fellini set piece, perhaps next step as suggested would be traveling over the waters, like rossi's church. new scripts adopted.
i think building more or less has gone fictional rather than remain as a property of its original purpose. it happens once in a very seldom while and it is not a typical situation.
a new chapter has born for one reason and/or another. in this case the necessary tools were there. in most cases it would be a land fill material. so it is really one of a kind. a developing story if it does...
it can easly suck up the salt in the new location, and start to decay five times faster and next crisis might not be broadcasted...

Hey, lb, you worked on the "Out of the Ordinary" set-up? That was a nicely put together exhibit.

Venturi didn't only look at nostalgic neons and bulbs: in his design for the Canton Football Hall of Fame, he presaged the moving sign board way, way before LEDs and LCDs.

make that the New Brunswick Football Hall of Fame

Excellent point about the Football Hall of Fame design, Emilio! His proposal for the Staten Island Ferry Terminal also presaged the current appearance of Times Square, if I'm not mistaken.

And thanks, yes. It was a challenging project but one I'm exceptionally fortunate to have been able to work on.

no offense nocti but yr writing is painfully wordy

That very interestng Steven. Such arguments are impossible for me to understand. Aesthetics is such a fragile topic, easily shattered by whimsical culture.



thanks LB. I thought that might be the case. am pretty sure i have seen images of just that sort of thing somewhere. To be fair to Sudjic however, he was accurate about the contents of LFLV, which is nostalgic in a particular way. I don't mind that so much because LFLV isn't an academic book and humans will always have biases that inform what they talk about, so maybe it is more petty than ironic. It could signify something else though...


I often wonder about the history of big ideas, and would put Venturi's crew in that category. It is surprising how fast (and how slow) such things turn. Einstein fought til he died against the ideas that led to Q.E.D. and all of the people who worked to get that idea off the ground. Not because the science was bad, but simply because he had philosophical problems with quantum mechanics.

Which is amazing. One of the most supple minds of humanity fighting so hard on the wrong side of history. He was not made irrelevant per se, but was no longer the leader of new ideas and instead spent his energies trying to refute ideas that in the end proved to be irrefutable. Architecture is not so dramatic, but the chain of ideas is fascinating nonetheless.

So while I respect Venturi and still think we should study him I am not sure his ideas matter today in anything more than a background-y way. Which is why Sudjic's account is interesting to me. It's an indication that we are ready to move on. But to where?

Its too bad venturi is primarily referred for his writings. Formally I think he is extremely underrated. A lot of his plans are very well done, incredibly compact and efficient. And he did some things w scale that were v ahead of his time.

But unfortunately his work did not improve from when he did his smaller earlier projects.

Sorry but have to throw in my 2 cents on this: to go on and on here about the irrelevance of Venturi to architecture (or Gehry for that matter) because its "fugly" is simply pointless. Venturi's built stuff clearly got weaker over time (arguably not so true with Gehry), but the work was undeniably always driven by important ideas and attitudes. For better or worse, Complexity and Contradiction is one of the three or four most influential texts on architecture in the 20th century; and Learning from Las Vegas is right up there in relevance as well. If you look into it, you can even see their influence on the likes of Koolhaas and H&DeM among many others. So, evil et al, be haters if you want, but as Arch.InCriticalCondition suggests, being such a naysayer (let alone name-caller) really does only reveal your own shortcomings.

I and some others here have responded to some of the silly notions on Venturi's work, but the one that bugs me the most is the one of relevancy: RELEVANT TO WHAT? TO WHO? The notion that there is a new big idea that displaces old ones is way overrated. What we're really talking about is hipness, being of the moment, and, let's face it, whether students or young architects look at your work. And I did that too in school, had to look at the magazines and monographs to see what the latest noise was. But the duration that anything in art, architecture, writing, music, etc. etc. is hip lasts a nanosecond, if you're lucky. But some of that stuff hangs around for a long time: why? because it's relevant? not in the hip sense: it's relevant because it's good, people still get something out of it. Led Zeppeling was cool for about five/six years, but a hell of a lot of people still listen to them, because they were fucking good...and so were Elvis and Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, etc. And they might say the same about <fill in the name of latest band here> or <fill in the name of latest cool architect here>, but that remains to be seen. Something is relevant if it's relevant to you, if it helps you make new work, if it inspires you, period, end of sentence.

Emilio - end of sentence maybe, but not end of topic. By relevance, in this case, I certainly wasn't meaning hipness. And your last sentence is exactly my point: something is relevant if its relevant to and inspires an individual. By that measure, the texts named above (and some of the buildings) were, like it or not, hugely 'relevant', for decades in fact (C & C was published in 1966 I believe). It may have been before your time, or just not have appealed to you at the time; but its pretty well documented that many were influenced, again for better or worse, by this work. That pretty much suggests it has relevance, and not just hipness. Period, end of paragraph.

actually, the relevance of relevance was posited by venturi and scott brown themselves.

noctilucent :the premise is that historical association would be more relevant to people (to whom this would be relevant is never actually stated)...of course, as a side remark, we can read the self-damning proposition of a relevant architecture. once i proclaim my architecture is relevant for today, i am also proposing that the same architecture is irrelevant for tomorrow.

is skin cancern explicit and pancreatic cancer implicit? what happens when one still eats silly notions as they regurgitate them? sillly notions bulemia

What happens when what you write is so all over the place that there's no way to judge or interpret what you're saying? Nocti, you're not Derrida and you cannot write like him. You can try but it's just gobbledygook. Take some time and explain your linkages. Then see what you've got...

bothands If you look into it, you can even see their influence on the likes of Koolhaas and H&DeM among many others.

noctilucent: anyway, venturi's challenge of the eurocentric abstract with the spurtive occurence of the existentially fickle, along with the antithetically process-driven architectural quasi-sciences of modernism, paves way for the architectural retroactive manifesto and the opportunistic worldview.

we are in agreement. rummaging for the rubric through the rubbish. but at a certain point, the rotting carcass..."materialism"... the stench of the "teeming masses"... turned abstract and hygienic. vulgar signboards become posh, de Sade is a touchstone canon and a rotting shark carcass presents itself as an artsy eye fodder. and when the "Après l’avant-garde" avant-garde architects talk of materialism, one doesn't know which side of the vulva one is on.

make, shoo.

i am the "revered modernist" in this article.;.)

for the Gotkin-Sarnoffs!!

It's for reasons like this that I wonder: all quibbles over philosophical purity, in situ vs not in situ, or just generally whether Venturi represents a "discredited" "obsolete" "crap" legacy and we should merely let some kind of style-libertarian nature take its course...*what on earth is wrong with this*? It's the best positive publicity one can ask for; and even the creator himself can appreciate--on an inherently philosophical basis, no less.

Indeed, as an "architectural event", the move is poetry in its own right. It's its own best self-justification.

rondo i added your post in my continuing post about the lieb house in my blog.

I can just hear Ms. Liberty mumbling "Number 9....number 9...number 9...number 9...."

love the quote from the woman who used to live in the house. if there is no other justification for valuing and keeping this artifact, the fact that she made the trip to come watch it move because of the memory of her own good experiences in the house is something.

sort of puts the lie to the comments of the naysayers who said this is only impt to archi-geeks. this building meant something in someone's life. isn't that what we're in this for?

Yeah - rich reminiscing about a trophy house.

Ah, that evilplatypus. The Chris Brown of Archinect.

everyone has good memories of the places they have lived, and some of these places have no kind of architectural value at all...
with that reasoning, we would still be living in caves because our ancestors had good experiences in them.. you can't use that as an excuse to save the house -this one or any other building-
so the house is important only to archi-geeks and the people who has lived in it: 2, 4, a dozen?.. not much more people..
I also keep good memories of the house where I live but I can easily rationalize that it is, architecturally speaking, completely mediocre. I guess you can rationalize this argument for almost 95% of the residential buildings of this planet, inclunding some 'famous' houses.

Yup, I've got great memories of my parent's shack/shed in our backyard. I guess this is more or less a more contemporary version for someone.

Well said, Steven.

I think the argument is that a happy memory can be enhanced, or even germinated, by a considered (or in this case, a funky) architectural surround.

I can't believe I'm defending the impact architecture can have in daily life to a bunch of architects!!!

Sheesh, guys, why even bother if you don't desire, some day, to have someone say of your work "I loved being in that place, I'd be sad to see it disappear."?

I can only imagine a couple of Ruskie crew members sitting in the living room of Number 9. having White Russians as the barge moves across the bay. Wondering what all the fuss is about.

then let's keep ALL the houses (and restaurants-where-you-had-dates, and hospitals-where-your-child-was-born, and museums-where-you-saw-that-beautiful-picture, and metro-stations-where-you-met-an-old-dear-friend, etc...) in this planet intact and in their place forever and ever, just because all of their owners have had great times in them... does that make sense?

no one denies the impact that architecture has in people's daily life.. but you have to calibrate what has an extra value for other people not emotionally-linked to that building and what not... I couldn't care less if house X is demolished or moved in my neighborhood if I don't know the person living in it, so I will only support the preservation of house X if I see/presume that it has a certain value as a piece of good architecture...
and that, create things that trascend the client's or owner's personal satisfaction -which is certainly important but not the only purpose of making architecture-, is why some architects "bother".

just imagine how many threads about houses to be demolished we could do in Archinect every month if the preservation of "good memories" was the first thing an architect should bother about when discussing the importance of a building.

Medit, you're being extreme.

The impact of Lieb House is undeniable in architectural history, whether anyone likes it or not. Apparently, it also had a positive impact in the life of a woman who went to watch it be relocated, who doesn't give a hang about architectural history.