"Here is a nice excursion into the early days of the discussion on facades and how to avoid them. Wish I had seen it in real, and at the time. " - via Karen Lohrmann

Some excerpts from the conversation between Rem Koolhaas, Stefano de Martino and Léa-Catherine Szacka discussing post modernism, 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale and the opposition to facadism from the early collaborators.

A historical delight!

Stefano de Martino [SdM]: The piece of canvas was a temporary screen – the only concession to an exterior presence was the OMA neon sign. We did not play the formalist game, proving that architecture can be very little, that you can concentrate on content.

Rem Koolhaas: I hated the idea of having to do a facade, even more a facade to represent oneself. So there were essentially a number of things that we wanted to avoid.

SdM: We were never into facadism. Maybe now that it’s all about facades, you don’t hear this word anymore, but at the time it was an insult. We saw the Strada Novissima as a kind of postmodern Potemkin village. Knowing the people invited, we could very well imagine what would happen. We knew it would be a horrendous pastiche. Our project moved in another direction: it was ephemeral, non-referential, and it produced its own logic, defining a situation instead.

......

Léa-Catherine Szacka : Portoghesi, when embarking on the daunting task of organizing the Biennale, asked Charles Jencks but also Robert Stern, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Vincent Scully and Kenneth Frampton to be part of the organization committee – Frampton soon quit because he didn’t agree with the curatorial and theoretical positions. Who do you think was responsible for your presence? 

RK: I think it was Jencks. I didn’t know Portoghesi. At the Biennale I shook his hand, but barely talked to him. Now, in retrospect, I think he is a very interesting architect. But with Jencks and Frampton, I was in an extremely unstable situation. I was a friend of Jencks since 1968, when I met him at the AA. Of course, I totally disagreed with Jencks’ positions and I still do, but we remained good friends. A little later, in the 1970s, I became friends with Frampton. In the 1970s, I agreed with his position. When I was writing Delirious New York he became more and more negative about my work. He thought it was terrible to write about Dalí. At the beginning of the 1970s Frampton had a good sense of me; at the end of the decade, he had a bad one.  

.......

LCS: You said at one point you were not so different from the others in the Strada Novissima.  

RK: No, I wasn't that much different. That is the whole point of Delirious New York: exaggerate the differences. You have no idea how controversial the idea was at the time to work on New York. Everyone thought it was a serious mistake and an irrelevant subject. And that is why I was always interested in Venturi and Scott Brown. Because I realized that they were extremely SMaRt and creative in the way they looked at things. I wanted to be part of that.  

via OASE Journal for Architecture