Falleció Robet Venturi, artifice del postmodernismo

El 18 de septiembre falleció el arquitecto Robet Venturi, artifice del postmodernismo. A continuación un par de obituarios:

Vía Design, El País.

Robert Venturi, el hombre que quiso que la arquitectura fuera una fiesta

Fallece el arquitecto estadounidense que lideró el postmodernismo y cuyo premio Pritzker, en 1991, vivió rodeado de polémica por no haberlo recibido también su esposa y socia Denise Scott Brown.

Por Mario Suárez

Cuando la arquitectura en los años sesenta aún se arrodillaba ante aforismos como los de Mies Van der Rohe de “menos es más”, llegó un inconformista arquitecto estadounidense y dijo que “menos es un rollo”. Robert Venturi (1925-2018) tomó las riendas de la crítica sistemática y efectiva contra el Movimiento Moderno, contra la austeridad de lo funcional, y se empeñó en que la arquitectura fuera una fiesta de referencias inteligibles por todo el mundo.

En 1962 construyó la que hoy se considera primera casa posmoderna de la historia, que rompía el dogma vanguardista y no era un cubo acristalado sino una construcción con tejado a dos aguas y un arquito sobre la puerta. Está a las afueras de Filadelfia y fue diseñada para una mujer de izquierdas, feminista y vegetariana: Vanna, su madre. Empeñado en dar valor al ornamento frente a lo mínimo imperante, desde finales de los años sesenta Venturi se convirtió en el mayor representante del posmodernismo, en parte por su obra y también por sus estudios de pensamiento y análisis de la arquitectura y su relación con el entorno. Uno de sus primeros libros, Contradicción y complejidad en la arquitectura (1966) sigue siendo una referencia en esa reivindicación del historicismo, de lo simbólico.

“Venturi tuvo una enorme importancia en explorar los elementos simbólicos inherentes a la arquitectura, cogió todos estos referentes sociales que estaban apartados y los incorporó; para él, el medio ambiente estaba construido de infiltrados culturales y debía introducirlos en la arquitectura”, explica el arquitecto Juan Navarro Baldeweg. Todos estos elementos eran imágenes del capitalismo, de un mundo real, símbolos de la tradición y de lo cotidiano, y a todo ello, él lo pone en valor y lo contextualiza. “Su investigación sobre el aspecto simbólico de la arquitectura es su legado y forma parte del pensamiento actual”, añade Navarro Baldeweg.

Este trabajo de investigación se materializó en Aprendiendo de Las Vegas. El simbolismo olvidado de la forma arquitectónica (1972), que escribió junto a su mujer, Denise Scott Brown, y Steven Izenour. En este manual irónico hablaba de simbología del entorno, de la manera en que una gasolinera o un cartel publicitario puede crear ciudad y comunicar con el individuo. Es decir, que también es arquitectura.

El arquitecto diseñó también mobiliario –funcional pero festivo– y en el patrimonio monumental de los EE UU dejó edificios como el colorista Museo del Niño en Houston o la Guild House en Filadelfia. Recibió el premio Pritzker de Arquitectura en 1991, pero su esposa y socia no acudió a la gala. Para ella no era el premio, pese a llevar varias décadas firmando los proyectos a medias. En 2013, el matrimonio participó en una campaña de firmas para reclamar el premio con carácter retroactivo para Denise Scott Brown. El desplante machista a su esposa ensombreció para siempre el galardón, al tiempo que lo consagró.

El pasado martes 18 de septiembre, su familia enviaba un comunicado a la revista Architect’s Newspaper en el que decía: “Anoche, Robert Venturi falleció pacíficamente en su casa después de una breve enfermedad. Ha estado rodeado de su esposa y su socia, Denise Scott Brown, y su hijo, Jim Venturi. Tenía 93 años. La familia está planeando hacer un servicio en su honor para celebrar la vida de Venturi que anunciará en la próximas semanas”.

El texto remarcaba que Denise era esposa y compartía despacho con Venturi. Un subliminal mensaje que dice que la batalla de ella, quizá, aún no ha acabado.

Vía The Guardian.

Robert Venturi: the bad-taste architect who took a sledgehammer to modernism

Por Oliver Wainwright

With the maxim ‘less is a bore’, the larger-than-life architect, who has died aged 93, brought history and hilarity to the staid world of monochrome tastefulness

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, the seminal 1966 book by Robert Venturi, who has died aged 93, has always stuck out of my bookshelf. Like its author, it is an awkward thing, refusing to bow to the conventions of what shape a book should be. A recently published facsimile edition of Learning from Las Vegas, the radical manifesto he wrote with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, and colleague, Steven Izenour, in 1972, does the same thing today. It pokes out of the teetering piles of books gathered around my desk, a monumental tome that is impossible to ignore. Like the Vegas billboards it celebrates, it screams for attention.

Disrupting more than just bookshelves across the world, Venturi was one of the most influential figures in 20th-century architecture, taking an erudite sledgehammer to the dogmas of modernism and arguing for a world that embraced history, diversity and humour. His was a catholic big tent that rejected the “either/or” attitude of purity and order, arguing for the plural richness of “both/and”. It was a pop sensibility that placed as much value in the burger stand as the cathedral, an inclusive folk art approach to architecture that found joy in the everyday. “Less is more,” was the po-faced maxim of modernist maestro Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to which Venturi gleefully retorted: “Less is a bore.”

I met Venturi and Scott Brown for the first time at 18, when I was working as an intern at the National Building Museum in Washington DC. They came to lecture on the occasion of being awarded the Vincent Scully prize in 2002, and performed a quick-fire slideshow of things that they loved, under the banner A Disorderly Ode to Architecture That Engages. It was a fun-filled ride, from Michelangelos and bungalows to ketchup bottles and cartoons, but presented with poker-faced gravity by this besuited pair of pensioners. They took their fun seriously. As Scott Brown would later write: “Be deadpan, don’t upstage your subject and (in the way Bob wears Brooks Brothers suits) present outrageous content in a conventional format.”

I eagerly queued to have my book signed (even Venturi’s signature was larger than life, incorporating the facade of the house he designed for his mother in a lively scribble), and on learning that I was from Yorkshire, his eyes lit up. “Vanbrugh! Castle Howard! It’s one of our favourite buildings!” I had been expecting him to wax lyrical about pop culture, but instead he began enthusing on the wonders of the English baroque. In an instant he transformed what had always been a tedious stately home in my mind, from a childhood of being unwillingly dragged around such places, into a magical-world of architectural games and theatrical tricks, a great house conceived as a series of stage sets. I hadn’t realised these old stone hulks were so full of mischief and wit.

Unexpectedly, the influence of Venturi would persist. A year later, the first essay I was set when I arrived at university was on his mother’s house, which he built in Philadelphia in 1964. It was the first time I learned how to read a plan and section, what to look for in a facade, how architecture could be representational: that meanings could be translated into physical space.

“It is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little,” wrote Venturi. “Some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another.” I remember staring at the plan for hours, trying to work out why the staircase kinks awkwardly around the back of a chimney breast, as if each element was competing to occupy the centre of the room. In typically perverse fashion, Venturi wrote that the staircase considered on its own, tucked into a residual space, is bad. But, considered as part of the complex and contradictory whole, it is good. It performs a curious dance with the chimney, and splays at the bottom to provide a place to sit. The facade, meanwhile, acts like a Vegas sign, a thin screen that shouts “house”, through which the building’s inner complexities occasionally protrude, setting the symmetrical form off-balance.

It had a flatness, like layered stage scenery, that would continue to be a theme throughout Venturi and Scott Brown’s work. “Baroque architecture needed a depth of one yard to do its decoration,” they wrote. “Renaissance architecture perhaps a foot, rococo one centimetre, and art deco could suggest seven or eight overlaid surfaces in one bas-relief, one centimetre deep. We loved the richness within the deco low-relief, but when we came to think about what this meant for us today, we realised that our decorative surfaces should be two-dimensional – for many reasons, including cost.”

It was a kind of architecture they classified as the “decorated shed”, a functional box with ornament applied independently of what’s going on inside, which they set in opposition to the “duck”, where the architecture itself is a sculptural, symbolic object – named in honour of a duck-shaped egg-stand on Long Island. It is a useful classification that remains relevant, with the contorted ducks garnering media attention, while the decorated sheds sprawl across the landscape. They told me that wherever they went, they always played the game of “I bet I can like something worse than you can like”. It was an urge that Scott Brown described as “hate-love exhilaration,” an attraction to the weird, ugly or banal, that forced them to reflect on that attraction, and unpick the signs and symbols behind the world around them.

Venturi is often referred to as the father of postmodernism, but he was so much more than that. As the historian Robert Miller wrote, it is “a charge comparable to calling Thomas Edison the father of disco”. Like Edison, Venturi shone a bright light into the often gloomy world of architectural discourse, illuminating a colourful spectrum of possibility, embracing the messy vitality of the “ugly ordinary”, and expanding the very idea of what architecture could be.