chapter VI
 
The Scholastics
 
AND WHAT ARCHITECT, HERE IN THE COLONY, FIFTY years later, was going to change things? What architect, as the Eagle screamed his supremacy in the twentieth century, dared design for America anything but homage to 1920s Middle European worker housing? To be fair about it, it was not merely a matter of daring, as the sad experience of Stone and Saarinen had shown. No, the only way to establish one’s originality and be respected for it was to proceed with infinite subtlety and with consummate respect for the proprieties. And never mind building buildings. The new way was first demonstrated in 1966 by a forty-one-year-old architect, Robert Venturi, who had built scarely half a dozen buildings in his life.
Venturi published a book called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as part of a Museum of Modern Art series on “the theoretical background of modern architecture.” Venturi’s essay looked, on the face of it, like sheer apostasy. He took Mies’ famous dictum, “Less is more,” and turned it on its head. “Less is a bore,” he said. He called for “messy vitality” to replace modernism’s “obvious unity,” for “hybrid” elements to replace modernism’s “pure” ones; he preferred the distorted to the straightforward, the ambiguous to the articulated, the inconsistent and equivocal to the direct and clear, “both-and” to “either-or,” “black and white and sometimes gray” to “black or white,” “richness of meaning” to “clarity of meaning.” In A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas and “Learning from Levittown” he and his collaborators, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, told where the necessary “messy vitality” might be found. Its cues would come from the “vernacular” architecture of America in the second half of the twentieth century. “Main Street is almost all right,” according to one of his dicta. So were the housing developments (Levittown) and the commercial strips (Las Vegas).
Venturi seemed to be saying it was time to remove architecture from the elite world of the universities—from the compounds—and make it once more familiar, comfortable, cozy, and appealing to ordinary people; and to remove it from the level of theory and restore it to the compromising and inconsistent but nevertheless rich terrain of real life.
It was for this reason that people were so baffled by Venturi’s buildings themselves. There were very few Venturi buildings, as one might well understand, since he was young and a rebel. (One was for Mother.) At the time Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was published, his only building of any size was the Guild House, a Quaker apartment project for old people in Philadelphia. For such an outspoken young man (among architects, anybody under fifty was young), Venturi worked in a somewhat … tentative way. If he was departing from modernism, he was backing off gingerly, with tiny steps and soft footfalls. In fact, the Guild House bore a curiously strong resemblance to Bruno Taut’s Red Front! worker-housing project in Berlin thirty-seven years before. And Bruno, despite the occasional lapse in taste, such as using a color, had devoted his life to getting it right in the orthodox manner. At first glance, Venturi’s words seemed rebellious. But his designs never seemed anything other than timid.
One clue to the puzzle was the fact that Complexity and Contradiction was published in a Museum of Modern Art series. Over at Utopia, Ltd., they did not publish books on “the theoretical background of modern architecture” by apostates.
Venturi’s academic credentials were excellent. He had studied architecture at Princeton and was on the faculty at Yale. Like his friend Louis Kahn, he had also studied for a year in Rome as a fellow of the American Academy. In fact, Venturi was the classic architect-intellectual for the new age: young, slender, soft-spoken, cool, ironic, urbane, highly educated, charming with just the right amount of reticence, sophisticated in the lore and the strategies of modern architecture, able to mix plain words with scholarly ones, historical references of the more esoteric sort—to Lutyens, Soane, Vanbrugh, Borromini—with references of the more banal srt—to billboards, electric signs, shopping centers, front-yard mailboxes. Complexity and Contradiction appeared with moving and even slightly purple endorsements in the form of an introduction by Yale’s prominent architectural historian, Vincent Scully, and a foreword by Arthur Drexler, curator for architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Scully said that Venturi’s work “seems to approach tragic status in the tradition of [Frank] Furness, Louis Sullivan, Wright, and Kahn.” (The tragic link between these four, as nearly as one can make out from Scully’s text, is that at one time or another they all had to work in Philadelphia.)
Bruno Taut’s Hufeisen Siedlung, Berlin, 1926 (top), and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, Philadelphia, 1963. It took us thirty-seven years to get this far.
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Studied closely, Venturi’s treatise turns out to be not apostasy at all but rather an agile and brilliant skip along the top of the wall of the compound. For a start, he calls it a “gentle” manifesto. But manifestos are not gentle. They are commandments, brought down from the mountaintop, to the boom of thunder. In fact, Complexity and Contradiction is no manifesto at all; Venturi is not trying to remove the divinity of art and the authority of taste from the official precinct. He sends out that signal at the very outset:
“I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism.” Translation: I, like you, am against the bourgeois (picturesque, precious, intricate, arbitrary, incoherent, and incompetent). Moreover, I, like you, have no interest in the merely eccentric (expressionism, in the Saarinen or Mendelsohn manner). Venturi continues: “Instead, I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art.” This turns out to be the most important sentence in the book. Including that experience which is inherent in art. Translation: I, like you, am working here within these walls. I am still a member of the compound. Don’t worry, the complexities and contradictions I am going to show you, with their “messy vitality,” are not going to be drawn from the stupidities of the world outside (except, occasionally, for playful effects) but from our own experience as progeny of the Silver Prince, from that experience which is inherent in art; namely, the esoteric lessons of Mies, Corbu, and Gropius concerning modern architecture itself. I am going to show you how to make architecture that will amuse, delight, enthrall other architects.
This, then, was the genius of Venturi. He brought modernism into its Scholastic age. Scholasticism in the Dark Ages was theology to test the subtlety of other theologians. Scholasticism in the twentieth century was architecture to test the subtlety of other architects. Venturi became the Roscellinus of modern architecture. Roscellinus, one of the most brilliant of the Scholastics, walked the very edge of heresy and excommunication by suggesting that sheer logic might require that since Jesus Christ, God, and the Holy Ghost were the Three-in-One (the doctrine of the Trinity), then God and the Holy Ghost were also corporeal and had ears, toes, the lot. But he was not excommunicated, and he was not a heretic. He was only pressing logic to its limits and making it do a few one-and-a-half gainers and, one might surmise, trying to make a name for himself. Not for a moment did he question the divinity of God or the existence of the Trinity. And here we have Venturi and, for that matter, Post-Modern architecture, as it is now known, in general.
Not for a moment did Venturi dispute the underlying assumptions of modern architecture: namely, that it was to be for the people; that it should be nonbourgeois and have no applied decoration; that there was a historical inevitability to the forms that should be used; and that the architect, from his vantage point inside the compound, would decide what was best for the people and what they inevitably should have.
With considerable wit Venturi redefined those two mythological items on the compound agenda—the people and nonbourgeois—and then presented the elements of orthodox modern design in prank form, with “Kick me” signs stuck on the back. These became known among architects as “witty” or “ironic references.”
In the Venturi cosmology, the people could no longer be thought of in terms of the industrial proletariat, the workers with raised fists, engorged brachial arteries, and necks wider than their heads, Marxism’s downtrodden masses in the urban slums. The people were now the “middle-middle class,” as Venturi called them. They lived in suburban developments like Levittown, shopped at the A & P over in the shopping center, and went to Las Vegas on their vacations the way they used to go to Coney Island. The middle-middle folk were not the bourgeoisie. They were the “sprawling” masses, as opposed to the huddled ones. To act snobbishly toward them was to be elitist. And what could be more elitist in this new age, Venturi wanted to know, than the Mies tradition of the International Style, with its emphasis on “heroic and original” forms? Mies’ modernism had itself … gone bourgeois! Modern architects had become obsessed with pure form. He compared the Mies box to a roadside stand in Long Island built in the shape of a duck. The entire building was devoted to expressing a single thought: “Ducks in here.” Likewise, the Mies box. It was nothing more than a single expression: “Modern architecture in here.” Which made it expressionism, right? Heroic, original, elitist, expressionist—how very bourgeois!
So Venturi did to the Mieslings precisely what they had done to Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and the architects of the Vienna Secession half a century earlier. He consigned them to the garbage barge of bourgeois deviationism.
As for the people, the middle-middle class, Venturi regarded them in precisely the same way that the Silver Prince had regarded the proles of fifty years before. They were intellectually undeveloped, although Venturi was never so gauche as to use such terms. One did not waste time asking them what they liked. As was customary within the compounds, the architect made the decisions in this area.
Venturi’s decisions resembled those of Gropius, who had decided that the workers should have low ceilings, small rooms, and narrow hallways. Venturi explained that people are perfectly entitled to have in their buildings the sort of familiar and explicit symbols that applied decoration can provide. So on top of his Guild House he put an enormous television aerial made of gold-anodized aluminum. It was not connected to any television set, however. It was “a symbol for the elderly.”
Ambol for the elderly? Scully provided a fuller explanation. Venturi’s TV aerial was surprisingly direct, refreshingly candid. “After all, a television aerial at appropriate scale crowns [the building], exactly as it fills—here neither good nor bad but a fact—our old people’s lives. Whatever dignity may be in that, Venturi embodies, but he does not lie to us once concerning what the facts are.” The phrase “whatever dignity” referred, presumably, to the dignity of aged middle-middle gorks sitting out the golden years narcotized by the tubercular blue gleam of the TV set. Just how much delight, if any, the residents of Guild House found in this familiar and explicit symbol, he did not report.
But so what! The Guild House TV aerial was above all an example of Venturi’s gift for the modernist prank. The aerial was a piece of applied ornament and, moreover, a crown, a finial, every bit as much as the “fantastic mooring mast” atop the Empire State Building—i.e., an obvious violation of the International Style. But in fact it was only a TV aerial, which is an ordinary machine-made (good) object whose function requires (good) that it be on top of a building. So only those whom the architect nudged in the ribs would be likely to perceive it as an ornament in the first place. Here we have what became known in the Venturi era as “an ironic reference.” Likewise, the aerial’s gold finish. Gold, as in Stone’s gold leaf, was the epitome of the hopelessly bourgeois in architecture. But gold-anodized aluminum was something else again, wasn’t it? It was a material conventionally used for the middle-middle people’s everyday mass-produced glitter, such as the adjustable strips on the bars of a rolling TV stand.
Venturi implied that if the Guild House had not been run by the Quakers, who are against such graven images, he would have crowned the building with “an open-armed, polychromatic, plaster madonna.” He would have … but he didn’t. Venturi’s rebellious exaltations of “the vernacular” led people to look for plaster madonnas and more in his buildings. But somehow they never showed up. Venturi’s strategy was to violate the taboo—without violating it. He used red brick (bourgeois) on the upper part of the façade of the Guild House—but it turned out to be a dark red brick especially chosen to match the “smog-smudged” brick of the run-down working-class housing around it (nonbourgeois). He placed a huge column (bourgeois) at the entrance—but it turned out to be undecorated (nonbourgeois), with no capital (nonbourgeois) and no pediment (nonbourgeois). He placed it not to the side but right in the middle of the entryway, making it seem not grander (bourgeois) but more cramped (nonbourgeois). The balconies were given decorative grilles (E. D. Stone bourgeois), but they appeared to have been stamped out in the cheapest possible mass-production process, as if by a punch press (stone-cold nonbourgeois).
O complexity! O contradiction! To violate the taboo—without violating it! Such virtuosity! Venturi had his detractors, but no one in the compounds could help but be impressed. Here was a man skipping, screaming, turning cartwheels on the very edge of the monastery wall—without once slipping or falling.
Of course, a man from Mars—or, we may safely assume, an old person from Philadelphia installed in the Guild House for the remainder of his network dotage—looked at the same building and saw only another typical, drab (smog-smudged red), faceless modern institutional structure. Even within the compounds, there were those who made the mistake of describing Venturi’s work in such terms. Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft called Venturi’s work “ugly” and “ordinary.” They both lived to regret that. Venturi was brilliant in such situations. He was a master of jujitsu. Like the Fauvists and the Cubists of days gone by, he took up every epithet as a glorious motto. “Ugly and ordinary!” he said. Then he turned it into “U & O” and played with that awhile. Better “U & O” than “H & O”—Heroic and Original, which was the stance of Mieslings such as Johnson and Bunshaft. H & O, J & B … how very bourgeois.
Venturi often praised the Pop artists of the 1960s, as if they were reestablishing some sort of tie between high art and popular culture. Venturi’s strategy was, in fact, precisely like that of the Pop artists—and neither had any interest, beyond the playful and camp, in popular culture. Pop Art was not a rebellion. The Pop artists, no less than the abstract expressionists whom they eclipsed, still religiously observed the central tenets of modernism concerning flatness (“the integrity of the picture plane”) and nonillusionism. They were careful to do only pictures of other pictures—labels, comic-strip panels, flags, pages of numbers—so that their fellow hierophants in the Modern movement would realize that they were not actually returning to realism. Jasper Johns’ proponents said that his pictures of flags and numbers, for example, were the flattest and most nonillusionistic paintings yet, because they were of things that were by their very nature two-dimensional and abstract. Pop was a leg-pull, a mischievous but, at bottom, respectful wink at the orthodoxy of the day.
For many younger architects, Venturi’s Big Wink was irresistible. The man was a genius. He had figured out the perfect strategy for routing the old crowd, the Mies-box people, without trying to dismantle the compound system itself. Venturi had found their vulnerable spots: first, their dreadful solemnity and high seriousness; and second, their age and remoteness from modern life. Their ideas of machine forms and mass production came from the period before the First World War. Their Mieslings’ approach to the goal of being nonbourgeois had been to take the “industrial vernacular” from “the other side of the tracks,” as Venturi put it, and introduce it to “the civic areas of the city.” Venturi was doing the same thing, but he was updating the process. He was using “the commercial vernacular” (the Las Vegas strip) and “the merchant builders’ vernacular” (the suburban housing development). Down with wide-flange beams. Up with a TV aerial here and a polka-dot punch-press balustrade there. That was the beauty of it. Venturi was upholding a central tenet of the compounds, after all. He was sticking to the wrong side of the tracks. He was keeping the nonbourgeois faith.
 
 
THERE WERE THOSE WHO, LIKE VENTURI HIMSELF, thought the source of arcane “reference” (the terminology of Structural linguistics was now taken up like a monocle) should be the middle-middle sprawling masses outside the walls. Charles Moore, formerly dean of architecture at Yale and now at UCLA, became the master of the camp historical reference. Moore would place a big piece of Victorian hyperogeed molding (bourgeois and a half) over a doorway in a private home—but with the following touches that snatched it from the jaws of apostasy at the last moment: (1) He put the molding only at the top, leaving the rest of the doorway with the usual mean plaster worker-housing frame. (2) He used not casing or architrave molding, which one usually sees around a door frame (if one has to look at such retrograde sights at all), but picture molding, from which picture frames are supposed to be hung, by wire or decorative ribbon. (3) In case there wassomeone who still didn’t get it, he attached a little strip of mirror vertically at one end of the molding, so that it was repeated for emphasis. But for emphasis on what? Why, on the fact that this was only “an ironic historical reference.” Intellectually, the molding remained as detached and remote as if it were behind a glass case in a museum of folk art.
Gradually, a Venturi, or “Pop Architecture,” movement began to form. It included Moore, Hugh Hardy, Moore’s friend William Turnbull, and Robert Stern. As editor of the magazine Perspecta when he was an architecture student at Yale, Stern had run part of Complexity and Contradiction a year before the book was published, and had helped call Venturi to the attention of Vincent Scully. By now, Scully served the Venturi wing of American architecture the way Guillaume Apollinaire had served the Cubists, which is to say, as scholar, counsel, and special pleader.
Beyond any doubt, Scully had established his credentials as a prophet. In his introduction to Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture he had described it as the most important piece of writing on architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture. The next few years had proved him right. Venturi was the first architect to create an important change inside the compound of the Silver Prince. Like Roscellinus, Venturi had his enemies, and some of them were bitter. But one and all were caught up in the utterly serious game he had originated: architecture of infinite subtlety for the delectation and astonishment of other architects. The new arcana revealed!—one monk to the other.
The recession of the early 1970s intensified the process. The recession wrecked the business structure of American architecture almost as thoroughly as had the Great Depression forty years before. There had been a tremendous building boom during the 1960s; practically every major downtown in the eastern United States had been rebuilt in a short time. Many new architecture firms had been founded, and many older firms had swollen to more than a hundred employees. The expansion had come to a natural end at the same time the financial slide had begun. Overnight, it seemed, thirty to forty percent of all architects were out of work. Firms with two hundred employees were suddenly reduced to ten. Senior partners were answering the telephones. Draftsmen were promoted to vice presidents. That way, instead of receiving salaries, they could share in profits, which no longer existed. Then came the exodus. Half of America’s architects seemed to be working, if they were working at all, for the Shah of Iran. Forty percent seemed to be working for King Saud the Good. The rest stayed behind to vie for fame within the intellectual competition of the academies.
In 1972, a new compound, known as the Whites, or the New York Five, made its bid with a book entitled Five Architects, the five being Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, Richard Meier, and Charles Gwathmey. They played Anselm or Abelard to Venturi’s Roscellinus. In their bid to appear original without violating the fundamental assumptions of modernism, they took the position that the true way would be found not in the land of the sprawling middle-middles but in a return to first principles. Their idea was to return to the purest of all the purists, Dr. Purism himself, Le Corbusier, and explore the paths he had indicated. Their Apollinaire was Colin Rowe, a professor of architecture at Cornell who had written an influential exegesis of Le Corbusier’s work. They were called the Whites because practically all their buildings were white, inside and out, like the maestro’s.
Their position was that Corbu had opened up a universe of forms that were right and inevitable because they came from the very core—“the deep structure,” to use Eisenman’s term—of the meaning of architecture itself. The meaning of architecture? For most who approached the Whites cold, this was a baffling notion. But … ah!—the Whites were ready for all the puzzled looks.
By now the philosophy—and the jargon—of French structural linguistics was highly fashionable in American universities. Even Venturi, with all his talk about “vernaculars,” “codes,” “references,” and “ambiguities,” had been affected by it. Structuralism had originated in France in what might be called a Late or Mannerist Marxist mist. The Structuralists assumed that language (and therefore meaning) has an immutable underlying structure, growing out of the very nature of the central nervous system. Instinctively, the ruling classes, the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have appropriated this structure for their own purposes and saturated it with a bewildering internal propaganda.
If this notion in itself seemed a bit incomprehensible, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Structuralists were people dedicated to stripping the whole bourgeois mess down to clean bare bones. Structuralists were beneficial to the people by the very nature of their work. So there was no need to get messily political about it. The same misty goodness enveloped the Whites. The simple truth was that they could scarcely have cared less about politics. In any case, they didn’t have to. It was taken for granted that Structuralist experiments were good for the people.
The work of the Whites you could tell at a glance. Their buildings were white … and baffling. They could barely stand to introduce the occasional black or gray touch, such as the band of black painted at the base of a wall to do the work of the old (bourgeois) baseboards. They were convinced that the way to be nonbourgeois, in the new age, was to be scrupulously pure, as Corbu had been scrupulously pure, and to be baffling. Baffling was their contribution.
The Whites. Architecture’s about-face avant-garde, marching resolutely back to the 1920s and Corbu’s early phase, with R & R at Gerrit Rietveld’s. Peter Eisenman, House II.
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Richard Meier, Douglas House.
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Charles Gwathmey, Bridgehampton residence.
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Corbu was a pane of glass compared to, say, Peter Eisenman, an architect who ran the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, which put out the two major organs of the Whites, Oppositions and Skyline. Eisenman was Corbu, if Corbu had ever gone to Holland and been hypnotized by Gerrit Rietveld. Eisenman designed white buildings that were Expressed Structure Heaven. They were like a piece of serial music by Milton Babbitt. The outsider found them utterly incomprehensible. The insider—the fellow compound architect—could detect that there was some sort of pattern, some sort of complex paradigm, underlying all the strange angles and projections, bu couldn’t figure out what on earth it was. One’s own esoteric soul cried out for an explanation.
But Eisenman’s explanations were not much help, even to the initiate. Eisenman had gone all the way with the linguistics business … Others were talking about syntactical nuances and the semiology of the infrastructure and the semantics of the superstructure and the morphemes of negative space and the polyphemes of architectonic afterimage. They would talk about such things as “the articulation of the perimeter of the perceived structure and its dialogue with the surrounding landscape.” (This caused a Harvard logician to ask, “What did the landscape have to say?” The architect had nothing verbatim to report.) But they were all United Press International rewrite men, simple to a fault, compared with Eisenman. Eisenman’s great genius was to use relatively clear words from the linguistic lingo and lead one’s poor brain straight into the Halusian Gulp.
“Syntactic meaning as defined here,” he would say, “is not concerned with the meaning that accrues to elements or actual relationships between elements but rather with the relationship between relationships.
Eisenman was beautiful. He could lead any man alive into the Gulp in a single sentence. Eisenman was such a purist that in the few instances when houses he designed were built, he did not refer to them by the names of the owners, as other architects did (e.g., Wright’s Robie House, Rietveld’s Schroeder House). He referred to them by numbers: House I, House II, and so on. It was as if they didn’t belong to anybody, no matter who had paid for them. They belonged to the deep structure of architecture; and, if one need edit, to history. His confrere Hejduk referred to his houses by numbers for a different reason. None of them had ever been built. They were all Corbu theoretical treatises in two dimensions, such as his “One-Half House,” which consisted of floor plans and axonometric schemes based on half a circle, half a diamond, and half a square. The one piece of constructed work Hejduk had to his credit was the renovation of the interior of the main building of Cooper Union in New York, where he was dean of the school of architecture. It was remarkable enough: a Corbu boat inserted, against all odds, inside a Beaux-Arts bottle. I saw it for the first time when I attended the Cooper Union commencement exercises in 1980. I could barely concentrate on the event at hand. Cooper Union had been designated a landmark building, so that Hejduk had not been able to touch the exterior. The exterior looked pretty much as it must have when Fred A. Petersen designed it a hundred and twenty-five years before. It was a great brownstone waltz of arch windows, caesurae, cornices, and loggias, in the Italian palazzo style, taking up an entire block. And inside? Inside the old masonry shell, at enormous expense, Hejduk had blown up Corbu’s little Villa Savoye like a balloon. The white walls, the ramps, the pipe railings, the cylinders … It was all quite bizarre. And why had he done it? Because, being a true compound architect, a true White, a true Neo-Purist, he could do nothing else. Petersen had designed huge windows along the stairways. The idea was to illuminate them as much as possible by sunlight. But this meant that anyone walking down the stairs could look out and see big chunks of Petersen’s damnable brown bourgeois masonry. So Hejduk meticulously enclosed the stairs in white Corbu cylinders, converting them into stairwells. Overhead, in the gloom, at each landing, there was a single unadorned 22-watt fluorescent circlet bulb of the sort known in New York as the Landlord’s Halo.