Robert Venturi
Robert Venturi is most known for being the most influential member of the Philadelphia School, which comprised of his associates Denise Scott Brown, John Rauch and Steven Izenour. Robert was seen as the principle apostle of pop architecture in the United States and indeed the world. He took his influences from ‘main street’, a typical housing project or a plain looking school, also from the thousands of motel diners with there billboards all along the American motor ways. Venturi and his colleges took from pop culture, which was at the time widely interpreted as a reaction to the then dominant ideas of abstract art, and used these manifestations found in the ordinary ‘main street’ and fashioned them into a new kind of language that was more reflective of America. His work reflected a very postmodern attitude seeking its own voice.
Venturi believed that his predecessors were not seeking clarity from their buildings but that they were being rather overly complex. He’s famous for coining the phrase ‘less is a bore’ a parody of one of his peer, Mies van der Rohe. For Venturi, architecture did not have to be heroic and original instead it could draw upon its rich history around it. In his publication Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture he says that ‘main street’ is almost all right, he was looking to the American landscape for a visual language for his work and ordinary America was fine. His predecessors were modernists, using abstract forms in their designs, and this was what he was rebelling against, he wanted to use what was in his surroundings. Like pop art, looking at signs and objects from the man made environment and integrating them into his buildings. In Learning from Vegas he even compares Los Angeles and Las Vegas to the Rome and Florence of the United States, suggesting that the buildings symbolized America more than the abstract buildings that van der Rohe was building at the time. Looking away from the abstract theoretical world, Venturi looked at the actual American landscape and he saw what other high-minded types might of seen as tacky, as beautiful.
Renovation of Grand Restaurant
During Venturi’s formative years words like supergraphics and supermannerisms were coined to describe breaks with the modernist movement. A mannerism is a word used to label the stylish art of the 1500′s, which broke with the natural and harmonious beauty of the High Renaissance. Supermannerists was a term used by those advocates purist modernist movement to describe work by young architects like Venturi who embraced the pop art notions of changing scale and context. In the late 60′s, supergraphics became a popular word for bold and geometric shapes of color, giant letterforms and huge pictographs warping walls, bending corners and flowing from wall to wall to expand and contract, changing space and scale. The renovation of Grands Restaurant gives us a good example of where type is seen as an integral part of the buildings function. Used in this way where it has both decorative and psychological values. Externally and internally we can see the influences of Venturi’s attitude to post modern architecture.
The owner of Grand’s restaurant wanted to retain his simple atmosphere of his former establishment were ‘students would feel comfortable in their t-shirts’. The restaurant’s budget wasn’t much so rather than disguise this he decided to exploit it. He wanted to use conventional means and elements through out the design of the interior and exterior but in a way to make the common things take on new meaning and context. Venturi saw his architecture as shelter rather than as a photo; as a background, not as a backdrop. Typography and cheap painted patterns spelt out the proprietor’s name along the sidewalls of the restaurant, Venturi says that the text was illogically place as to emphasize the ornamental characteristics of the letterforms. This naturally gives the restaurant a stylish environment at a small cost. Giant letterform stencils repeated in mirror image on the opposite wall of the kitchen alter the scale and space of the environment. The type also gave unity and space to a public space and gives contrast to the multiple booths that dot the restaurant and the inevitable individual scale they form. The typography’s function is different in Grands than buildings before, it’s not for way finding or labeling, its taking the problem Venturi had of a long unattractive hall and creating a beautiful space.
Although the exterior lettering is bold in its scale its function is different from the interior. The colours on the outside sign are unrelated to those on the inside because the outside is different from the inside, says Venturi. They are primary and more vivid which catches the eye reluctant to read ads. Jencks says of Venturi that the exteriors of his buildings reflect the external public forces, whether pop art or urban space, while the interiors reflects the individual circumstance.
