Page 21 - Studio International - September October 1975

Inevitably, too, the attitude acquired Las Vegas strip, although it is a quite the shape of a vast duck was illustrated in
a high culture architect as its advocate. different product from the arcane a book by Peter Blake, God's Own
He is the triune person of Robert complexities of Lutyens' plans. Junkyard, which he ridiculed); and
Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and John But the counterposition of Las Vegas `decorated sheds'. Venturi maintains
Rauch. On his own, when Robert and of Levittown is interesting for
Venturi wrote Complexity and another reason. The study done in
Contradiction in Architecture (1966), he Learning from Las Vegas deals only with
replaced the Miesian paradox 'Less is the strip. Not a word is said of Las Vegas
more' with the jibe 'Less is a bore'. housing. Though if you look at the
His appeal against the purism of the old Venturis' plans of the town on which the
Modern Movement, against the strip is marked for your admiration, you
uniformities and the boredom of the will see that it is virtually square: and yet
Masters was to an architecture of variety, in the book, the parts of the town beyond
and (as the title implied) of visual and the façades of the strip do not appear,
volumetric complexity. Lutyens was except at the edge of one or two aerial
quoted almost as often as Corbusier; and photographs. Their attention is entirely
above all 'Main Street', which had been focused on the eccentric volumes of the
the cynosure of so many 'purist' critics casinos and hotels : but even more, on
(Venturi attacked Peter Blake in their signs.
particular), messy, disorderly,
commercialized Main Street was almost
all right.

His next step was perhaps foreseeable.
If Main Street is almost all right, then it
can be made wholly so by putting it in
inverted commas. So that is what
Venturi did. 'Ugly and Ordinary' is how
he describes the building he wishes to
design. Note the inverted commas,
'however. Not ugly and ordinary, but
'Ugly and Ordinary'. These buildings that most modern 'architects' architecture'
are high culture, to be judged by the is 'ducks', buildings in which the
same criteria as 'architects' architecture', symbolic form is the organizing principle
just as the Rolling Stones put themselves of structure, volume and programme.
between inverted commas when they While their validity in the past (Gothic
made Sympathy for the Devil with cathedrals) is unquestioned, the Venturis
Jean-Luc Godard. propose as the type of a modern
The slogan of the ugly and the building the decorated shed, in which the
ordinary is not intended to be a critical shelter is dictated by utilitarian
judgement on their architecture, although considerations, while the symbolic bits
it derives from a jury comment on a and pieces are stuck on to the front:
competition scheme of Venturi's. façades, bill boards or signs. Assertively,
Unfortunately, even in their second Venturi has carried his theory out in
apologia, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), The variety of the neon and other practice. Decorated sheds, 'ugly and
they do not offer a higher transcendental electric signs is, of course, what continues ordinary' is what he claims to build,
idea than variety as a justification for to fascinate so many journalists as well as though he also produces the occasional
their approach. No idea there of variety the architects and designers who make duck : there is after all no ban on ducks
for . ? Variety is presented as good in Las Vegas part of their grand tour. And in his theory.
itself, and the book sets as many posers as yet Tom Wolfe, who had popularized
it answers. it, also had, all those many years ago, a
Learning from Las Vegas was, you warning for them: his first hero of the
might say, the architectural tail of the Las Vegas adventure, whom he called
comet which had Tom Wolfe as its 'Raymond' and who 'although not a
flashing head. The analytical jeremiads typical Las Vegas tourist' — is a 'good
which were the favoured US kind of example of the impact Las Vegas had on
journalistic sociology, excellently the senses', demonstrated that the impact,
purveyed by Vance Packard and augmented by alternating doses of
William H. Whyte Jr., had its amphetamine and meprobamate (taken
architectural equivalent in the with alcohol), had induced a state of
post-Modern Movement style of Paul toxic schizophrenia.
Rudolph. Naturally, he became the The Venturis have now transferred
Venturis' favourite target. But their attention to the much more
architecture is more expensive than anodyne varieties of 'customized'
clothes or even customized motor cars, Levittown housing, which indicates a
and architectural fashions follow behind duality (unresolved and perhaps
other fashion manifestations which are unresolvable) in approach. On the one
cheaper, more volatile and more sensitive hand is the public space of Las Vegas;
to the change of social tone. on the other, the private one of the
The cult of Levittown as a speculators' suburb. Variety is the one
representative of American suburban transcendent value to which they pay any
life combines the self-sufficiency and service. Yet in the first book there was a
individualism of the generation which pervading assumption that variety had
grew up in the fifties and early sixties no meaning without a unity to which it is
and is now saddled with the universal subsumed.
paraphernalia of wife, children, mortgage In the later studies there is less talk of The dual classification, with its
and job. Levittown makes a premium of unity. In the Las Vegas study there is a emphatic preference for the decorated
individuality within the suburban crucial attempt to classify all building into shed, does, however, raise a most
milieu. The variety which Venturi two major classes : ducks, that is buildings important issue; and it may be worth
exalted in Complexity and Contradiction which are three-dimensional, volumetric looking at one of their buildings in some
is available in Levittown, as it is on the envelopes for a given function (a diner in detail to state it. This oldish scheme (1967)

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