RES Columns: Q & A
Signs and Systems: Q+A with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
Words: Jesse Ashlock
Photo: Kawasumi Architectural Photograph Office
The current issue of RES offers a condensed Q+A with renowned architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. We're pleased to offer here the entire text of our conversation with the renowned husband-and-wife team, along with additional photographs of the resort hotel they recently completed in Nikko, Japan.
For nearly 40 years, the pair has challenged the conventional wisdom of architectural modernism with their projects and theoretical writings. They were praised and reviled for their groundbreaking 1972 monograph Learning from Las Vegas (with Steven Izenour), a celebration of the "messy vitality" of roadside signage and symbolically decorated vernacular architecture. Recent projects of their Philadelphia firm, VSBA (established in 1964), have included a resort hotel in Nikko, Japan, a government center in Toulouse, France, and campus architecture at Princeton, Penn and other American universities. They recently initiated designs for a pair of skyscrapers (their first) in Shanghai, and are working on a new book developed from a lecture series at Harvard, tentatively titled An Architecture of Signs and Systems.
RES: You have a unique working relationship. Do you distinguish the skills and talents that each of you brings to a task? Is there a seam? What's the nature of your relationship, as architects and planners?
Denise Scott Brown: Well, could we write a book for you? It's complex because we're from similar fields. But we do extend in different directions at either end of the spectrum. That's in a disciplinary sense. We also span continents -- though largely the same continents -- with one big exception: Africa. An important thing we had in common when we first met was that we'd both lived in Italy.
I like to say that Bob is a profound person who's surprisingly broad, while I'm a broad person who's surprisingly profound. We've learned to fill in the gaps around each other. But as far as ideas are concerned, it's very difficult to tease us apart. Although the world is sure they know how to do that.
Robert Venturi: I would say that the world is right to some extent, in that in general Denise focuses on the planning and architecture, and in general I focus on the architecture.
Another thing that's important is that we work as critics. T.S. Eliot wrote a lot about being a critic when you're being creative and designing. As an artist, you spend an awful lot of time critiquing what you are doing as you are doing it. We work as critics alone and together. And our theoretical writing is generally shared equally.
 Photo: Photokosuge |
DSB: Over the last few years I've been particularly close to our campus master planning project for the University of Michigan and to the complex of life sciences buildings and infrastructures that arose out of it, for which we're the architects. Recently, we've written a manuscript for a book and it's in production now. We were invited to give the Massey Lectures at Harvard last year. These are sponsored by the American Studies program. We gave three lectures -- half of each lecture each -- describing what we stand for. It's intended to be personal. The book is based on the lectures.
RES: That's typical of your manuscripts, isn't it, that they often blossom out of lectures that you've given?
RV: Yes, that is true. That's a good way to put it. The Las Vegas book [Learning from Las Vegas, 1972] blossomed out of a studio we gave at Yale, a design studio. And my complexity book [Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966] out of a course I gave at Penn.
DSB: But it's not purely a lecture. Our format is the photo-essay. Text, pictures and captions run together. Take out the pictures and their captions and you lose maybe half the text. We really need the pictures to make our point. If you're talking about the back of a building, a picture of the front won't help. You have to show the back. So the book has about 400 photographs.
RES: What is your opinion on the way the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has conducted the public selection process to replace the World Trade Center? How do you feel about the winning memorial and the Libeskind design for the building?
DSB: They don't interest us. The selection process was "public" but how really public was it? We didn't even try -- well, we did send in a brochure -- but we didn't expect to get anywhere at all, because we're not fashionable.
But, we viewed the economics and politics of the project with interest -- from the sidelines. I wrote an article for The New York Times saying, "Hold your horses. Think some more. Wait a little." I suspect the developer will demand the right to do that, but also wants the plan to be approved so he can get the money and be in a position to start. But maybe the process will go more slowly than people thought. I don't know. And I don't know, whether the demand for the space will exist or not, once it's built -- and no one else knows either.
I call this a honeypot project. Bees come from miles around. There's a cast of thousands vying for it or parts of it, and everyone has an agenda, though they all come on like public citizens. There can't be much rationality in such a situation.
 Photo: Photokosuge |
RV: Well, we did have two beams of light. But I think everybody thought of that.
DSB: We thought those high searchlights (you could call them) were a good idea. I had an idea tied to the patterns that began evolving almost immediately after the tragedy -- emerging patterns around the site that were also emergency patterns. Quite soon, rescue workers got the hang of what was available -- what places had remained open, where toilets were, where there was food. The next pattern was of Xerox sheets. "Have you seen my wife?" "Have you seen my brother?" They were put in places where people passed. A route through the area marked by those poignant notices could be a profound memorial. The Xeroxes could be reproduced in stone and placed along pedestrian routes in the pattern they had formed in the first few days. I felt that should be a major part of the restoration of the site. But no one took it up.
I'm very interested in urban patterns, so I was moved by the notion that, right after the tragedy, new patterns started and that these had such poignant human qualities. The sheets with photographs of lost people reminded me of the small marble plaques you find on the walls of old churches. Each represents a prayer for one person. Although mine would be outside in the open air, it was the same idea: along the busy sidewalks they would make a quiet urban processional.
RES: In many ways, the work you've done throughout your career has been a response to the heroic architecture exemplified by the old World Trade Center. Given that, I'm curious what sort of an effect if any those towers falling has had on the core philosophical or theoretical tenets to your approach to making buildings?
DSB: The fact that they fell, you mean? Should we say that we should never have skyscrapers again?
RES: For some people, that's an open question. But I mean in conjunction with the honeypot you described. What should replace buildings like those? What is the value of buildings like those?
DSB: We look at architecture, in many respects, as problem solving; and as responding to forces and requirements -- to forces, functions, and programs. The way I would start with the World Trade Center now is to analyze the activity patterns of the whole of Lower Manhattan, particularly those related to commercial uses and transportation, and with special emphasis on the stops in the transportation system -- to the places where people emerge from the transit systems into the city. What dynamic will build up out of that? Then I would progress that pattern, those patterns, into the future as much as possible.
The original World Trade Center was a bit of New Jersey in Manhattan. People in those buildings didn't go into the city. They took the subway in, went up to their office, then went home again. Are we sure the new growth won't go to New Jersey now? With the fear of New York and highrises that this has generated, workers and businesses might prefer to rebuild in Jersey City. So, I would look at the patterns and think of the options: if the market comes back, what are the options? If it doesn't, how is this area changing anyway? What new uses could you expect now? What existing uses could be encouraged? And what would be the patterns of growth under these assumptions? Considering the options based on several assumptions will allow you to head in appropriate directions, once you begin to see which assumption are panning out. That's the way I would think as a planner.
Now translate that into architecture. I think you could evolve a wonderful and bold architecture from these ideas. The built results of an incremental and tentative planning process need not be bland. But they would have to be derived in a thoughtful way. I think the project design should arise from plans for the ground level and what happens there. I would grow the designs around the subway station that's been restored to the site, around the stops in the system that bring people up to ground level. I couldn't find ground level plans in illustrations of competition entries on the Web.
 Photo: Koji Horiuchi |
DSB: I think the ground floor should contain a series of places that serve civic and humanitarian purposes. There was a suggestion I thought very good to locate NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- on this site, organizations that need space in New York not far from the United Nations. Civic buildings of different kinds could be added as well, and these could tie into private sector buildings around them.
RES: I read that one distinction of the winning proposal is to open the 16-acre site so that it's harmonious with the surrounding city grid, rather than a segregated superblock the way it was before, which seems like a step in the right direction and something that you would be for.
DSB: Yes. That was a major aim of the project -- to return to the liveliness of the streets, to replace through streets that the World Trade Center had blocked. I agree with that. And there are other people talking this language -- people on the planning commission in New York and the citizen's group I talked with at the Regional Plan Association in Manhattan. But I'm not sure any of them are being heard.
RES: How have the issues discussed in Learning from Las Vegas percolated through the last three decades?
RV: Before we answer that, we should always remember that we made the study over 30 years ago. It is very significant what has happened since then. We were considering Las Vegas as a really extreme example of the automobile-highway system of Los Angeles. And of course what happened in a relatively short time was that an entirely different city, a different kind of urbanism, emerged. It is essentially a scenographic Disneyland, rather than the city of signs along the Strip.
DSB: We were also thinking of it in relation to the outskirts of cities of the Eastern seaboard. But it wasn't as easy to study signs and commercial strips in suburban New Jersey, because strip patterns there were overlaid on many other historical patterns.
RV: Las Vegas was a pure and exaggerated example.
DSB: But all of that's changed. New Jersey's changed, so has Los Angeles, and Las Vegas has strongly changed.
RV: We enjoy acknowledging that a significant part of the vocabulary of the Modernism that evolved in the early 20th century was essentially based on the European discovery of the significance of American industrial vernacular architecture. American factories are beautiful and relevant.
And we are saying, "Hey, why can't architecture now acknowledge, for our time, a hundred years later, in the early 21st century, the relevance of the vital American commercial vernacular of roadside architecture, and learn from that?" There's some irony in that the Modern architecture of today is a kind of a revival of the early Modern architecture of the mid-century and therefore is somewhat equivalent to the classical Ecole de Beaux-Arts architecture that the original Modernists were reacting against. There are ironies here that we can learn from, as we base our vocabulary on the kitsch of the vernacular commercial architecture of America now. Viva billboards!
[Part 2]
