RES Columns: Q & A

Signs and Systems: Q+A with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Part 2)

Words: Jesse Ashlock

Photo: Kawasumi Architectural Photography Office

[Part 1]

RES: As architects, what do you see when you travel? Do you see the homogeneity that cultural critics decry or do you see the "messy vitality" that's so important to you?

DSB: We go to Geneva, Switzerland, quite often. It's intriguing to see how McDonald's there uses the Roman forum in their ads. They would never do that in Philadelphia. As for Starbucks homogeneity, I heard an African-American architect say you can be sure the Starbucks in Harlem has very different music from the Starbucks in Midtown. Perhaps the invasion of the chains isn't as deadening as we think. We need to look beyond the alarmism to what may actually be happening.

RV: You could also refer to the Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing!

DSB: I think people in England love to hate Starbucks, but I was in London last year and I certainly saw a whole lot of people sitting in there. They didn't look terribly un-English either. Starbucks didn't seem to be oppressing the society.

Consider another point of view: a chain like Starbucks can provide an opportunity for relatively inexperienced people to go into business, because of the support they get. Using chains to help build and support minority businesses may not be the worst thing in the world.

RES: What about the flipside? Can the sameness of the chain stores and the built environment be detrimental to local cultures?

DSB: We should be alarmed about economic globalism when it breeds economic oppression, but do people think oppression wasn't there before the global economy?

This is horrifying, but consider the issue of child labor, which the President mentioned the other day. No, American firms in the developing world should not lower their prices by using child labor. But listen to the point of view of some people in developing countries: it may be terrible, but if these children were not laboring and were merely dying of starvation -- would that be better? Maybe the ones who are laboring are better off? Do you see what I'm saying? It shouldn't be that way, but at the same time, the issues may be a lot different for a child in Africa who has zero chance for getting an education in any case. If we're going to get anywhere, I think we should accept that there needs to be a system of economic flows between the developed and the developing worlds, and that we must regulate that system -- not that there should be no system and then there will be no oppression. There's oppression under existing rulers. Capitalism that oppresses is altogether wrong, but a regulated system that helps bring benefits and controls capitalistic excesses may be right -- if we could get it.

RV: A year or so ago I was at a conference in Beijing and an Italian-Swiss architect referred disdainfully to the "Americanization of China." He was referring to the Pizza Huts and the highrises. I felt like saying, "Well, it's not as bad as the Italianization of Ethiopia." I think there really is a difference between political/military imperialism and commercial imperialism. When we arrived awhile back in Casablanca, the first thing we saw as we came out of the airport was a big Coca-Cola sign. But there was also, juxtaposed, the local commercialism which is very vital -- and of course you find that in Japan, beautifully. I think those juxtapositions are wonderful, and they show a kind of universality and localism at the same time, which is appropriate, and that gives tension and dynamism via contrast.

Photo: Kawasumi Architectural Photography Office

RES: It's interesting to note the degree to which Japanese culture in terms of iconography has become an actual export over the last decade or so and has begun infiltrating American culture.

DSB: I don't think that's going to hurt us.

RES:No, no, not at all. It's a forward progression that seems natural and that seems born of certain kinds of compromises between countries and ethnicities and ways of thinking that are inevitable as a result of globalism.

RV: That is a different thing from what Denise and you were talking about earlier, the sort of exploitation of labor by big companies and that kind of thing. But this other approach isn't inherently negative. These people love American pop culture; they love hamburgers and blue jeans. They're not being made to connect with it.

DSB: In 1977 I went to Iran for a conference of the International Union of Women Architects. At 3am, as the plane came in to land, they gave us Coca-Cola. I said, "Look, we Americans may be crazy about Coca-Cola, but we certainly don't drink it for breakfast." And they said, "Well, we Iranians do."

RES: Well that's very apropos. Even if the products are the same, the consumption is not.

It seems to me that the two of you might appreciate the parallels between architecture and information design. Has information technology changed your approach to architecture? Can we apply anything we learned in Las Vegas to cyberspace? Are there similarities in the way we can approach the built landscape and the digital one?

DSB: We use the computer considerably in our work, and on many different levels, not only for computer-aided design. We also do desktop and Photoshop work and we have a Web site. We're very interested in the use of information technology in architecture. But we're not good at understanding information technology. I try to make parallels between architecture and IT, but I'm not really sure what the architecture of information means. I criticize the structure of Web sites where I don't get enough of an overview to let me make choices about what I want, and where I can't get a sense of what I'll find before I go there. I really hate scrolling without knowing where I'm going. For me, that's anomie.

Photo: Kawasumi Architectural Photography Office

RV: In the book we've just written, my part has focused on the use of digital media for an architecture of signs, an architecture of communication, an architecture of the Post-industrial age -- of the Electronic age, the Information age. Abstract form in architecture is a relatively recent thing and rather unique to the 20th century. Look at the long tradition of architecture that is not abstract -- it's got to be appropriate again for our architecture to acknowledge and engage and accommodate symbolism and iconography. Look at Gothic churches -- they have stained glass windows which we think of as decorative art, but which are there to communicate content. Look at Byzantine and early Christian churches, they have mosaics, and they are incidentally art -- they are first of all there to promote information, to inform the populace which was mostly illiterate. Go to ancient Egypt and you find hieroglyphics all over the architecture, and so forth and so on. The two skyscrapers we've designed for Shanghai are not twisted and dramatically composed like the skyscrapers of today. They are essentially generic lofts whose surfaces contain vivid patterns and iconography that is graphic and ornamental. These surfaces, pixelated for today via electronic LED technology, are both static and changing.

RES: Are you familiar with the work of [information design theorist] Edward Tufte?

DSB: Yes, we know him. When I first saw his work, and seeing one picture in particular, I sent him a letter saying, "This diagram ties in exactly with what we think," and he wrote back saying something like, "Where do you think I got the idea?"

RV: In architecture your followers often get to do it before you. There's a building on the east side of 7th Avenue at 50th Street engaging conventional architecture, not revolutionary architecture, whose surfaces emit changing images via LED, sometimes decorative and sometimes informational. So it is beginning to happen and we think it is the architecture of now and that the current abstract expressionism is just an irrelevant revival.

RES: That's still very much the notion of the decorated shed, just on a larger scale?

RV: Yes, it is.

DSB: Except that the decoration now has no dimension.

RV: What do you mean by dimension?

DSB: It has no depth, it's made of light. Here's a way of thinking about it: Baroque architecture needed a depth of one yard to do its decoration, Renaissance architecture perhaps a foot, Rococo one centimeter, and Art Deco could suggest seven or eight overlaid surfaces in one bas relief, one centimeter deep. We loved the richness within the Deco low relief, but when we came to think about what this meant for us today, we realized that our decorative surfaces should be two dimensional -- for many reasons, including cost.

For example, on Bob's Fire Station No. 4 [1968] in Columbus, Indiana, the decoration is merely a change of color in the wall surface. That was a strong statement of what decoration could be at that time (it reminds me of Malevich's painting White on White and what it said for art in its time). And now we say decoration can be made of light. The surface can emit light but have no depth.

RV: We haven't been able to do it much, but we're hoping we can. Especially in Beijing.

Photo: Shinkenchiku-sha

RES: You had a full scale exhibition at the Philadelphia Art Museum a couple of years ago. What's your relationship with the city of Philadelphia?

DSB: When Philadelphians saw us at our exhibition they greeted us like family. It was wonderful. In some respects we're well winkled into the city, in others, not at all. There was a time when we, at last, had a set of supporters in the city's decision-making hierarchy and that's when we were chosen to be the architects of Philadelphia Orchestra Hall. But the orchestra could not find the funding, and then the people we had grown up with and been supported by retired, and the Orchestra's great executive director died. The new titans of industry who ran the process thereafter didn't feel they needed us, our design, or the information we had. Of course we feel they made a big, very costly mistake. It was sad for us. And we aren't connected now with Philadelphia building and architectural decision-making.

But we're happy that we have several projects right now in Philadelphia. Over the years we've done important work at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Benjamin Franklin Memorial for the National Park Service, and, of course, there are the Guild House and Bob's mother's house (both being nominated now for the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places). And we've done many small projects and a fair amount of urban planning in Philadelphia.

We've had to go outside Philadelphia, and indeed worldwide, for large civic projects. But all over the US we have academic projects ? laboratories, campus centers and libraries and quite a few campus planning projects.

RES: Aphorisms have been a big part of the discourse of architecture and you've used them often to articulate viewpoints and stances. Can they be dangerous?

RV: Yes. They can be very effective, but like a lot of effective things, they can also be dangerous. They're easy to misinterpret. Inevitably a short statement simplifies and may miss the complexity of a situation. But here's one we like now: "We're not ashamed to design buildings that look like buildings."

DSB: Aphorisms are often scandalous statements. If you make them, if you're an enfant terrible, people won't want to employ you.

One more thing about Philadelphia: our office is in Manayunk, in an old mill building. It's an apt location for us, on Main Street and we love our building, which is a big generic loft with a storefront. When I was wondering how we might get to exhibit our work as we ourselves saw it -- to curate our own exhibition -- I suddenly realized we had our own little gallery, right there at the corner of Main and Rector Streets, in our store windows. So we opened them up and we have exhibitions there, sometimes of our work, sometimes of other things. We made a little exhibition on Nicole Miller's clothes. There's a Nicole Miller store opposite our office. We had people really puzzled. We saw them standing looking from her window to ours wondering -- why would we have her things in our window? It was because we wanted to say something about the way she designs. We made a little scholarly monograph on Nicole Miller in that window. So we have fun there, and that's another way we're part of Philadelphia. People wait to see what we're going to say next.

RES: What do you say to people who still insist on calling you postmodernists?

RV: We are repelled. It's just a simple misunderstanding.

In the first book, Complexity and Contradiction, there are a lot of references to historical architecture. They're there to help via the method of comparative analysis, to say, "it's like this, rather than like that." That was misunderstood as not a method of comparative analysis, but as a way of saying, "Hey, you should revive that kind of historical architecture." That is an absurd misunderstanding and it was very sad. But if you're good, there's a danger of being misunderstood. That's the way it is.

DSB: The people who misunderstand us don't read us. They think they know what we stand for without reading us or looking at our architecture. They don't know the work we've done -- some of them seem to think the only building we've ever built is Bob's mother's house. That's all they can talk about, and that was 40 years ago. In fact, we have a large oeuvre, but much of our recent work has not been published. That is part of the problem.

In the book we're doing now, I used a statement Bob made some years back as the basis for what I wrote. He said "We talk a lot about iconography and signs, but when we do our work, we, like other architects, spend 90% of our time doing other things." So my part of the book tries to show those other things we think of when we design. Some of the disciplines we use while designing are different from those of other architects. They evolve from urban planning.

RES: Does the book have a working title?

DSB: It's called Architecture as Signs and Systems.

RV: We'd love to acknowledge in a subtitle the element of "mannerism" as valid for our era. And mannerism is sort of a continuation of the idea of complexity and contradiction. Mannerism is a high-faluting term that people don't understand. They think it means something bad. But historically it has meant architecture that acknowledges ambiguity and breaking the rules. When we talk about mannerism for now, it's essentially about architecture as signs.

DSB: -- as signs and systems. And in the plural.