5 minute read
UGLY AND ORDINARY
NTURI ROBERT VENTURI I LIKE ELEMENTS WHICH ARE HYBRID RATHER THAN PURE, DISTORTED RATHER THAN STRAIGHTFORWARD, AMBIGUOUS AND EQUIVOCAL RATHER THAN DIRECT AND CLEAR. I AM FOR MESSY VITALITY OVER OBVIOUS UNITY. I AM FOR RICHNESS OF MEANING RATHER THAN CLARITY OF MEANING.”
ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE IS IN TOUCH WITH THE REAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE. GAUDY SUBURBAN, IMPERFECTION ACTUALLY SPEAKS TO PEOPLE.
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UGLY AND ORDINARY
HOUSES FOR PEOPLE
Robert Venturi, a controversial architectural theorist and critic of Modernism, put forward a number of key influential theories on Postmodernism in his manifestoes Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Both were a harsh condenment of modernism and culture of elite architecture. Venturi began designing “decorated sheds”, building with complex adornment and symbols. Venturi’s Guild House is considered one of the first and most influential expressions of postmodernist philosophy through architecture, representing a deliberate rejection of modernist ideals and a celebration of the “ugly and ordinary” (as Venturi called it). Guild House uses ordinary materials and flourishes to relate to the rest of the everyday humble architecture in the area including red brick, square, double-hung windows, and chain-link fence, overall mimicking public housing. Despite its visual language being rooted in the everyday, the building is far from ordinary in its philosophy, these embellishments are deliberate symbolic elements, (larson, 484) and Venturi wished to celebrate the density of symbols in ordinary architecture considered beneath the elite modernist ideals to get in touch with the human experience (hughes, 6). Not only does Postmodernist design raise questions about history and context through ornamentation, play and visual wit but also shows an engagement with mass culture and popular culture. Venturi, Brown and Izenour in Learning from
and Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas embrace the ugliness of symbolism and put forward that ignoring the taste of the ordinary person was wrong. This mirrored a cultural shift that saw relationships between high, low and mass culture change and complicate (sturken and cartwright, 314). Where Modernist art, design and culture had seen itself elite and distinguished from the media, the popular and the everyday, postmodern thought was part of pop culture. In our late stage capitalist culture, you increasingly cannot not experience consumerism, branding, images, media and the popular (strinati, 211). In its characterised skepticism of thought structures, postmodernism questioned modernism’s elite position above the everyday person’s experience. Venturi believed that mass culture and the everyday is so integrated into our identity and so should be a part of our art, design and architecture and hence his protest against modern architecture in buildings such as guild house.
The structure has the symmetrical composition of a palazzo and also adopts elements from Classical orders on the front with a giant pillar, again an example of historical pastiche again which protests against modernist ideals of progress. Venturi designed the building with a humorous ornamental top, in the shape of a large golden antenna. This was a playful and controversial symbol of or reference to the elderly inhabitants of the building and their presumed main leisure activity—watching TV—an ironic take on classical pediments and an example of humour in architecture that emerged as pop culture and entertainment became more important in art and design. This ornament, symbolism and visual wit influenced the future of the architecture world as designers, seeing how Postmodernism’s disregard for rules lended to contextualisation and communication in architecture (cartwright, 340). This was a direct challenge to the basic central principles that Modernism was built on, the design again not only using from the inventory of “postmodern style” features but also expressing on a wider level a shift in global culture.
DETAILS FROM GUILD HOUSE
ROBERT VENTURI 1960
MEN, NOT MACHINES
Modernism idolised the machine (gold, 33) as the perfect model, and situated itself above the everyday person. Modernists built houses that were machines ideal for housing machines (hughes, 4), beautiful buildings which were cold, cramped, impersonal and failed to appeal to the everyday human. As Evelyn Waugh summed up,
The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men (...) Man is never beautiful; he is never happy except when he becomes the channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.” “
Sturken and Cartwright write that one of the key attitudes of postmodern architecture is a critique of modern architecture as uncontextualised and impersonal in this way. Postmodernism questioned the control and minimalism of modernist architecture proposing that, “its insistence on functionality and rejection of decoration, metaphor, and symbolism, ignored the important ways that these elements functioned as cultural signifiers” (sturken, 340), that without ornament it fails to communicate anything about the surroundings, personality or purpose of the building, with often disastrous results, such as in the case of Pruitt–Igoe. Seeing that modernism’s ideas of progress, discipline and order and could lead to decay in these failed modern buildings but also in WWII, postmodernist architects rejected such principles. They believed that renouncing the belief in house as machine and renewing interest in symbolism and decoration, could speak to occupants in ways that modern buildings fail at.
It’s all well and saying that the ornament and decoration abhorred by the Modernists is actually what the people want and need but seeing it in your locality is the proof. @UglyIrishHouses on instagram collects photos of Irelands most bizzarre so-called “crimes against design”, both ridiculing and celebrating the architecture, but ultimately proof of the importance to homeowners to have individuality injected into their homes in the postmodern spirit.
SCAN WITH YOUR PHONE TO GO TO @UGLYIRISHHOUSES
