ROBERT VENTURI COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION IN ARCHITECTURE
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LITERATURE REVIEW
Article 1 Robert Venturi made architecture less rigid yet more clubby. He advocated for new styles but not new voices. Author: Christopher Hawthorne Date Issued: September 29, 2018
Review: Complexity, contradiction and ambiguity are known as words in daily language having negative meanings and should be converted to positive. The tension around these concepts may be much more disturbing in architectural design than in the everyday life. If there is a complexity, it should be simplified, if there is a contradiction, it should be eliminated and the ambiguity should be moved to certainty. Generally speaking, contrary to the negative meanings which are given to them, the concepts like complexity and contradiction1 have taken place in the literature as concepts explaining the nature of architecture after Venturi. The most common phrase "less is a bore" is used. Venturi meant an architecture that could pursue multiple, even seemingly opposed strategies at the same time that could be playful and deeply ambitious and new. It welcomed the ambiguity in architecture and embraced what he called "the difficult whole" Venturi wanted to awaken architects from "prim dreams of pure order". The idea of "both-and" live comfortable in the small house. Venturi designed for his mother for the site in Philadelphia, 1964. The architect began with the platonic image of a house as drawn by any first grader: gabled roof, chimney pointing skyward. Then he began to tweak and subvert those familiar spaces, cutting a deep notch in the gable and then hiding the front door behind a simple square opening punched through the facade. These gestures knocked the whole composition thrillingly off balance suggesting the ionic directions architecture would take it moved in the 1970s toward post modernism. Venturi wrote "The architect's over diminishing power and his growing ineffectualness in shaping the whole environment can perhaps be reserved ironically by narrowing his concerns and concentrating on his own job. Also, architecture as a profession field to go with and reflect the culture, complexity and contradiction was part of the larger wave of cultural upheaval.
BHAKTI SHET B-44 | INDIRA COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN | FOURTH YEAR B. Arch. | 2018-19
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