LITERATURE REVIEW

LIT ERAT URE 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.

Article 2

Complexity and contradiction in architecture turns 50

Author: Charles Jenks

Date issued: May 1, 2016

Review:

This article was issued after the completion of 50 years on the book publication. Probably no other track in American architecture had ever had such a powerful send-off. The book was well-aimed manifesto that was an orthodox to the modern architecture. Venturi pushed for complexity in architecture instead of modernism's generic and simple solutions.

Venturi pointed out that unity is found in multiplicity where all the diverse elements of architecture establish a sense of relationship complexity and contradiction emphasized the visual and formal aspects of architecture. The book closely looks at the individual aspect of architecture such as window, doorways etc. Yet it failed to apply the same to whole building.

Venturi railed against the generic modernism of simple methods and universal solutions. Venturi's preface to his book showed a commitment to modernist literature. Venturi's book is basically a formal analysis that doesn't deal with sociological truths and the scientific ideas that bolstered complexity theory in other disciplines.

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is a conceptualizing source primarily for architectural design. With the thinking of its potential should be revealed, the writing processes of complexity and contradiction in architecture have been investigated and compared in this study. Venturi first of all created the skeleton of the theory of complexity and contradiction.

Complexity II, can be the second wave of postmodern architecture college directly from ventures ideas but seeks a more continuous micro complexity made buildable by computer software. They concluded that the desire for the holistic architecture of depth and pluralism remains same even if the styles and methods of complexity II may have changed.

Article 3

Robert Venturi: The bad-test architect who do sledgehammer to modernism

Author: Diver Wainwright

Date Issued: August, 2017

Review:

With the maxim "less is a bore" the larger than life architect who brought history and hilarity to the staid world of monochrome tastefulness. Venturi was one of the most influential figures in 20th CE architecture taking an erudite sledgehammer to the dogmas of modernism and arguing for the world that embraced history, diversity and humor.

He was a catholic big tent that is rejected the "either/or" attitude of purity and order, arguing for the plural richness of "both/and". It was an inclusive folk-art approach to architecture that found joy in every day. "Less is more", was the pro-faced maxim of modernist maestro Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to which century gleefully retorted less is a bore.

Unexpectedly, the influence of Venturi would persist. A year later, the first essay I was set when I arrived at university was on his mother’s house, which he built in Philadelphia in 1964. It was the first time I learned how to read a plan and section, what to look for in a facade, how architecture could be representational: that meanings could be translated into physical space.

“It is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little,” wrote Venturi. “Some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another.” In typically perverse fashion, Venturi wrote that the staircase considered on its own, tucked into a residual space, is bad. But, considered as part of the complex and contradictory whole, it is good. It performs a curious dance with the chimney, and splays at the bottom to provide a place to sit. The facade, meanwhile, acts like a Vegas sign, a thin screen that shouts “house”, through which the building’s inner complexities occasionally protrude, setting the symmetrical form offbalance.

Venturi is often referred to as the father of postmodernism, but he was so much more than that. As the historian Robert Miller wrote, it is “a charge comparable to calling Thomas Edison the father of disco”. Like Edison, Venturi shone a bright light into the often-gloomy world of architectural discourse, illuminating a colorful spectrum of possibility, embracing the messy vitality of the “ugly ordinary”, and expanding the very idea of what architecture could be.

Research Paper - 1

A CONCEPT RESOURCE FOR ARCHITECTURALDESIGN: THE BOOK OF ROBERT VENTURI “COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION IN ARCHITECTURE”

Author: Nazmiye OZTURK

Keywords:

Complexity and Contradiction, Robert Venturi, Architecture, Design, Concepts

Review:

Mostly, the book of Robert Venturi ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, known as the book of history of architecture, is essentially a book blending design with history. This article follows the traces of the thinking that iconography of this book serves the focus of design concepts. With this aim, the differences between the first typed manuscript of the book in 1963 and its last printing in 1992 have been investigated. The comparison of 1963 and 1992 texts demonstrate that the connections of this book with architectural design are stronger than assumed.

Accordingto such comparison, Venturi established his book on the key words and concepts and this concepthierarchies vary and points out to the concepts powerful enough to change the architectural design, as well as the ways of implementation. When reread with such perspective, it can be clearly understood that ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’ comprises concepts which are very different from the basic design principles such as proportion, symmetry, harmony, balance which remain insufficient in the face of today’s reality. In this article, hybrid concepts such as No straightforward, Super adjacency, Contradiction Adapted, Contradiction Juxtaposed can be called as non-basic design concepts.

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 contradiction have taken place in the literature as concepts explaining the nature of architecture after Venturi.

Research Paper - 2

The influence of Robert Venturi on Lewis Kahn

Author : Sam Rondell

Date : May 2008

Location : Washington State University school of architecture

Review:

This study considered the question of how Louis Kahn's development as an architect was shaped by the influences of Robert Venturi. Venturi admires British architecture Michelangelo's contributions. One of the very first artists to benefit from Venturi appears to be Kahn.

Venturi influenced Kahn in significant ways. The impact of that influence is neither simple nor obvious. Kahn is seen by most as an absolute opposite of Venturi as in many ways. But each incorporated the influence of the other advancing their own interpretations of these influences. Kahn like any great architect applied what his life experience and his accumulated knowledge and understanding is of design incorporating its own architectural vocabulary.

Characteristics of Kahn's which followed venturi's work in some or other way. Kahn's architectural vocabulary was universal, it promoted form, its mass eschewed ornament and the explanation of Kahn's forms as mass was heroic and original, the element of big scale, the exclusion of shelter, structural and geometric rhetoric theory prominent basis, hierarchical space, holes in walls, layers breaking the order and Kahn's use of historical references.

Venturi configured the theory of complexity and contradiction firstly on the basis of concept and deployed and reproduced new concepts. Such concepts (which cannot be explained with Basic Design Principles) arisen from the attempt of understanding and explaining the dynamics of his time. Architecture encountered the thinking that modernist approach where pre-determined entireties are in the center is not an absolute true after Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

Just as the modernist design approach corresponds to an historical period, the values which are valid today can be qualified as the temporary truths of an historical period. Therefore, instead of making design under the shadow of professional truths, following the variable nature of concepts can pave the way for progressing the contemporary architecture.

BOOK REVIEW

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Author: Robert Venturi

Published in: 1966

Robert Venturi's book has enduring significance in a complex and contradictory age. Complexity and contradiction changed how you look at, think and talk about architecture. Venturi's gentle manifesto has often been held as a symptom of prices in architecture.

The book is introduced by Vincent sally, suggest that architecture should welcome the complexity and contradictions of urban experience. Complexity and contraction excel at deploying historical knowledge to expand our understanding. Venturi believes that simplification is intrinsically boring true simplicity i.e. which is not from being economical with materials or using repeated modular forms, but from cognitive satisfaction is achieved through inner complexity. Architects shouldn't be guided by habit but rather a conscious sense of the past with full consideration of architectural precedent.

The composition of 20th CE buildings and historical examples provides the fundamental body of evidence within the book complexity and contradiction is illustrated via images, sketches, plans & elevations. These illustrations to quickly switch between period and type, juxtaposition and comparing architecture and artworks.

Robert Venturi, the author of the book ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, indicates that these concepts are included in architecture since the time of Vitruvius. Validity, one of the most frequently used words in ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’, is a concept pointing out to the evolution of architecture, of admirations and simplicity in meaning.

According to Venturi, architecture applicable for that time is established on the plurality of meanings. ‘A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once. It can be asserted that the concepts and their variances open to interpretation lead to plurality of meaning. For instance, according to Venturi, the entry door of a structure may be ‘the Dominant binder’ or ‘Super adjacency’ can refer to the piling or juxtaposing different components, depending on the direction. The book is a valuable expression of important moment in architectural history and is a persuasive case for architecture beyond modernism.