CASE STUDY

CASE ST UDY SEL ECT ION

Robert Venturi architectural works:

1. Vanna Venturi House, Philadelphia

2. Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

3. Guild House, Philadelphia

4. Fire Station No. 4, Columbus, USA

5. Sainsbury wing, London

6. Gordon Wu Hall

7. Freedom Plaza, Washington, DC

8. Chapel at The Episcopal Academy

9. Trabant Student Centre, University of Delaware

10. Children's Museum of Houston, USA

11. Hartford Stage, Hartford

12. Frist Campus Centre, Princeton

13. Brant House; Greenwich, Connecticut (1972)

14. Dixwell Fire Station, New Haven, CT (1974)

15. Allen Memorial Art Museum modern addition, Oberlin College; Oberlin, Ohio (1976)

16. BASCO Showroom; Philadelphia (1976)

17. Franklin Court; Philadelphia (1976)

CASE STUDY 1 - VANNA VENTURI HOUSE

Location : Suburban neighborhood of chestnut bill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Construction : 1960 to 1964 Type : Private Residence House

Introduction

The Vanna Venturi House, one of the first prominent works of the postmodern architecture movement, is located in the neighbourhood of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother, Vanna Venturi, and constructed between 1962 and 1964.

The five-room house stands only about 30 feet (9 m) tall, but has a monumental front facade, an effect achieved by intentionally manipulating the architectural elements that indicate a building's scale. Elements such as a non-structural applique arch and "hole in the wall" windows were an open challenge to Modernist orthodoxy, as described in Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Architectural historian Vincent Scully called it "the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century."

Concept

In this work embodies his theories Venturi Complexity and Contradiction, using modern resources toward purely as collage, quotation, and even irony, e.g. diverted from the chimney shaft, quotes a Greek pediment on the façade, and so on. During the same time when this work was constructed Venturi worked on one of his best known “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”.

The house has a uniform appearance, even simple and symmetrical. However, between that appearance and compositional center sets a series of changes, geometric changes and unexpected routes. His unit concept is not, after all, an instrument of historicism, but, as he said, understanding of the silhouette as a whole. It represents in simplified form the image of home that we have in memory. Robert Venturi used to say: “The House… is Home”. The same urban rescues Popular Culture, because the volume of the house, playing a popularly accepted model home.

Spaces

Small, yet large scale, its spaces are very complex, both in form and in their relations.

Access is difficult to identify, i.e. it shows a typical porch, but no access, which is located on the sides of it.

The ground floor contains entrance hall, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and bathroom. Top floor has a study, a small health centre and two storage areas.

Outwardly the house shows its function. There are resources that challenge laid consistency of the modern movement, complex and contradictory as access, staircase and fireplace, the arrangement of the bedroom doors, etc. Besides we can see the appeal of the citation and collage (the window is quoted verbatim from Rossi, the long window typical of Le Corbusier in the modern movement and the chimney of Frank Lloyd Wright) and how these elements from different backgrounds, live in the same work, one can speak of collage.

At the bottom the ladder is extended to facilitate the function of seat, but in his latest installment follows a wayward course to nowhere, as it does not reach any point of arrival, losing any functional relationship to become an element made extravagant and lacking more than practical help to clean some windows and store objects in the tank.

Structure

Brick Masonry plasters, both exterior and interior, covered with veneer and wood mezzanines of lathing.

Design

View from the rear of the house (south)

Venturi designed the Vanna Venturi House at the same time that he wrote his antiModernist polemic Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in which he outlined his own architectural ideas. During the writing he redesigned the house at least five times in fully worked-out versions. A description of the house is included in the book and the house is viewed as an embodiment of the ideas in the book.

Many of the basic elements of the house are a reaction against standard Modernist architectural elements: the pitched roof rather than flat roof, the emphasis on the central hearth and chimney, a closed ground floor "set firmly on the ground" rather than the Modernist columns and glass walls which open up the ground floor. On the front elevation the broken pediment or gable and a purely ornamental applique arch reflect a return to Mannerist architecture and a rejection of Modernism. Thus, the house is a direct break from Modern architecture, designed in order to disrupt and contradict formal Modernist aesthetics. More simply, Venturi demonstrated his intentions by figuratively giving the finger to the Modernist establishment

View from the side (south-east)

The site of the house is flat, with a long driveway connecting it to the street. Venturi placed the parallel walls of the house perpendicular to the main axis of the site, defined by the driveway, rather than the usual placement along the axis. Unusually, the gable is placed on the long side of the rectangle formed by the house, and there is no matching gable at the rear. The chimney is emphasized by the centrally placed room on the second floor, but the actual chimney is small and off-centre. The effect is to magnify the scale of the small house and make the facade appear to be monumental. The scale magnifying effects are not carried over to the sides and rear of the house, thus making the house appear to be both large and small from different angles. The central chimney and staircase dominate the interior of the house. Two vertical elements — the fireplace-chimney and the stair — compete, as it were, for central position. And each of these elements, one essentially solid, the other essentially void, compromises in its shape and position — that is, inflects toward the other to make a unity of the duality of

the central core they constitute. On one side the fireplace distorts in shape and moves over a little, as does its chimney; on the other side the stair suddenly constricts its width and distorts its path because of the chimney.

The themes of scale, contradiction, and "whimsy" – "not inappropriate to an individual house," can be seen at the top of the stair, that seems to go from the second floor to a nonexistent third floor. On one level, it goes nowhere and is whimsical; at another level, it is like a ladder against a wall from which to wash the high window and paint the clerestory. The change in scale of the stair on this floor further contrasts with that change of scale in the other direction at the bottom.

The house was constructed with intentional formal architectural, historical and aesthetic contradictions. Venturi has compared the iconic front facade to "a child's drawing of a house." Yet he has also written, "This building recognizes complexities and contradictions: it is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little; some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another its order accommodates the generic elements and of the house in general, and the circumstantial elements of a house in particular."

Neighbourhood

Chestnut Hill is a residential neighbourhood in the north western part of Philadelphia. It was settled in the early eighteenth century and still has many stone buildings from that period. In the second half of the nineteenth century many Victorian mansions were built in the area. Several residences within a few blocks of the Vanna Venturi House were designed by wellknown architects. The entire neighbourhood is part of the Chestnut Hill Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. The Houston-Sauveur House, built in 1885 by architects G. W. & W. D. Hewitt, is one of many Victorian mansions in the immediate neighbourhood. Nearby modern architecture includes Louis Kahn's Esherick House and a house in the International Style designed by Kenneth Day. A bit further away is Cherokee Village, a 104-unit apartment complex designed by Oscar Stonorov in the 1950s. Venturi worked on this project as a draftsman. Two other houses designed by Stonorov, and the house of Venturi's long-time partner, John Rauch, are near the apartment complex. The Esherick and Vanna Venturi Houses invite comparison, having been built within two years and one block of each other by Philadelphia's best-known 20th century architects. In Kahn's building, proportion and symmetry bind the building together; in Venturi's the building's elements appear as fragments of the whole. The Esherick House seems devoid of ornament, while the Venturi House has a large, purely ornamental arch on its facade. The Esherick House is essentially symmetric, but the Venturi House contradicts its basic symmetry with asymmetric windows.

Houston-Sauveur House (1885).

Kahn's Esherick House.

House designed by Kenneth Day.

Cherokee Village.

CASE STUDY 2 - EPISCOPAL ACADEMY CHAPEL

Project Name : Episcopal Academy Chapel Construction Year : 2008 Architect : Venturi Scott And Associates Project Category : Chapel Location : Newton Square, Pennsylvania, USA Client: Episcopal Academy Area: 15,000 sf Construction Cost: $8,500,000 Distinctions: Design Award of Honor, Pennsylvania Council Society of American Registered Architects, 2009

Introduction:

The Episcopal Academy was founded in Philadelphia in 1795 and subsequently established campuses outside the city in Devon and Merion. In 2001, they acquired land to relocate both campuses to a single parcel in Newtown Square -- 123 acres of woods, wetlands, and former farmland. The new campus is to consist of seven new structures and three renovated buildings arranged around a central green common. The focus of this “school village” will be a new Chapel, which VSBA was selected to design. (Curiously enough, as the subject of his 1950 Master’s Thesis at Princeton, Robert Venturi designed a chapel for the Episcopal Academy’s Merion campus.) VSBA designed the Chapel to be an iconic campus landmark -- immediately identifiable and symbolic of the new campus, yet also a well-used and highly-functional school facility. Its distinctive form is composed of many layers -- of masonry walls and soaring clerestories. The spaces between these layers allow circulation and light. The impressive and gently monumental scale of the building is softened by striped patterns at pedestrian-level. Inside, the Chapel’s fan-shaped plan allows worshipers to face each other as well as the altar, nurturing a sense of togetherness and community. This was a configuration endorsed by the chaplain at the beginning of the design process -- and as we like to say, we get our best ideas from our clients. The interior is lit by means of 2 levels of clerestory windows and from the interstices between over-lapping layers of walls, which allow indirect light to create aura. The Chapel will serve as an important facet of life at Episcopal Academy. Upper and middle school students attend Chapel three days a week, lower school students attend once a week. While the service celebrates the Episcopalian heritage, it serves and welcomes students of all faiths.

CASE STUDY 3 - GUILD HOUSE

Architect : Robert Venturi, John Raunch, Cope and Lippincott Built in : 1960-1963 Location : Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Type : Low budget public housing project apartment

Introduction:

Guild House is a residential building in Philadelphia which is an important and influential work of 20th-century architecture and was the first major work by Robert Venturi. Along with the Vanna Venturi House it is considered to be one of the earliest expressions of Postmodern architecture, and helped establish Venturi as one of the leading architects of the 20th century. The building, which houses apartments for low-income senior citizens, was commissioned by a local Quaker organization, Friends Rehabilitation Program, Inc. and completed in 1963. Employing a combination of nondescript commercial architecture and ironic historical references, Guild House represented a conscious rejection of Modernist ideals and was widely cited in the subsequent development of the Postmodern movement.

HISTORY

Guild House was commissioned by the (Quaker) Friends Neighborhood Guild, a subsidiary of Friends Rehabilitation Program, Inc., as low-income housing for the elderly and built in 1960–63. It was designed by Venturi and Rauch in collaboration with Cope and Lippincott, another Philadelphia firm. In 2004, the building was added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places despite being barely 40 years old at the time.

Location

The House Guild was designed not as a construction Le Corbusier in a park, but along a street to the sidewalk, in an ordinary urban environment such as a building opening for windows in the walls, brick instead of concrete, with a bow-shaped opening and a dual composition at its input, with a column in the center instead of a minimalist column. It also contains a nearly commercial sign in his capacity.

It was built on 711 Spring Garden Street, bordering the north central city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, and commissioned by the Quaker organization Friends Gremials del Barrio (Friends Neighborhood Guild).

Concept

This apartment building for seniors with low incomes was one of the first important works of Robert Venturi and then mate, John Rauch. The building has become an emblem of an architectural philosophy that tries to embrace both conventional classical tradition and “ugly and ordinary” cheaper and social construction.

FRONT ELEVAT ION

The front facade respects the line of the street as the urban layout of the city, although the building is retracted on the sides. Like the ordinary structures in this neighbourhood, its facade offers an economic aspect of red bricks with conventional metal window sash. In many ways it is an “ordinary” building, for many people even “ugly”. In contrast construction fits the context, without highlighting between the architecture of the neighbourhood.

The building housing apartments for seniors with low incomes, was commissioned by Quaker organization and was completed in 1963. Together with the Vanna Venturi House is considered an important and influential works of twentieth-century architecture and one of the first expressions of postmodern architecture. Guild House represents a conscious rejection of modernist ideals and was widely cited in the further development of the postmodern movement.

Venturi later explained the architecture of the Guild House in the context of his philosophy of “decorated shed”: In the House of Guild symbolic ornamental elements are loosely applied literally. The symbolism of the decoration becomes ugly and ordinary, with a hint of irony original heroic and rightly shed is ugly and ordinary, but its bricks and windows are also symbolic.

The building’s architecture combines the historical forms with the “banal” mercantilism of the twentieth century, hiding behind its apparent vulgarity an astute intellectual agenda. Venturi wrote about it: the economy delivered the advanced architectural elements, but conventional. We do not resist to it.

FACADE

The facade facing the street is anchored by a thick column of black polished granite and crowned with a large arched window opening in the upstairs common area of the building. The rear facade is flat.

This 6-storey building with a symmetrical facade, shown in a white base coating plant, where the entrance is located and on which 4 pairs of balconies flanked by square windows open, ending in a large arched window in the top floor for the lounge. The retraction of both ends generates a staggering allows more windows sunny exposures. Like the facades screen in some medieval cathedrals, this front deceived as to what is behind, as an example about the masonry slots, at the top, which reveal that the building is interrupted in this sector.

 Access

The entrance to the ground floor is highlighted with a coating of white bricks that also cover the balcony of the first-floor balconies and a string ending on the fifth floor. In the center of the entrance a massive column of black polished granite highlights the access to the building. According Venturi, the combination of these elements provides a new and larger scale of the three juxtaposed to the other floors six plants smaller window marked by scale. Covering the front of the balcony of the segued plant, and over access, large letters indicate the name of the building. Originally the facade was crowned with a large television antenna as abstract sculptural element representing the main pastime of its inhabitants.

INSIDE

The interior spaces are defined by intricate mazes of walls that fit the complex and varied program of an apartment building and the irregular frame allowed by flat slab construction. There is a maximum internal volume and minimum aisle space, which are irregular and varied residual space, instead of the usual tunnel. The building has 91 apartments, mostly with windows that let in outside light and street views. The top floor contains the living room, indicated by a big lunette window.

Structure

The structure of the Guild House was built mainly with dark bricks and flat slabs.The stepped facade organization allows most units on southwest or southeast facing windows, giving way to sunshine and views of the street below. The open interior corridors were designed to create intimate and informal spaces.

The large round column exposed at the entrance on the street facade, accommodates and emphasizes the large opening on the ground floor, contrasting with the white brick area coating extends to the second floor.

The central window on the top floor reflects the special room inside the common spatial configuration and is related to the entry below, increasing the scale and the building on the street. Its arched shape allows a large opening in the wall while being “a hole” instead of “empty” of a frame. The presence, in the original building, TV antenna on top of the shaft and beyond the finish line of the structure, strengthen the scale of the facade in the central and expresses a kind of monumentality.

Materials

Sash windows recall the formal language of public housing, thus being “ordinary” by. At the same time, some of these windows are “normal”, some unusually large, depending on their relationship to the street. Both the main facade and rear windows were placed primarily in symmetrical patterns. A column of black polished granite in the middle of the entrance portal contrasts with the white ceramic glaze coating. This element and the scale label “Guild House” placed on the first-floor balcony clearly mark the entrance.

The architects used red clay bricks and sash windows to recall the existing public housing projects and express what they were inelegant neighbouring urban structures. The balcony railings are perforated steel plates, on the first floor painted white instead of black to create a continuity of the surface in this area despite the change in the material, since the coating on the first floor has made in white glazed brick. TV antenna that crowned the building at the time of its completion was gold anodized aluminium.