TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021792/0217430.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 5.9 KB | 129 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 82

Pioneer's Vindication


The founder of Postmodern architecture adds the Seattle Art
Museum to his string of triumphs

By KURT ANDERSEN -- With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/Philadelphia


    Robert Venturi, the man who launched architectural
Postmodernism a quarter-century ago, is not exactly unsung: only
a few of his living peers are better known, and none has been
credited with more deeply influencing the way houses and
cityscapes look. Still, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, his wife
and partner, feel chronically underappreciated. They have never
got as much work as they might have: after almost 40 years as
architects, much of that time as world-famous architects,
Venturi and Scott Brown have built a few score buildings, many
of those within driving distance of their office and none of
them very large. Spring after spring, the Pritzker Architecture
Prize, a 13-year-old pseudo Nobel, went to other people,
sometimes Venturi's inferiors.

    Now, at age 66, comes vindication -- kudos, prestigious
buildings, the works. Last April, Venturi won the Pritzker. In
July his impeccable addition to the National Gallery of Art on
Trafalgar Square in London was dedicated. And now all of haute
Seattle is celebrating his latest creation, the city's fetching
new art museum.

    Is he finally happy? Almost. "You always look at what you
have done and say, `Oh, I could have done that better.'" But,
he agrees, it's a pretty nice museum, particularly given its
hemmed-in, heart-of-downtown site. "It is a little building with
big scale," Venturi said on the eve of the grand opening,
"surrounded by big buildings with little scale."

    That sounds familiar -- and, sure enough, he used it in
his seminal book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,
to describe one of his early buildings. Complexity and
Contradiction was a galvanizing manifesto, liberating architects
from Modernist, minimalist dogma. "Less is a bore," Venturi
declared, meaning that it was time to begin using ornament in
buildings again. And also, "Main Street is almost all right,"
meaning that familiar, off-the-shelf architectural forms also
deserved to be revived. The past could be a rich source of
inspiration for contemporary architects. Relax, Venturi told his
snobbish profession, and enjoy the old-fashioned gewgaws, the
color, even the kitsch.

    This is now conventional wisdom, but in the early '60s it
was crazy talk, downright revolutionary, particularly coming
from a respected young Princeton graduate and Rome Prize
winner. By the time his book was published in 1966, Venturi had
actually built a house illustrating his alarming, thrilling
ideas in a Philadelphia suburb, for the perfect client: his
well-to-do socialist mother. As with much of his work since, he
took the debased, muddled classical references residually
present in most suburban houses and made them self-conscious,
explicit, arch. The house was two decades ahead of its time.
Imagine a Pop artwork from 1945, or a rap recording from 1965.

    Amazing -- and not always, at the time, likable. His 1973
addition to Oberlin College's art museum has a checkerboard
exterior and a comically oversize Ionic column inside.
Outrageous! The molecular-biology lab at Princeton, designed in
1983, has a wild Argyle sheathing of bricks and oddly
orientalized archways. Ridiculous!

    By the mid-'80s, however, the movement that Venturi had
provoked was ascendant, ubiquitous. The more popularly
celebrated and lucrative careers of Michael Graves and Robert
Stern in the '80s and '90s depended on Venturi's breakthroughs
in the '60s; Philip Johnson's highboyish AT&T Building, dreamed
up in the late 1970s, might have been created by Venturi a
decade earlier. "If you invent something," Scott Brown says, "it
has a sort of agony to it. Your followers can take that as a
point of departure -- it is much easier for them to make it
beautiful." Finally Venturi gets to the bottom line: "They are
selling what you have originated." The followers -- not Venturi
-- get to design Disney's buildings. "For some reason," he says,
"we haven't been able to please them."

    Occasionally, however, it all works out. The five-story
Seattle Art Museum is good-size but hardly expansive. The
interior is lucid and properly restrained. It is, in Venturi's
famous phrase, a "decorated shed." Around the front doors, the
facade is a riot of color, pattern and material: red granite
topped by green, blue and yellow tiles, zigzags of terra cotta,
bluestone squares and vaguely Moorish arches in sandstone. A
grand staircase runs the length of the building, paralleling the
street outside; in fact, the stairs become something of an
interior street, giving on to an open-front mezzanine cafe
three-quarters of the way up.

    The two floors of permanent galleries have a similar
elegant coherence. On each floor a wide corridor runs east to
west, with floor-to-ceiling windows at each end, to bring in
natural light and let wanderers know where they are. Throughout
are refined Venturi details (granite thresholds, for instance)
and also Venturi perversity (columns placed a few inches from
a wall simply to create an unnavigable isthmus).

    All in all, the museum is like the city -- stylish but not
quite trendy, unpretentiously cosmopolitan. Seattle seems to
agree. On the day the first part of the museum opened to the
public in December, there was a line around the block until
closing time at 9 p.m., despite a rainstorm. "When people don't
like it," Venturi says unconvincingly, "it doesn't bother me
too much. On the other hand, I find that I do love it when
people like the building." He may be the most influential
American architect of the late 20th century, but in the end,
like Sally Field, he just wants to know that they like him --
they really like him.