Posted Jul 30, 2010, 2:30 PM
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When Less Was No Longer More
July 29, 2010
By JAYNE MERKEL
Read More: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...o-longer-more/
Quote:
Not long after the wrenching end of the Vietnam War, skyscrapers with pointed tops, stony-looking concrete walls and decorative marble bases — in other words, new buildings made to look like old ones — began to rise in American cities. These buildings were called “postmodern” because they constituted a reaction to the bold, modern, glass-and-steel ones that had been built after World War II, when it seemed that anything was possible and new technology would create a brave new world. That they rose so soon after the war was no coincidence: by the late 1960s, faith in progress had been tarnished by assassinations of public figures, the quagmire in Vietnam and riots in American cities. Social anxiety created a mood in which looking backwards seemed safer and more comforting than looking forward to an uncertain future.
Although the most visible signs of the new postmodern movement were in city centers, the first and most interesting ones actually came in houses designed by ground-breaking young architects. And while few of the houses built in the 1970s reflected postmodern ideas explicitly, these buildings had an enormous impact on architecture — and on how people thought about, and lived in, houses over the next few decades. In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi, who had teasingly answered Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “less is more” by declaring “less is a bore,” published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” a book calling for more decoration, symbolism, color, pattern and clever references to historic structures. Old buildings were not just worth saving, he said; they could inspire new ones.
Venturi made his argument in sheet rock and wood framing as well as words. A house he built for his mother near Philadelphia “critiqued” the modern movement’s tendency to reject the past while also showing a playfulness often lost in modernist architecture. With its gabled roof and central entrance, it looks like a child’s drawing of a house, but it is not as simple as it looks. It is small, but spatially complex inside. The house looks symmetrical but, on closer inspection, isn’t. It has a traditional central staircase, but after the second floor, the staircase leads nowhere. Unlike Mies’s steel-and-glass jewel boxes, Venturi’s house is full of wit and whimsy as well as clever references to historic buildings — while still working as a house for his aging mother.
Modern architects had built many interesting houses, but these never really caught on with the general public because they looked too unusual. They were also, perhaps, too plain, subtle and modest for American tastes. During the postmodern period, however, knowledgeable, talented architects started designing houses that captured the popular imagination.
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The home Robert Venturi built for his mother, Vanna Venturi, who is sitting in the doorway.
Private residence by Michael Graves. Warren, New Jersey, 1977.
A Robert A.M. Stern home in Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. (1979-1983).
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