Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
Robert Venturi was born on June 25th 1925 in Philadelphia. In his early career, he worked for EERo Saarinen, and then in Philadelphia offices of the renowned Louis I. Kahn and Oscar Stonorov. He then partnered with John Rauch from 1964-1989 (Craven 2012b). For the past 30 years, he has collaborated with his wife, the architect, planner, author, and educator Denise Scott Brown, born on October 3rd 1931 in Zambia, and later on raised in a suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa. As a partnership, they created the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA) (Craven 2012a). As told in the “That Old Thing Called Flexibility: An Interview with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” their classic books Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction remain unmatched for their aptitude to concern current architectural thought. The methods in regard in this article are about their “present thinking about iconography, transparency, spectacularisation, architectural pornography and the contemporary architectural avant-grade.”(Proto 2009)
In Learning from Las Vegas (1972) the famous diagram of ‘The duck and the decorated shed’ was introduced into the architectural vocabulary; the duck represents a special building that is a symbol, whereas the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols (Venturi 1977, 87). The classic understanding of symbolism was overturned after the revelation of the decorated shed found along the Las Vegas strip. The decorated shed would literally be a billboard in front of a simple, undecorated building as for example, some of the Las Vegas casinos, where the façade is disconnected from the building and congested with commercial signs (Proto 2009). Venture noted that the contemporary city was evolving alongside the widespread use of the automobile, and the way people interact with the new city. Through his interest in iconology as a historical method, he translates Las Vegas as a location that emanates symbolism, signs, and information that creates a city that can be portrayed as architecture of communication over space (Wessel, Sauda, and Chang). Through this discovery, the architects might have used the observational method or Iconographic method which would require observation while walking along the strip, analysis of street maps at different scales and possibly through photographs and films. Such procedures are called photographic method and filmic methods. Such analysis can only be performed through a strong interest in everyday observation and visual analysis. Robert Venturi states that he “loves to look at historical architecture and the everyday” and adds “therefore on the train or driving I am constantly looking (…) I love and learn from the commercial vernacular. I love walking down Main Street, driving Root 66. I’m a pervert!” (Tamas 2011)
As an example, the authors used the Crawford Manor in New Haven and the Guild House in Philadelphia (Fig. 1). The Crawford Manor rejects the idea of ornaments, which is encouraged by orthodox Modern architecture. On the other hand, the Guild House composes of various elements that do not form part of any structural component of the building, which is hence denoted as a symbolism of ornament (Venturi 1977, 92-93). The authors describe Crawford Manor as being ugly and ordinary when at the same time being heroic and original. However, the building’s architecture has weakened by rejecting denotative ornament and the rich tradition of iconography in historical architecture (Venturi 1977, 101). One of the methods used in this analysis is the comparative method (Fig.2). The properties of each building were listed in order to be evaluated both individually and together.