Complexity and Contradiction

In postmodernism, as in all architectural movements, words and drawings came before buildings. Philip Johnson, the historian who introduced the International Style to the United States, the architect who collaborated

with Mies, the patron of architecture par excellence, the propagandist of all architectural novelties, has repeatedly declared that Robert Venturi "revolutionized architecture in 1966 with his book." He considers "the freedom that Venturi gave us" as the first factor in the 1970s revision of modernism.^[87]

Although Complexity and Contradiction stays clear of contemporary urban issues, it can be taken as the architectural counterpart of Jacobs's defense of the city as it already exists. The affinities with Jacobs's urbanism emerge in Venturi's loving attention to history, in the preference he shows for urban examples, in his eclectic and inclusive taste, in the obvious effects that Rome had on his culture and his theory. It is a theory attentive to sixteenth-century mannerism, the exaggeration of architectural elements for aesthetic or dramatic effect. Venturi sees mannerism as an expression of the resurgent desire for complexity and the tolerance of contradictions, both of which have followed reductive periods of Western architectural history. Here is how Venturi declares himself against "orthodox modern architecture":

I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. . . . I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning. . . . I prefer "both-and" to "either-or," black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. . . . But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole. . . . It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.^[88]

Venturi's sources are mostly Italian, in the Renaissance, mannerist, and baroque periods, extending to the English and French eighteenth century, and rescuing from neglect the early twentieth-century work of Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of imperial New Delhi, the Philadelphian Frank Furness, and Louis Sullivan. Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn complete Venturi's "canon": This critical detachment vis-à-vis the Modern Movement indicates that, for Venturi, it can already be treated as "a source," like any other period of architectural history.

History was a subject excised from Gropius's Bauhaus program and paid only superficial attention in American architectural schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, Venturi's careful recovery of historical tradition and his treatment of parts of the Modern Movement as history signal a double break with the still-reigning pedagogy.

As in all documents that have influenced modern architecture, the subtext of Complexity and Contradiction is the renegotiation of the architect's role with self, profession, and society. From this sociological point of view,

these are the most salient points of Venturi's "gentle manifesto" (see also table 1):

1. "Unorthodox" architects must design in terms adequate to the complexity of the client's programs. The increasing complexity of the architectural program is a fact of contemporary life. The concern with formal purity of orthodox modernist architects is better suited to single-function buildings than to complex programs. The office building with its repetitive modular units is therefore the fitting archetype of American modernism.

While Venturi seems to indulge rhetorically in the conceit that some architects get to choose what they do, he is also implicitly comparing other architects' situations to his own at the time. The great majority of architects who work as independent or self-employed professionals are likely to encounter small projects and very modest budgets, which nonetheless can have programs as complex as the larger ones. Venturi's implicit insistence that architects must be committed to the client's needs simply restates the principle of architecture's professional morality.

2. Despite all the dogmatic declarations of the Modern Movement, form does not follow function: Venturi asserts that there are no good architectural reasons (as against economic or constructional ones) why it should. If exclusions of nonstructural elements (decoration, eclectic details, etc.) are not justified by functionality but by ideology, that ideology ought to be rejected as aesthetically irrelevant—as an encumbrance that often conceals the aesthetic preferences and choices of the modernist masters.^[89]

In reaction to the nineteenth-century nostalgic appropriation of many pasts, the Modern Movement has chosen to create unity and order by classification—namely, the separation and specialization of elements at all levels of the built environment. This rigorous emphasis on order reflected the heroic and utopian vision of an architecture that was going to remake the world. Now that the urban world has been remade, the exclusionary principles—unity, order, purity—have become a totalizing ideology that excludes the projection and communication of all meaning but one: the implacable and impersonal order of the machine (or, more precisely, as the South American architects told CIAM, the implacable order of profit).

3. Architecture has multiple meanings (it is polysemic, as we would say today), and the elements by which it projects meaning may be "contradictory to the form, structure and program with which they combine." In the extremely controversial book of 1972, learning from Las Vegas, Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour extended to mass culture the problem of signification in architecture. Orthodox architects, they argued, are

dissatisfied with the monotonous and unexpressive rigor of the dominant code but still imprisoned by the dogmatic exclusion of ornament. Therefore, they veer toward monumental expressionism. But the study of architectural history teaches that there are two basic types of "signifiers"—"the duck" and "the decorated shed":

Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form, this kind of building-becoming-sculpture we call the duck , in honor of the duck-shaped drive-in . . . illustrated in God's Own Junkyard by Peter Blake. Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them. This we call the decorated shed . The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. . . . We think that the duck is seldom relevant today, although it pervades Modern architecture.^[90]

4. The unorthodox architect rededicates him- or herself to the creation of meanings that are ambiguous, complex, and contradictory—like modernity itself. A contemporary architecture is therefore realistic; it should adapt itself modestly to what exists, using conventions to create the unconventional. Throughout history, decoration has been (and should be again) an important way of creating meaning through image.

In his book, Venturi offered the Pop painter, "who gives uncommon meaning to common elements by changing their context or increasing their scale," as a role model: "The architect who would accept his role as combiner of significant old clichés—valid banalities—in new contexts as his condition within a society that directs its best efforts, its big money and its elegant technologies elsewhere, can ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society's inverted scale of values ."^[91]

5. Decoration is now permissible. Other means available to the unorthodox architect for generating form include:

• Inflection, the art of the fragment, the achievement of a difficult unity through inclusion: Inflected parts are partial elements that maintain their identity and diversity yet are more integral to the whole than uninflected parts. They correspond to formed space (as opposed to fluid and continuous space).

• Emphasis on the wall: a boundary, between two spaces, to which decoration and symbols are attached. It induces simultaneous awareness of what is significant on either side.

• Emphasis on the facade: It allows urbanity and leads to revaluation of the street. In Learning from Las Vegas , the facade becomes the locus

of permissible ornament, the essential part of the decorated shed, which itself is the cheap and meaningful architecture for our time.

• The unresolved building: It can accommodate growth and changing programs. Venturi legitimizes it by reference to literature: Poets and playwrights acknowledge dilemmas without solutions.

• The vast symbolic repertories of history and popular culture: American vernacular is commercial culture, which can be adopted in earnest with a view to making it "all right."

Concerning this last point, Venturi has been maligned enough to be quoted exactly: "In God's Own Junkyard , Peter Blake has compared the chaos of commercial Main Street with the orderliness of the University of Virginia. Besides the irrelevancy of the comparison, is not Main Street almost all right? Indeed, is not the commercial strip of Route 66 almost all right? As I have said, our question is what slight twist of context will make them all right? Perhaps more signs, more contained."^[92] In sum, Venturi responded to the Miesian dictum "Less is more" with the playful populism of "Less is a bore!" His realism about the contemporary conditions of architecture in America corrected Mies's naïveté about speculative building:^[93] His challenge was directed against an architecture that, having become commercial and corporate in the image of American postwar power, still pretended to the aspirations of peaceful internationalism, unity, and universality of another era.

To understand the liberating effects of the first manifesto of postmodernism, we must understand several points. First, we must not omit the fact that Venturi, with a teaching job at an elite university, a small office, and little work, enjoyed a total though unwanted freedom from corporate dictates. While perhaps not original nor too scholarly, Venturi's wide-ranging and intelligent explication of his own taste provided serious intellectual legitimation for the repressed components of architectural delight.

Second, Venturi complemented the admission of ornament with an emphasis on symbolism, making it easier for architects to achieve originality and variety in small-scale, nonmonumental (and relatively cheap) architecture.

Third, the insistence on the relation of the part to the whole and of structure to use merged with the keen practical awareness that buildings seldom have ideal sites. This amounted to giving the context primacy. In Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour would recommend an architecture of urban infill: The ugly and ordinary building, when artfully and carefully designed, is the truly extraordinary one in an

urban fabric torn asunder by monumental and original "ducks." It is important to point out that "ugly and ordinary" and "infill" are the only kinds of commissions at which most architects can get a crack.

Fourth, in Learning from Las Vegas , Venturi and his associates made good on the promise to reveal the communicative potential of clichés. Under the acknowledged influence of the sociologist Herbert Gans, they were in fact consciously erasing the high modernist barrier between high and low culture. Last but not least, because of their love for European cities and buildings (not despite it), Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour (like Gans and Jacobs) managed to find possibilities for complexity and contradiction, enjoyment and diversity, collages and layers of meaning in an American environment.

Taken together, Venturi's two books draw an optimistic picture of the potential of American cities, most evident in the deliberately shocking comparison of private and public spaces in eighteenth-century Rome with the Las Vegas Strip. Venturi's theoretical work is essentially a critique of modernist architecture, calling it pompous, humorless, ugly, and harmful. For an architect, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on modest, small-scale architecture.

Venturi's challenge clearly has liberating aspects: the unsentimental recovery of history, the respect for the context, the desire to communicate, the openness to many cultural codes or, in the words of the movement's popularizer, Charles Jencks, a characteristic double-coding . On the one hand, postmodern work displays modern technology and expresses the modern purposes of the buildings (if necessary with esoteric means that only architects understand); on the other hand, it expresses the desire to communicate with a larger audience through conventional signs.^[94] Modernity is embedded ironically in the past, which gives modernity meaning and which only arrogance can presume to leave forever. Yet, as one critic observes, the liberating message is totally professional—addressed to other architects, safely contained within architectural discourse: "The oppositional pose Venturi strikes primarily guarantees one thing—that the architect remains safely insulated from all those "complexities and contradictions" outside the boundaries of the discipline, a discipline increasingly defined precisely by such insulation. His later juggling with the terms form and symbolism only thickens the walls."^[95] A large and growing segment of the American architectural profession was ready for Venturi's iconoclastic message. Tongue-in-cheek, Hugh Hardy, the principal of the very successful "young" New York firm Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, described the mood: "We rejected the fifties, we rejected the AIA, we rejected midtown,

we rejected contracts, we rejected working drawings, we rejected design, we rejected everything but clients."^[96]