Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room - Hardcover

Venturi, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262220512 ISBN 13: 9780262220514

Publisher: MIT Press, 1996

Synopsis

"...the most thought-provoking architecture book of the year." -- Martin Filler, The New York Times Book Review

Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas (the latter coauthored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) are among the most influential books by any architect of our era -- the one celebrating complexity in architecture, the other the uses of symbolism in commercial and vernacular architecture and signage. This new collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a generic architecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualities become shelter and symbol. Venturi, who along with his partner, Denise Scott Brown, made the vulgar acceptable and found virtue in the commercial, the kitsch, and the ordinary, is respected equally as a theorist and an architect who communicates his architectural ideas, formal and verbal, with grace and wit. These essays, letters, reports, lectures, manifestoes, and polemical texts offer a candid, uncensored view from the drafting room -- commonsense responses, urgent and diverse, of a busy architect, in part a reaction against the conceptualizing of architecture today invaded by other disciplines and made obscure. Seven of the essays were coauthored with Denise Scott Brown. The voice is personal -- eloquent in expounding on the unglamorous side of practice; sometimes vituperative and corrective in addressing clients, theoreticians, and critics; often amusing and humorous in looking back on past projects and opportunities; instructive in describing early influences and tastes; and reflective in assessing his own impact on the profession. The lead essays can be described as an argument embracing reference and representation in our information age, whose technical basis is truly of our time and whose iconographic basis derives from a long tradition in architecture including hieroglyphic Egyptian pylons, early Christian basilicas, scenographic Baroque interiors, and even eclectic Romantic architecture and twentieth-century electronic signs and displays. The essays include Venturi's 1950 M.F.A. thesis, published here for the first time -- a work that foreshadows many of the themes that were later to make him a controversial and ground breaking architect and writer -- and a series of vintage Venturi aphorisms.

About this title

Review

While writing a speech about the visual antecedents of the World Wide Web, I came across a copy of Robert Venturi's Learning From Las Vegas, and realized that much of what Venturi has to say in the '50s about Las Vegas architecture had great similarities to the appropriation of physical metaphors in cyberspace, and the compression of space and time into flatspace.

Iconography and Electronics... is a thought-provoking collection of Venturi's essays, screeds, and articles (episodically) exploring the use of electronics in architectural design (despite the title's promise). Regardless of what you think of Venturi's architecture you are sure to be stimulated and challenged by his proposed marriage of the physical and the digital. However, if you've not read much architectural theory before, be forewarned: Venturi, like most in his field, prefers a turgid and dense style that sometimes seems to be the illegitimate spawn of early 20th century continental philosophy and MFA thesis proposals. Nonetheless, this book is Recommended.

About the Author

Robert Venturi, FAIA, Hon. FRIBA, is a Principal in Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0262220512
• ISBN 13: 9780262220514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 374