Architecture has gone through vast changes in the past quarter century, and the direction it will take as we inch up to the new millennium is not clear. Post-modernism and Deconstructivism are the most recent movements to have captured the public's attention, the latter supplanting the former as architecture's avant-grade with surprising suddenness in the mid-1980s.
Although many factors are responsible for the current turmoil in architecture, one firm -Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates - was seminal, more than two decades ago, in creating the intellectual atmosphere and supplying the theoretical underpinning for what became these new movements. The start of the 1990s seemed like a good time to revisit Venturi, Scott Brown, to gage their reaction to the architecture of the recent pas and find out what they themselves are thinking and planning as the century ends.
Peak of influence
Twenty-five years ago, the style of architecture we have come to think of as Modern had reached its peak of influence and acceptance. To its founders in the early years of the century, of course, it was not a style: not Modern Architecture but modern architecture, the inevitable result of modern thought married to a true understanding of the real, technology-based world. It was rooted in the belief that technology was a force for good, an invention of humanity that could be counted on to lift humankind above the morass of problems we have wallowed in for as long as we have stood upright. Technology was progress, progress was good, and art (as well as architecture) based - as technology was - in rationality, minimalism, and simplicity would therefore be appropriate in all times, situations, and places.
The Battle of the Styles was over. Style was obsolete. Architecture, it seemed, had reached the End of History long before anyone else.
But it didn't work out that way. By the mid-1960s it was obvious that the new architecture had brought us not light, leisure, and room to breathe but rather endless avenues of eventless glass boxes punctuating cities, more and more given over to deadly high-rise slabs towering over windswept asphalt canyons. The dream of an architecture able to create a better world was beginning to seem at worst tyrannical and at best unrealizable. How could we get from the chaotic present to architecture's grand, visionary future? The way was not clear.
Then, in 1966, Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and in 1972, with Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. These books asked a different question: not how to achieve architecture's grand vision but why? Was a unified, simple, ordered future desirable, even if it could be achieved (which was by no means certain)? Suddenly the idea of architects and planners issuing decrees from a high culture cloud palace, organizing, directing, and neatening up daily life for the rest of us, was called into question in a compelling way. What, specifically, was wrong with the environment around us? Was not Main Street, in Venturi's history-making phrase, "almost all right?"
The idea that architecture could benefit from paying attention to vernacular, popular, and historical sources is widely accepted now, but at the time
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