Learning from Denise and Bob Venturi
Philadelphia Architects, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, expose the roots of their world-shaping ideas on architecture, design, planning, and being.

On September 29, 2001, Metropolis presented "In Your Face," a symposium on the importance and influence of Philadelphia-based architects Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (VSBA).

Denise Scott Brown spent more than an hour showing how her unique approach to architecture and urban planning grew out of her early experiences and education in South Africa, Europe and America. Scott Brown debunked the many misconceptions about the firm's work, including the widespread perception of the couple as the parents of postmodernism.

Claiming "there's much else beyond neon in our philosophy," Scott Brown reviewed that "else" as it derived from urban planning and the social sciences, and showed its importance in the design of VSBA's architectural projects. To do so, she explained how the thought of several schools of architecture and several urban-related disciplines became incorporated into her thinking during her education and early professional life. "Making the professional personal" in this way she hoped would help clarify her ideas for the audience, and suggest an approach to architecture that others could benefit from.

Robert Venturi's talk, by comparison, was brief. He seemed to trust that the crowd had read his books and was familiar with his approach. He focused instead on "A Disorderly Ode to an Architecture for Now," a sort of free-form verse that describes his ideas as they have evolved over the years.

A skittish crowd of New Yorkers filled the City University of New York Graduate Center Auditorium to overflowing that evening, perhaps looking for some positive thoughts about urbanism from the gurus of urban design and architecture at a time--just after the September 11 attacks--when both cities and architecture seemed more fragile than anyone could have imagined.

In retrospect, Denise's deliberate, thoughtful, inclusive attitude toward a thorough understanding of planning issues may have been just the thing that New York needed to hear. With the rush to rebuild the World Trade Center site even before we understand who we have become and what we need to build, her words are more important now than when she spoke them.

These are edited versions of Scott Brown's and Venturi's talks, along with images graciously loaned to MetropolisMag.com by the architects. --ed.


Activities as Patterns:
Lessons About Architecture from Planning
By Denise Scott Brown
Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates
September 2001

Bob and I tend to stress communication and iconography when we write and lecture, but in designing and building we spend 90 percent of our time on other issues. There's much else beyond neon in our philosophy. The "In Your Face" symposium allowed me to tell about some lesser known aspects of our work and to fight the stereotypes about us--shaking you, if necessary, by the lapels to do so. That's "in your face."

I want to show as well that we are not Postmodernists, and never were. The origins of our thinking are more complex than that and have more sources. My aim here is to clarify some ideas in our work that I feel shouldn't be ignored. In conveying complex ideas, it helps to describe their origins historically or even personally, to show their place in a scheme of things. So, for this reason, I'll make the professional personal for a moment.

"Mine is an African view of Las Vegas"
In the 1920s there was a group of young architects in Johannesburg, South Africa, who were aspirant Moderninsts. My mother was at architecture school with them. She dropped out after two years because she couldn't afford to continue but, when she married, she hired her old friends to design our house. This was in 1934. I think ours was the second International Style house in Johannesburg but we would never have called it that; to us it was Modern. We moved in when I was four years old. This house was designed by Hansen, Tomkin, and Finkelstein. Their work is illustrated in books and journals of the time. It was a truly beautiful house.

So I have personal and familial attachments to early Modernism and I feel our work continues that tradition--updated, of course, to be relevant for today. What we reacted against in the 1960s was not that early tradition but late Modern architecture, which we felt had become decadent and lost the clarity and verve of the 1920s and 1930s.

A second African route to my themes in architecture took me via Las Vegas. Mine is an African view of Las Vegas. To explain, I must start with Johannesburg in the 1940s. This was a multicultural society, a work center for Africans from across the continent but also a refuge from Nazism for Europeans, many of them Jews. It was a sophisticated center of the arts. Growing up there, I had an art teacher, Rosa van Gelderen, a Dutch Jewish refugee, who said, "You will not be a creative artist if you don't paint what's around you." She meant the life of Africans in the streets of Johannesburg; she made me look around me and awoke my interest in popular culture. I was about ten.

No child in South Africa could be unaware of the agonized issues of justice and equity between the races there. But artistically, the confrontation had another side. Our distance from the centers of European culture made us feel out of touch, especially during World War II. Yet being at a periphery brought up challenging artistic questions: Where did we fit culturally, with Africa or with England? This brought up questions of "is" and "ought": what environment, in fact, lay around us and how was this different from what the dominant culture's media (for the most part English) suggested should be there?

For example, we made Christmas cards in school--there's multiculturalism for you: a Jewish child painting Christmas cards. In this English-based school, we painted snow scenes in Surrey. This was in the middle of the South African summer. An extreme version of this form of colonial domination was a film showing young, black French West Africans reciting lessons on " "--our ancestors the Gauls. (I learned in France that they don't do that anymore.)

As a child, the places I read of in books were largely English. I lived in a harsher, drier landscape and, although I found the high veld incredibly beautiful, English people around me seemed to like it only to the extent that it reminded them of "home." I wondered why my landscape had to look like Surrey to be beautiful, and I became an African xenophobe.

South African author Dan Jacobson wrote that he had never seen his own karoo landscape in a book until he read , by Olive Schreiner. The surprised discovery of your familiar surroundings in print is part of the African experience. It gives rise to an artistic dilemma: "How can we African artists find our own
idiom?" and the corollary, "How should we relate to the arts of Europe and America?" Such questions may have been dominant in America 150 years ago, although in architecture they seem to have force here, even today. But my xenophobia was only half right. There is a necessity, I now believe, to relate immediate circumstances to a broader tradition, perhaps to several.

Nevertheless, learning-from-what's-around-you has remained an overarching theme for us, and seeing how African artists confronted that theme was important for me growing up. The clash of cultures in South Africa, although politically terrible, was artistically exciting and invigorating. African folk artists' interpretations of Western artifacts had unbounded vitality. They were much more interesting than the Western artists' responses to African cultures. African folk art that incorporated Western images was decried by the purists, but I found it fascinating. It prepared me for the impurity of Las Vegas.