Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.

This collection of an important architectural theorist's essays considers and compares designs by Palladio and Le Corbusier, discusses mannerism and modern architecture, architectural vocabulary in the 19th century, the architecture of Chicago, neoclassicism and modern architecture, and the architecture of utopia.

This new collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a genericarchitecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualitiesbecome shelter and symbol.

Discusses the problems of this special field of library science

"Robert Venturi’s Rome is a guidebook to the city of Rome seen through the eyes of Robert Venturi and re-interpreted by two subsequent Rome Prize fellows and architect, Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby. Published in 1966, Venturi viewed architecture, landscape, and art as different manifestations of common themes. Fundamental to the develo9pment of any young architects’ outlook on architecture, Venturi wrote this seminal publication following a two-year Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Many buildings in Rome serve as examples that illustrate his theories, underscoring the city’s profound influence on Venturi’s thinking: from the Pantheon, through works by his favorite artist, Michelangelo, and on to 20th century buildings by Armando Brasini and Luigi Moretti, Venturi reveals Rom as a complex and contradictory city." -- Book jacket.

In the 1960s, American architect Robert Venturi made a case for the difficult whole, opposing mainstream modern architecture that ignores all the intricacies of life and produces pure space, or "easy unity". The architecture Venturi was aiming for embraces diversities, inevitable in any project. This new book, edited by Architecture Without Content, a research group at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne's School of Architecture, offers a fresh analysis and a thorough re-evaluation of Venturi s idea of "the difficult whole" as both a looking glass and a possible tool for architecture today. Through a radical re-reading of found material from the Venturi Scott Brown archives, the editors seek to propose a credible alternative to contemporary architectural discourse. Its format combines the ambiguity of interpretation with the factual material, keeping the precision of the argument. This elusive position is elaborated in essays, complemented by interviews with Kazunari Sakamoto and Alvaro Siza.Around 35 projects by Venturi Scott Brown, and also by Alvaro Siza and James Stirling, form a visual narrative with original plans and sections and other archive material as well as new perspective images and photographs especially produced for this book.

Continuing the themes that have been addressed in The Humanities in Architectural Design and The Cultural Role of Architecture, this book illustrates the important role that a contradiction between form and function plays in compositional strategies in architecture. The contradiction between form and function is seen as a device for poetic expression, for the expression of ideas, in architecture. The book contributes to the project of re-establishing architecture as a humanistic discipline, to re-establish an emphasis on the expression of ideas, and on the ethical role of architecture to engage the intellect of the observer and to represent human identity.

The observer-designer-theorists who analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in "Learning from Las Vegas" now turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has spawned for this fascinating retrospective of their life work.