Venturi: Blahrchitecture

The Inky's Chris Satullo recently made the absurd allegation in defense of saving the Dilworth faux colonial that Venturi is the greatest living American architect! What a joke. For lack of commissions anywhere (except for his mother's house in Germantown!), Venturi, faute de mieux, became a pamphleteer urging us all to learn from Las Vegas.

Well, just look at what he learned: a stodgy, plattenbau-like Guild House, a Seattle Museum of Art with a kitschy "grand" staircase, a pseudo-classic addition to London's National Gallery, and the spookily goofy Franklin ghost house, and on and on into the greatest muddle of Post-Modernism. It's understandable to root for the home boy, but not when you're talking world history!

I have never seen a Venturi which levitated my eyes and spirit like, say, Kahn's Kimbell, Wright's Falling Water, Saarinen's St. Louis Arch, Timothy Pflueger's Oakland Paramount, Bertrand Goldberg's Marina Towers in Chicago, Kevin Roche's Oakland Museum. He creates Blahrchitecture. In short, Venturi is blind as a bat as a designer and his PoMo bad habits will come to haunt us long after we've exorcised his Las Vegas fantasies out of architecture schools. There was plenty wrong with tight ass Bauhausery, but Venturi's facile cliches were no remedy.

It is useful to remember that Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus to bring good design (housing and its contents) to the German working classes. (Their newly big cities were then a Big Mess.) When he and Mies fled to the United States, they ultimately dumped that still valid ideal for becoming Facade makers for the Fortune 500.

It was painful to see Gropius stumble. (Perennial architectural weather vane Phillip Johnson used to mock his Harvard teacher for always talking blue collar at Harvard Graduate School of Design.) Grossly neglected Charles Goodman was already designing great cheap housing for National Homes of Lafyette, IN. (Our first house in 1954, when I was finishing my PhD at Michigan State was a brand new Goodman--three bedrooms for $6000, $400 down and $40 a month.) And William Levitt after the war took over on the East Coast.

The first thing Gropius did was to rent an expensive Park Avenue office for his collaborator Konrad Wachsmann, the pioneer wooden prefab designer who first gained notoriety designing Albert Einstein's summer home outside Potsdam (just rehabbed for the centennial of Einstein's theory). The scientist and the architect got the Jew Wachsmann a visa to flee Germany at the last moment. Alas, he rented an abandoned aircraft factory in California to make prefabs for their General Panel Corporation, not realizing that transportation costs could kill them compared with Lafayette, IN's central location.

Neither he nor Gropius had a clue about private financing (European cheap housing had been publicly financed by Social Democratic politicos.) or U.S. building codes And the snooty New York intellectuals condemned Levittowns without ever bothering to see one, a still unacknowledged trahison des clercs even greater than Corbusier's silly notion that high rise apartments would liberate the land below for park like greenery. (Not drug pushers.)

The great Columbia U sociologist Herbert J.Gans proved this in his classic "The Levittowners"--which he wrote when he taught at Penn in the early sixties, while living in New Jersey's Levittown, renamed Willingboro to placate the New York eggheads.

How Corbu and Mies are still revered beats me. I guess architects just have to want to do the right thing! Mies' only single residence in America, the Farnsworth House, was unliveable. The Barcelona Pavilion type glass made energy costs prohibitively high. (Heh, it wasn't rocket science to perceive that Barcelona was not a Chicago suburb.) Dr. Farnsworth sued him when their romance cooled! Like other unlivable icons of Modernism, it's now a Visitor Center where Mies's genius is celebrated for posterity. (Like Corbu's uninhabitable apartment in Weissenhof!(1927) Mies' dream of a modern community outside Stuttgart.)

Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lueders, Germany's first feminist, nailed Mies in Form magazine for making apartments no one could raise kids in. But what did a mother know?! The Bundestag has belatedly honored this prescient pioneer by naming its new Library on the Spree after her. It's about time, patriarchs! Mies wanted to create ART not architecture, and failed at both in Plano.

The squabble over Dilworth's house shows us how far the architecture/ preservation community has drifted from the social idealism of Gropius. The hoopla over Cesar Pelli's MegaMirror next to 30th Street Station (see July 31 Inquirer Commentary page) is just more poudre aux yeux. Venturi's architectural "thinking" has led to a generation of starchitects, each with a showoff shtick to make his architecture a sellable brand (Gehry's titanium, Meier's Men's Urinal white tiles).

The sad truth is that Venturi's PoMo piffle about Las Vegas has led to our Potemkin Village Center Cities, where we think our cities' problems are solved by a Pelli level icon every generation or so. So silly.

These PV's just temporarily obscure the escalating collapse of urban infrastructure behind their Oh So Fine Facades. Good restaurants do not a viable city make. Great neighborhoods do. Read what Sister Mary Scullion says in the Inky SimplePose-um. The Wal-Mortification of our economy is the final step in this self-destruction. Blue collars at least used to be able to afford Levitt's houses (Unless of course they were blacks--for the first 25 years.)

Building Big is just an infantile program. Leave that to the Chinese in Pudong. And get to work on the neighborhoods, architects, and not just the rich ones in Society Hill either. Join the London-founded Architecture for Humanity, which hates Las Vegas! (Like I do!) Walt Whitman didn't write "Leaves of Grass" 150 years ago to inspire such crap.