Robert Venturi died this week. Learning from Las Vegas (which he wrote with Denise Scott Brown) is the architecture book that made me actually want to read more architecture books, and while most of Venturi's buildings weren't that great, his way of seeing the world was revolutionary, finding redeeming qualities in the 1970s commercial landscape (best exemplified by Las Vegas) that modernists simply wanted to tear down and replace wholesale: "Architects have been brought up on Space, and enclosed space is the easiest to handle." Enclosed space—that is, traditional public space, modeled on the Italian piazza—remains an urbanist obsession even today, but one of Venturi's gifts to the world was his observation that now, for most of us, public space usually looks more like a mall or a hotel lobby or a Starbucks than the Piazza San Marco, unless we're encountering the latter in Vegas or at Disney World. In reality, there's not all that much Public Space but instead many overlapping layers of private and semi-private space that usually work well enough as a substitution.
#65: Heaven or Las Vegas
#65: Heaven or Las Vegas
#65: Heaven or Las Vegas
Robert Venturi died this week. Learning from Las Vegas (which he wrote with Denise Scott Brown) is the architecture book that made me actually want to read more architecture books, and while most of Venturi's buildings weren't that great, his way of seeing the world was revolutionary, finding redeeming qualities in the 1970s commercial landscape (best exemplified by Las Vegas) that modernists simply wanted to tear down and replace wholesale: "Architects have been brought up on Space, and enclosed space is the easiest to handle." Enclosed space—that is, traditional public space, modeled on the Italian piazza—remains an urbanist obsession even today, but one of Venturi's gifts to the world was his observation that now, for most of us, public space usually looks more like a mall or a hotel lobby or a Starbucks than the Piazza San Marco, unless we're encountering the latter in Vegas or at Disney World. In reality, there's not all that much Public Space but instead many overlapping layers of private and semi-private space that usually work well enough as a substitution.