I am happy to announce that I have finally finished one of those "must read" books on Architecture: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi. To give you an idea why it took me so long, here's a typical paragraph:Contradiction adapted is tolerant and pliable. It admits improvisation. It involves the disintegration of a prototype - and it ends in approximation and qualification. On the other hand, contradiction juxtaposed is unbending. It contains violent contrasts and uncompromising oppositions. Contradiction adapted ends in a whole which is perhaps impure. Contradiction juxtaposed ends in a whole which is perhaps unresolved.
I've lost count of how many times the book put me to sleep! Imagine a first-year student, fresh out of high school in Asia, with a tentative grasp of the English language, trying to make sense of that!
Anyway, here's my understanding of Venturi's mind-fogging classic.
Architecture is fundamentally a form of art and, like fashion, is subject to humanity's whims and fancies, actions and reactions. As it progresses through time, its guiding philosophy swings from one extreme to the other, rather like a pendulum. Going back a little in history, we find the Romantic Movement reacting against the intellectualism of the Renaissance. Modernism was, likewise, a reaction to the ornate architectural styles that had prevailed before. (Reacting against Modernism, we had Post-Modernism. And so it goes, on and on.)
Modernism was promoted by architectural superstars like Mies van der Rohe
(Farnsworth House) and Le Corbusier (Villa Savoye).
Call it a severe simplification of buildings to their bare essentials. The structure is the decoration. The house as a machine! As you can guess, it wasn't long before people got sick of these glass boxes and pure geometrical forms. Robert Venturi, a young architect back in the 1960's, came out with his book arguing that Modernism had gone too far and that complexities and contradictions are part and parcel of humanity. I do agree.
John Allen Paulos in Once Upon a Number:
Describing the world may be thought of as an Olympic contest between simplifiers - scientists in general, statisticians in particular - and complicators - humanists in general, storytellers in particular.
I would contend that scientists are very much like the Modernists in architecture. With a giant cleaver, they hacked away everything that is intangible, metaphysical, spiritual, and replaced it all with cold rationality.
I'm waiting for the pendulum to swing in the other direction.
