Reviewed by The Society of Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter

Website: http://www.sahscc.org/site/

From: https://archpaper.com/2018/01/robert-venturi-rome-review/

Seeing Rome through the eyes of Robert Venturi

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is not an easy book, or so we were told by Vincent Scully in the introduction to Robert Venturi’s seminal 1966 publication.

The book’s release is the stuff of modern architectural mythology. When initially published, Venturi’s text signified a daring step away from modern orthodoxy. It encouraged the design community to actively participate in broad architectural discourse, to treat the past as prologue rather than discarding it as merely vestigial.

The book was loathed by many. Treated as critical contraband, it was seen as incendiary and vulgar, and was perceived to be a jab to the prevailing momentum of Western architectural progress.

However, to a small fraction of midcentury architects, the book was a welcome embrace of architectural inheritance. It was a permissive, if soft, manifesto allowing designers to stretch out, to embrace a messy and nonlinear practice, to get a little weird.

Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby proudly identify with Team Venturi. The first pages of Robert Venturi’s Rome, to which both contribute text and watercolor illustration, celebrate the profound influence Complexity and Contradiction had on the way they practice, teach, and understand the built environment.

Reading the book as students proved to be a shared watershed moment. Fisher immediately shifted focus from art and art history to architecture, and has worked in Rome as both an architect and Rome Prize Fellow. Harby received the book from Vincent Scully in a fateful transaction that led to a Rome Prize Fellowship and a recurring teaching position in the Eternal City.

Robert Venturi’s Rome is ostensibly a travel book for the architecturally inclined, exploring some, though not all, of the Roman sites referenced in Complexity and Contradiction. Fisher and Harby “propose to take the reader on a journey through time and ideas by visiting and discussing nearly thirty Roman places that exemplify Venturi’s revolutionary ideas,” and they use the Complexity and Contradiction table of contents, and supplemental quotes from the original text, as a framework for ten short tours.

Unsurprisingly, by pairing buildings and urban spaces with the tenets of Venturi’s work, including “ambiguity,” “contradiction” (both “adapted” and “juxtaposed”), and the “double-functioning element,” Robert Venturi’s Rome is quickly revealed to be more complex, and yes, more contradictory, than a standard travel guide of the Fodor’s or Rick Steves variety.

Fisher and Harby pragmatically outline locations and hours of operation, but eschew detailed photography for their own watercolor illustrations. The images of buildings, architectural elements, and plans are gorgeous, lovingly rendered and evocative, but leave details to be examined solely by text. Accordingly, the text often carries an unevenly distributed burden.

Venturi populated Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture with more than 250 images, mixing architectural photographs and drawings with mannerist and abstract paintings, an approach that buttressed his criticism and apologia. Conversely, Fisher and Harby are successful when describing formally familiar work, like the Pantheon or Casa Girasole, but struggle when examining complicated baroque spaces, like Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane.

Vacillating between highlight reel and inside baseball, the tone of the book is inconsistent. It is simultaneously a travelogue for the architecturally curious and a series of esoteric incantations relying on the erudition of the reader to spot the sly relationship between Fisher and Harby’s text and Venturi’s design exegesis.

The esteem in which the authors hold Venturi—and his work—and their admiration for Roman architecture is evident. Venerating both theorist and city, Fisher and Harby note, “it is possible that, without acknowledging it, Venturi…is celebrating the fact that in the hands of Borromini and many other architects, classical language is a living, fluid thing, and not the dead language that Venturi’s modernist contemporaries would have considered it.”

By design or otherwise, the publication of Robert Venturi’s Rome feels timely and in keeping with a broader revivalist spirit currently underway. It fits easily with the recent Ettore Sottsass show at the Met Breuer, the successful effort to designate Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s Ambassador Grill as a New York City landmark, and the recognition of the glass pyramid–topped Musée Louvre renovation with an AIA 25-year award.

Still, it takes a unique kind of architectural navel gazer to appreciate the meta-narrative of a book about a book by an architect designing buildings about architecture.

Scully suggested that Complexity and Contradiction might shift our professional perspective from the Champs d’Elysées to Main Street. Through thoughtful analysis and vivid illustration, Fisher and Harby remind us that Rome is a complex city of interwoven Main Streets populated by both historic exemplars and idiosyncratic oddities.

Robert Venturi’s Rome “evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus,” write the authors. “Its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once.” Coincidentally, so does Robert Venturi’s Rome.

Brian Newman is an architect and university campus planner and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis.

Robert Venturi’s Rome
Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby, ORO Editions, $25.00

From: http://sbmag.com/

From: http://spacing.ca/national/2017/12/05/book-review-friedman-house/

Written by Richard Cavell, ORO Editions (2017)

UBC SALA West Coast Modern House Series

Following Dr. Friedman’s passing, the fate of the house was uncertain, and an attempt to acquire a heritage designation failed. Alerted to the sale of the house (and to the possibility of its demolition) an Ottawa tech entrepreneur and his wife, inspired by the architectural and social history of the house, placed a bid on the house, accompanied by a letter of support from Cornelia Oberlander, and by an offer from the realtor to reduce his commission. This offer was accepted by the board of the Constance and Sydney Friedman Foundation, and the house will stand as a major exemplar of Vancouver modernist architecture and of those who value its history.
-Richard Cavell

It appears we are at a moment again when the fate of the Binning House is uncertain, given the current rezoning application to subdivide the house’s lot in order to build a larger modern home next to the modest 1,500 square foot structure. At the time of writing this book review, the District of West Vancouver’s design review committee had approved the application with conditions, but there will be time at the resubmission to voice ones concern about the compromise of this site and its important West Coast Modern home – a National Historic Site in Canada (visit their website for more information).

In this fifth book of the West Coast Modern House Series from UBC SALA, Richard Cavell’s Friedman House gives readers thoughtful insight into its architect, Frederic Lasserre, and the context in which he designed and constructed it. Built in the halcyon days of Metro Vancouver, when people could still afford to both buy land and build one’s home upon it, the Foundation that formed following the passing of the Friedmans in order to preserve the house is a happy ending for the Friedman House, and a glint of what could be possible for the many other disappearing homes in the Lower Mainland.

Of course it was not initially so for the Friedman house, as its immanent sale and most certain demolition back in 2016 prompted Globe and Mail columnist Kerry Gold to write an article lamenting what would be tantamount to losing a house like the Binning House. Her piece included an interview with landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander who designed the site plan for the house back in 1953 and was often a collaborator with Lasserre, who taught architecture at UBC with Peter Oberlander.

Kerry Gold’s piece is a testament to the importance of journalism in the service of architectural preservation, at the very time that both modern architecture and journalism are being jeopardized by a growing ambivalence in our society, as without Kerry’s writing the present homeowners may have never heard of the Friedman House. So while it is a happy inclusion in the present West Coast Modern House series, it must not be forgotten that it is the exception and not the rule for the outcome of many of these architectural treasures.

The story of the house’s origin is as modest as the 2,225 square foot house itself. Sydney and Constance Friedman had moved from Montreal in 1950 to teach in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, and later acquired the 11,500 square foot triangular site to build a new home close to the university. Hiring Lasserre to design the house in the vocabulary of the then current West Coast Modern style of architecture, they collaboratively chose to provide the house with an introverted view, not having the benefit of the view of the Burrard Inlet like so many of their neighbours’ sites.

This being the case, its extensive southwest glazing looks out of its central living room to the spectacular first growth forest and new landscape designed by the aforementioned Cornelia Oberlander (one of her first projects), who also introduced a pear tree to the back yard between the house and pool as a focal point.

As Dr. Friedman would later recount, the house was often the gathering loci for many of the university’s faculty and benefactors, including Frederick Lasserre himself, along with Leon and Thea Koerner. Other guests included Audrey and Harry Hawthorn, whose collection of First Nations artifacts would later form the basis for the UBC Museum of Anthropology, and for which Sydney Friedman would also be a supporter.

A member of the AIBC and Fellow of the RAIC, Frederick Lasserre helped to found the School of Architecture at UBC in 1946 and later—as an associate at Sharp, Thompson, Berwick and Pratt—designed the UBC War Memorial Gym. One can only imagine how much more he would’ve been able to contribute to the architectural community had his life not been cut short at 50, the tragic victim of a mountain climbing accident in 1960. In 1962, UBC renamed the architecture building the Frederick Lasserre building, where architecture students at UBC continue to go to this day.

The preservation of the Friedman house is just as much a preservation of his legacy as it is of the Friedman’s themselves, and the new owners should be commended for their recognition of this in their decision to save the house. One can only hope that many more like them will emerge to save other houses jeopardized by our region’s insane real estate feeding-frenzy, and it is for precisely this reason that the West Coast Modern House book series is needed more than ever to spread the word.

Much thanks again must be given to the contributors of the book series—Leslie Van Duzer, Sherry McKay, and Christopher Macdonald, with book design by Pablo Mandel and photography by Michael Perlmutter. Friedman House is, like its predecessors, a small miracle in its depiction of yet another one of these endangered houses, sounding a clarion call before they all but disappear.

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For more information on Friedman House, visit the ORO Editions website.

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Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect and writer.

Wall Street Journal What to Give: Books on Design
The best books to give the design lover in your life.
By Ann Landi

Nov. 15, 2017 6:08 p.m. ET

0 COMMENTS

We don’t think much about public seating: We spy an empty bench in a park or a vacant chair in a town square and we deposit ourselves on its accommodating surface. Renowned landscape architect Laurie Olin, however, has spent a lifetime reflecting on how and where we sit, especially outside. The delightful volume “Be Seated” (Applied Research + Design, 213 pages, $34.95) contains his ruminations on the nature and design of public places for hanging out, the ideas behind his commissions for such spaces as Bryant Park and Columbus Circle in New York City, and a brief history of public seating (until the emergence of the Piazza Signoria in Florence in the 1400s, people mostly plunked themselves on the ground). The book is generously supplemented with Mr. Olin’s charming sketches and disarming observations: “An individual approaching a chair will often move it slightly, even if barely an inch or two, as an act of taking possession before sitting on it.”

From: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-to-give-books-on-design-1510787288