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Learning From Miami
An Architectural Guide to Coping With Urban Sprawl
About ten years ago, when I was studying architecture at college, we took several field trips to Yale University, whose campus has been endowed with many fine specimens of modern architecture. I specifically remember Louis Kahn's Yale Art Museum, where we were explicitly directed away from the impressive collection of early modern masters on the walls and turned toward the art of the floors instead—to the precisely jointed floorboards, and to the corners of the room, where polished stainless steel wall seams exquisitely met the perfectly polished blond oak floor. We wandered the stairwells—fashioned of simple but boldly geometric poured concrete—for hours, examining the walls for Kahn's trademark of evenly spaced small holes that correspond somehow to structural supports. This was the architecture we were being molded to admire; modern to be sure, defined only by a strong attention to detail and very expensive materials.
Yale's enormous rare book library has no windows, of course, as sunlight damages the ancient manuscripts. The architectural solution in this case was to construct a modern mega-sculpture made almost entirely of huge slabs of marble cut so thin that, from the inside, sunlight glows through them in soft radiant panels the shape of television screens. It is a lovely technological marvel, but, like Yale itself, screams privilege and a lack of appreciation.
No, I didn't care for the ambience at Yale. It was confining and isolated. One particularly unpleasant undergrad who was passing by sneered at my friend: "Nice shirt." My friend was wearing a lovely orange wool shirt from the designer Steven Sprouse who was, if you remember, the very height of fashion in 1985. This only reaffirmed what I had been saying all day: You can give someone an Ivy-league diploma but you can't give them good taste. Or good manners. Fuck Louis Kahn. I was glad to be going back to civilization: Manhattan.
The rest of that semester, we endlessly analyzed the architecture we had seen at Yale if our critique groups, captained by our professors—who were all, by the way, working architects. A lot of talk about purity and honesty in architecture was bandied about. I'll never forget one model made by an especially pretentious critique-group peer: It was a useless expanse of wall in a large field—two walls really—that met in the center with a curl. He made a long-winded reference to Yin and Yang energies during his presentation. The model was impeccable and the professor, well, she bought it hook, line, and sinker. My models always looked like shit, so it was undoubtedly interpreted as mere spite when I retorted (hey, this was a critique group) that I thought he should erect a huge sign in the middle of his stupid model that said I'M SO GREAT! Now that I think back on it, I must have felt real hostility building up. My own last project, I recall, was a burial crypt designed after the look of a Hollywood boudoir, with an elevated "bed" and matching curtains. I remember that my critique group had nothing much to say about it, good or bad. My gaudy, mirrored tomb was not pure and it certainly wasn't honest (whatever that is) and I'd rendered them all silent.
In retrospect, I'm not surprised that despite all the talk of Yale, there was nary a mention of Robert Venturi, although he was a professor at The Yale school of architecture throughout the 60s and 70s—one of their most famous, in fact. Venturi's once controversial ideas have long been accepted in the mainstream of other art scholarships, but apparently architects still hold him in absolute disdain, even contempt.
It was at Yale in 1968 that Venturi and a small group of professors and students first unleashed their ideas on the academic world. Theirs was a two-pronged aesthetic diatribe, both a scathing criticism of modern architecture and a promotion of roadside American architecture, specifically the commercial strip. It all began as a university lecture called "A Significance For A&P Parking Lots," in which Venturi calls the huge parking lot fronting any less significant building "...the greatest evolution of vast space since Versailles." Later, the lecture was expanded into a formal written manifesto, Venturi's infamous masterwork Learning From Las Vegas (1972). Venturi still designs architecture today: He recently proposed the addition of the largest clock face in the world to the top of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal.
What happened in '68 was this: Venturi and his team went to Las Vegas to research the ultimate expression of the commercial strip, an order to make "...a careful documentation and analysis of the physical form of urban sprawl, as important to us now as was the study of ancient Greece and Rome to earlier generations." They received the red carpet treatment in Vegas, and free room and board at the Stardust. Apparently the Las Vegas Strip Beautification Committee, who had recently been deadlocked on the issue of installing trees along the Strip, was hoping that at the end of their stay, the Yale architects would impart some inexpensive professional advice.
But reading Las Vegas one imagines this scenario: Robert Venturi reads The Fountainhead and is so appalled by this representation of the modern architect that he immediately packs his dictation machine and books the next flight for Vegas. Rand's obtuse rape melodrama is supposedly about individual artistic integrity, which is all well and good, but Venturi reminds us (indirectly) throughout his tome that architecture takes up a lot of public space—in fact it is public space. (Try avoiding architecture that you don't like for one day.) Therefore, the architect has some responsibility toward the public, and should respond to the public, as opposed to imposing something on the public "for the sake of Man." What exactly is the purpose of a "pure" and "honest" architecture in a late Twentieth Century pluralistic society, one wonders?
Naturally there are political overtones throughout Venturi's opus (Las Vegas is subtitled "The Great Proletarian Cultural Locomotive"), but the book is not a political rallying cry. His main concern is really for the myopic adoration of great modern architecture, the "...deadness that arises from too great a preoccupation with good taste," and the extreme underappreciation of commercial architecture. Within the analysis of Las Vegas, Venturi's real expertise comes out, as does his passion for chaotic and contradictory images in urban sprawl, a key of our architectural past.
Venturi stands against the modern "megastructure of total design." This is architecture as sculpture, such as the Bauhaus of Mies van der Rohe. He cites Le Corbusier's infamous desire to knock down all of Paris and rebuild it again as exactly the sort of attitude he fears from architects. Venturi champions architecture based on style and image, on folk or vernacular construction, and "architecture without architects." This vernacular style should be, by historical precedent, absolutely laden with signs and symbols from other eras and our own, it should mix high and low art, the sacred and the putrefying, for this is our natural language. He repeatedly refers to how moved he was by one particular sight in Vegas; one of the Venus de Milo's from Ceasar's Palace "standing" in front of a sign for Avis Rent-a-Car.
Venturi draws the basic conclusion that all architecture is either what he calls a Decorated Shed or a Duck. A Decorated Shed is what the commercial strip is, "the $10,000 building with the $100,000 sign." He describes functional boring architecture, neutral to the point of being difficult to recall, but that carries a surface alive with appliqué ornamental symbols, the function of which is to evoke various emotional responses. This is historical architecture; the Renaissance is full of Decorated Sheds. If you try to imagine what a Vegas casino must look like from the back, the term Decorated Shed should become abundantly clear. The other type of architecture, the Duck, is a building that has so reduced itself in importance in comparison to its sign that it has actually become the sign. The classic example for Venturi is a roadside structure on Long Island that is shaped like a duck (thus the name) but any such sculptural, freestanding building will do. Chartres is a Duck, we are told (although Venturi admits arguing with others who said it was a Shed). Most Modern architecture are basically Ducks, but don't admit to being Ducks. The real hypocrisy for Venturi was that "...modern architecture always demonstrated what it was by setting itself against what it wasn't." But a duck is a duck.
Learning From Las Vegas's many detailed charts and elevations therefore concern themselves with the all-important sign, since the architecture of the buildings which support them is purposefully ugly and boring. Each sign is different, yet they share certain traits; they are each, for example, lovingly placed at angles along the highway to greet the passer-by. Each sign possesses symbols borrowed from another era, and made its own. Venturi salutes this lack of innovation: What he calls "old words with new meanings" are, after all, more in line with clients' value systems.
Imagine, if you can, the Seagrams Building in mid-town Manhattan, designed by Mies and Philip Johnson. A minimal and austere tower, purely architectural, and so deprived of ornament that there are "...no signs except the tiny ones on the restrooms, begrudgingly applied." Venturi speculates that modern designers have shunned symbols because they pervade our culture and thus are now debased themselves. Venturi also tells us that the famous Mies dictate "Less is More" is misleading, since his architecture was technically so complicated that Less was actually More Work and that, furthermore, many elements of the Seagrams Building are enormously ornamental, but not, paradoxically, visible on the surface. The work is basically a huge Duck with elements of a Shed. In this context there has never been any pure and heroic architecture from which commercial designs have gone so horribly awry; it's modern architecture that is the aberration.
Back in Vegas, Venturi falls for the Strip's gas stations. They are "tasteful, repetitive constructions meant to soothe and comfort. They offer the patron sculpture (the gas pumps) and a desert oasis (the Coke machines)." Venturi's encyclopedic knowledge of ancient styles documents for us the historical precedents of Las Vegas: The Strip may appear chaotic, but look closely, there's an order there.
Las Vegas is the descendant of the Roman piazza. In Rome, every road leads to the inevitable piazza—a void in the congested city. In Vegas, every road leads to the Strip—a void with no focus, in an open, indefinite space. Only the scale has changed, from a space for pedestrians to one for automobiles. The Renaissance piazza was heavily ornamented with mixed-media symbols borrowed from other eras. (It was, after all, a renaissance of the classical arts. An ionic column here, a frieze there and—voilà—the serene "order" of the Renaissance.) The billboards that line the highways of Vegas? Their ancestors are the Roman triumphal arch, architecture as propaganda meant to be read at 55 m.p.h. Rome, every architect's pièce de resistance, is much closer to Vegas than to Mies. Venturi calls this critical associative process "From Rome to Vegas and back to Rome again." So, the next time you drive down the strip to the nearest cineplex or mall don't think "Bomb it," think "Michelangelo."
One pictorial grid in Las Vegas charts the cathedrals of the Strip, the casinos. They are broken down to their individual elements and compared: panorama, front, side, entrance, parking, oasis, foliage, sculpture, sign, and interior. Venturi also contrasts their styles, which include "Miami Moroccan," "International Jet-Set Style," "Bauhaus Hawaiian," and who could forget "Yamasaki Bernini cum Roman Orgiastic." How and why do these seemingly contrasting images merge? Venturi gives us this brief history of the roadside: "The Miami Beach Modern Hotel on a bleak stretch of highway in southern Delaware reminds jaded drivers of the welcome luxury of a tropical resort, persuading them, perhaps, to forgo the gracious plantation across the Virginal border called Motel Monticello. The real hotel in Miami alludes to the international stylishness of a Brazilian resort, which in turn derives from the International style of middle Corbu. This evolution, from high source through middle source to low source took only thirty years. Today, the middle source is less interesting than its commercial adaptations. Roadside copies of [the high source] are more interesting than the real thing." Venturi repeatedly makes the distinction between architecture that looks interesting but is actually boring, and cheap and awful architecture that is actually interesting.
One of the most interesting things about boring architecture is the inherent amount of contradictory messages given by commercial designs and urban sprawl. For Venturi, the obvious societal influences are the culprit; our chaotic value systems are perfectly manifested in what we build around us. And this, of course, has always been the case. "There is a contrast between the two types of order on the Las Vegas Strip: the obvious visual order of the street elements and the difficult visual order of the buildings and signs. The zone of the highway is a shared order. The zone off the highway is an individual order. The elements of the highway are civic. The buildings and signs are private. In combination they embrace continuity and discontinuity, going and stopping, clarity and ambiguity, cooperation and competition, the community and the rugged individual. The system of the highway gives order to the sensitive functions of exit and entrance, as well as to the image of the Strip as a sequential whole. It also generates places for individual enterprise and controls that growth." Wow. In the world of the dynamite-happy architect of The Fountainhead, it wouldn't be desirous to include such contrast and contradiction. But for Venturi it is symphonic as well as socially responsible. He warns us to be wary of any building that tries to be anything other than what at is: a building.
At the end of their pleasant stay in Las Vegas, wandering the "poignant" interiors of the casinos and the "pretty" shopping malls, Venturi and his team impart some advice to the Strip Beautification Committee, in the form of a memo reproduced in Learning From Las Vegas:
The Las Vegas Strip: Not the Champs Élysée
- Trees would block the signs.
- Grass medians are hard to maintain.
- Greenery and water would just raise the level of humidity.
- The best things on the Strip are the signs and architecture.
- The gas stations are nice, too.
- Model should be Near East—tiles, mosaics.
- Median of the strip should be paved in gold.
- Don't forget the floors of the parking lots!!
Venturi is not a post-modernist, this is a stupid classification and most post-modern architecture are ornamentless Ducks. He aligns himself more with the Pop artists of the 60s. Pop Art, for him, was a "relearning" of the necessary process of making symbols and tokens from the world around us—evolutionary art as opposed to revolutionary art. But, perhaps like many Pop artists, Venturi's work is brilliant on paper but falls short in practice (giant clock face excepted). Take, for example, Guild House, a building presented in Las Vegas as a result of his research there. It is plain ugly, an example of a style I would call "Late-Stalinist Siberian." But upon closer inspection, there is a unique beauty there. The proportion is that of the Roman palazzo, superficially evoked by appliqué' brickwork that does not correspond in any way to the actual interior space or support—architectural heresy in itself. Venturi points out that the windows of the building look like, and in fact are, windows. The main focus of the facade, dark brick chosen to match the sooty surroundings, is the sign GUILD HOUSE, which greets the inhabitants with a daily message "I AM GUILD HOUSE." The flourish of the overall design, we are told, is the large television antenna on the roof. Venturi narrates that he really wanted to put a large Virgin Mary with outstretched arms up there, but the board disapproved as many of them were Quakers, so he chose the next obvious cultural icon. It is exactly the kind of building you would expect to find an some blighted urban center or along the outskirts of the highways that lead to chain restaurants and car dealerships. Venturi seems to tell us that if only we cared more about this architecture, maybe it wouldn't be so awful. We could make our own modern day Roman Empire, complete with convenient parking. This era of the perpetually demolished or "renewed" city center, the endless American Strip Mall—could this actually be our Renaissance?
Now that I'm living in Miami, my interest in Venturi has proved helpful. This city's reputation precedes it; a sprawling network of highways without a proper downtown, hideously colored pastiches of Art Deco and Easter eggs (Art Deco, the shallowest of all modern design movements, despised by the Bauhaus). Not to mention all the unhealthy tanned flesh and boob jobs. All of these are well-known aspects of central Miami Beach hotels, which evoke, principally, pre-Castro Cuba, the Sammy Davis Jr. and Jerry Lewis era, and also allude to more exotic locations. The Hotel Casablanca never fails to cause me nearly to crash my car as I go whizzing past: Its three-story ornamental Greek portico is supported by four columns shaped like four Atlases, each holding a globe and then the portico on their backs. This city takes neon and plastered surfaces to the absolute limit. The colors of Miami Beach buildings complement the turquoise water and pinkish sand the palm trees. The city's many bridges are illuminated at night by out-of-place black light or lots of blue light, the vision of some brilliant coked-up, Ferrari-driving, city commissioner-thug. The Latins and Haitians here know they are more at home than any lobster-sunned white American will ever be.
One day I sat sipping coffee in front of the perfectly streamlined Krispy Kreme donut shop, its aluminum and teal-aluminum sides gleaming in the sun. I gazed across the six-lane blacktop to a restaurant rather inexplicably called The Caves. The building itself I didn't notice, but in front, angled to greet the motorist, there was a topiary cut in the shapes of our favorite dinosaurs, which were accessorized with strangely colored plaster stalagmites. I struggled for the appropriate terminology. Could it be Neo-Paleolithic cum Versailles-Garden Gothic? Sure it could.
Except for the houses, and even there perhaps, all the architecture here is roadside architecture. So naturally the most powerful spatial experience I've had occurred when I was driving route A1A to Fort Lauderdale. I saw it, looming up in the distance, as I was supposed to: It was the original sign, a design burned deep into my memory—I recognized it instantly. By the time I was underneath the sign, and passing, OK USED CARS, I'd already had the most intense wave of nostalgia possible. I nearly had to pull the car over. I had not seen this sign since I was a child, and I was flooded by memories; it couldn't have been a more effective jar if I was suddenly confronted with my childhood best friend Nicole Luther, who I haven't seen since I was ten. The lovely curved simplicity of the lettering reminded me of the original General Electric logo, in its perfect shades of dark yellow and red. The circular OK sign was near our house in Connecticut. We passed it at least two times a day, to and from school. I remembered simply looking at the sign, which is a more toothsome memory than it sounds. This surely should be the purpose of commercial symbols: to provide continuity through one lifetime and centuries. It is unfortunate that the field is so dominated by "innovators" who are still stuck in the juvenile belief that there is actually something new under the sun.
Venturi concludes: "Learning from popular culture does not remove the architect from his or her status in high culture. But it may alter high culture to make it more sympathetic to current needs and issues...as opposed to last years variety of high-culture cultists. Irony and the use of a joke to get to seriousness are the weapons of artists of non-authoritarian temperament in situations that do not agree with them. If the commercial persuasions of the strip are materialistic manipulations, it does not follow that we architects who learn from their techniques must reproduce the content or the superficiality of their messages. Interpretations of this kind of gentle architecture...can suggest sorrow, irony, love, satire, the human condition, or just happiness, rather than the necessity to buy soap or the promise of an orgy." Amen in a drive-thru church to that.
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