Venturi and Gehry: In the Real World - exhibitions of the work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Frank Gehry

By rejecting modernist idealism from the very outset of their careers, Robert Venturi and Frank Gehry have provided us with two different notions of what populist architecture can be. Recent museum shows devoted to each man's work traced their decades-long development.

While the "Year of Mies" reigned austerely elsewhere this past summer, two other architectural extravaganzas presented alternative visions. Less may not exactly have been a bore, but Mies's purified geometry and tectonic discipline could only face the messy realities of contemporary life with a resolute negativity, an urge to make the world over in its own, idealized image. What an architecture that embraced those realities might look like was on display in two exhibitions that were in many ways complementary, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates" and the Guggenheim Museum's "Frank Gehry, Architect." Both museums have close relationships with their subjects, reflected in the shows themselves. Venturi is, of course, a Philadelphia native and resident, and has designed exhibitions and spaces for the PMA, while Gehry's name is intimately linked with Thomas Krens's expansionary plans for the Guggenheim, most famously as the designer of its much-celebrated Bilbao branch (1991-97).

Accordingly, the still-traveling "Out of the Ordinary" (Venturi had preferred the title "ugly and ordinary") is a full-dress retrospective, exhaustively surveying his firm's output since the late 1950s--a long-overdue salute to a hometown hero. "Frank Gehry, Architect," by contrast, was more selective, focusing primarily on projects since the mid-1980s; we might call it an update of the groundbreaking 1986 exhibition held at the Walker Art Center, which was, like the present show, curated by Mildred Friedman. More cynically, it could be described as a self-congratulatory gesture on the part of the Guggenheim for having the good sense to commission Gehry once (at Bilbao, documented in the last gallery of the exhibition) and as an extended argument for hiring him again (for the proposed New York Guggenheim, along the East River in lower Manhattan).

Regardless of motives, the shows gave viewers a unique opportunity to compare the achievements of these two major figures. Both architects were born in the late 1920s, and both marked their arrival at a personal vocabulary of form with designs for houses destined for family members--houses which were, in equal parts, shots fired across modernism's bow and studies in comfort and habitability. Venturi was certainly the more precocious, with the home he designed for his widowed mother, the Vanna Venturi House (1959-64), located in suburban Philadelphia. It appears from the street as a kind of ur-house, with its dominant gables and central chimney, which also acknowledged its ticky-tacky forebears (this was the age of Levittown, after all) in its pale green coloration (added by the architect in 1967). This characterization, however, has too often obscured the house's truly innovative interior spaces, which Venturi distorted from orthogonal regularity, the better to accommodate the particular needs each addressed. This was a house that responded to both functional and psychological expectations for domestic space, and characteristically combined these everyday concerns with lessons in inclusiveness and experiential diversity that Venturi had learned from architectural Mannerism, a maligned style only then coming under scholarly reevaluation. The PMA exhibition recognized the significance of this design with an extensive presentation of models and plans, revealing the complicated genesis of the now-canonical structure, as well as a full-scale mock-up of its street elevation--which, while visually striking, unfortunately drew attention away from the importance of the house's interior, with its debt to mentor Louis Kahn's great rooms, reinforcing the misperception of Venturi as an architect of mere signboard buildings.

Venturi's epochal hybridization of high and low domestic forms was certainly not lost on Gehry when, in 1977-78, the latter renovated his own home, a modest 1920s Santa Monica bungalow. He preserved the original, anonymous structure while parasitically attaching a new shell around it--a shell infamously made up of "low" materials like plywood, chain link and corrugated metal. References to Dadaist collage, Constructivist geometry and Expressionist fragmentation jostled with the middle-class homeliness of the Los Angeles suburbs, all cobbled together with a weekend carpenter's inventiveness. The Guggenheim exhibition opened with this building (along with Gehry's other residential designs of the late 1970s), marking it as the crucial starting point of his mature work, though he had already been a practicing architect for over 20 years.

Overlapping conceptions but radically differing results characterize the relationship between these two architects' work, and the results have much to do with their varying approaches to architectural context. From his early statement that "Main Street is almost all right," Venturi has aimed at an architecture which would simultaneously fit in with its ordinary surroundings yet offer another layer of possible meaning through the recollection of historical precedents. This concern for context, evident in early works like the Vanna Venturi House or Guild House (1961-66), the community apartments for the elderly in downtown Philadelphia, only deepened after his partnership with Denise Scott Brown, who brought her profound knowledge of urban sociology to the firm. (In a number of his earlier projects, Venturi worked in association with William H. Short and John Rauch.) By the early 1970s, they had embraced "the strip" and the iconography of suburban sprawl, making Pop art out of the recalcitrant materials of the chain store and the parking lot--as in the Best Products showroom in Langhorne, Pa. (1973-79), with its facade of Warholesque flower-print enameled panels.