The Sun Sets on Venturi Scott Brown at Yale

If you are looking for something to do this weekend hop on Metro-North and catch the final weekend of What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. The exhibitions, there are actually two, showcase some of the original data collected by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and 13 Yale graduate students on their legendary site visit to Las Vegas 40 years ago. Given the iconic status of the resulting publication, it is really exciting to see these previously archived treasures first hand. The exhibition also covers their firm's later work with a focus on urbanism but also including buildings (the obligatory model of Venturi's mother's house is in there) and design objects from dinner ware to chairs.

The exhibition and companion symposium at Yale were just some of the events which have put the couple back on the architectural map. Denise also recently released a collection of essays titled Having Words which traces the evolution of her thinking about architecture and urbanism. The book was celebrated back in December at the Municipal Arts Society in the form of a conversation between Denise, Sarah Whiting and Hillary Sample, with moderation from Paola Antonelli. Ironically, this was technically the first event I covered on behalf of Headband Press, but somehow the potency of the group did not pan out into a really meaningful conversation.

My favorite of these nostalgic trips is the June 2009 special issue of A+U, Venturi and Scott Brown: What Turns Them On, which is an interview between the couple and OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu. Below are a few cute excerpts from the interview as well as snap shots of the exhibition which closes February 5th.

A few fun moments out of the A+U issue in no particular order:

#1 DSB: My mother had studied architecture, she was part of the group that initiated the change to modernism at the university. And there is a letter from Le Corbusier to students in that Johannesburg group in 1936 saying can't you find a very rich client there and I'll come out and we'll all do a project together.... My mother took gymnastics exercises with a woman who had connections with the Bauhaus. One of her claims to fame was that at a Bauhaus party she had danced with Jean Arp.

#2 DSB: I picked up the Smithsons' 'active socioplastics'. I still think it's a pretty nice idea but when the Smithsons actually tried to put it into effect and by working with sociologists to understand how people really live, how they have a street life, the things the Brutalists were talking about, they found the sociologists could not bend to them, and they could not bend to the sociologists. So they said no to active socioplastics. But I did not, though I had to come to America to find people to help with this problem and to learn it was no use asking sociologists to interpret their knowledge for me.

#3 RV: Denise once came out with this wonderful statement, its a bit pretentious, but sort of fun, about being misunderstood. Freud was not Freudian, Marx was not a Marxist, and ....

DSB: And we're not post-Modernists.

RV: We're not post-Modernist. Venturi is not post-Modernist.

#4 SS: When I first read your books, it was very interesting how provocative they were, and I was almost jealous that someone had something to react to so strongly.

#5 RV reading from is essay the Vision Thing: Creeps who talk about vision make me sick and suspicious. I say screw you to vision. Up your's to visionaries. Vision sucks. What a supreme irony that those who proclaim and pursue vision are least likely to attain it. Vision is not something you attain by consciously or heroically trying. It's achieved via indirection.