Robert Venturi says that he has avoided long corridors. But from outside, it looks bit like a prison. Maybe staff thinks that medication helps to forget that fact.
Assisted Living Facility (I was forced to censor its name) where I once lived, looks homey but not everyone in staff is friendly. I was even not allowed to hang DarkStalkers Catwoman Felicia poster to my door.
Anyone who's read 'From Bauhaus to our House" (Tom Wolfe)
is well-familiar with Guild House. Talk about contempt for the client(!):
"Venturi's decisions resembled those of Gropius, who had decided that the workers should have low ceilings, small rooms, and narrow hallways. Venturi explained that people are perfectly entitled to have in their buildings the sort of familiar and explicit symbols that applied decoration can provide. So on top of his Guild House he put an enormous television aerial made of gold-anodized aluminum. It was not connected to any television set, however. It was a "symbol for the elderly."
A symbol for the elderly? [Critic Vincent] Scully provided a fuller explanation. Venturi's TV aerial was surprisingly direct, refreshingly candid. "After all, a television aerial at appropriate scale crowns [the building], exactly as it fills -- here neither good nor bad but a fact -- our old people's lives. Whatever dignity may be in that, Venturi embodies, but he does not lie to us concerning what the facts are." The phrase "whatever dignity" referred, presumably, to the dignity of aged middle-middle gorks sitting out the golden years narcotized by the tubercular blue gleam of the TV set. Just how much delight, if any, the residents of Guild House found in this familiar and explicit symbol, he did not report."
Guild House was built in early 1960's. Right?
So I assume that many first residents were born in 19th Century, which means they did not have any kind of TV Set when they were young (maybe magic lanterns and some silent black & white movies in movie theaters, not at home). So televisions were marvel to them.
Some departments of Kellokoski Mental Institution look like that asylum from Batman & Robin film.
And some Peijas cells resemble THX 1138 (OK. I have not seen the film, but I have read George Lucas The Creative Impulse book).
http://www.tvhistory.tv/
It's highly amusing
(I guess) to read the architectural musings of those who take their modernism sufficiently seriously to collect its most popular artifacts, namely furnishings.
God forbid any of their own heroes should demonstrate the wit found in some of R Venturi's work ! And what are committed modernists doing quoting their arch-enemy, T Wolfe ? Isn't he playing the fool -- intentionally or otherwise -- when it comes to architectural criticism ?
With arch friends of modernism
like the designers of Guild House, SDR-- who NEEDS enemies?
Are you defending the snide inside-joke that is Guild House, or Robert Venturi's honor in general?
In truth, I'm not well-acquainted with much of Venturi's work. A google search uncovers the following though:
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