Americana / Venturi

DSB: “Contextual borrowings should never deceive; you should know what the new building consists of
beneath the skin. For this reason, our allusions are representations rather than copies of historic
precedents. The deceit is only skin deep.”

Main Street / Park Ave / Penn Ave / K Street

Centralized (Jacobs, Disney) to Decentralized big box

False Fronts: Under the Skin

Venturi multiplicities: Multivalence and hesitation (Vs. diagrammatic clarity of modernist architecture)

The particular over the universal

Quotidian ennui

Bass Line + Guitar Riff composition

The tract home and African American shotgun house

Tenement Dumbbell apartment

Hi-rise offices and houses

References

 American Architecture (Leland Roth):

o No qualms over looking to the past for a new historical identity (History as consecutive
periods which one could draw upon to forge a legitimate successor)
o Association: Eclectic sampling
 Architecture and the American Dream (Craig Whitaker)
o Major grid patterns (DC, NYC etc) – As manipulated by Endogenic means
o Levittown and the invention of suburbia
o The Open Road: The dream of mobility (Highway 66)
o American backyard, porch, loggia, garage
o Motels, gas stations, diners, drive-through theaters – Replaced by the big box network
 The Buildings of Main Street
 o
 Big Box Reuse
o Focus on Wal-Mart and K-Mart
o Preserving the mediocre
o Suburban sprawl
o Walmartrealty.com
o Big boxes are nodes in a larger system of highways
o Decade, century-long lease
o Empty big boxes are essentially placeholders for real estate
o Kept at the edge of town: Provide economic boost while minimizing eyesore
o Indoor raceway
o Land Bank
o Three parts: Building, Lease, Land
o Making generic non-space local
 o Homestead Act
o Multiple tenants
o More infrastructure than building
o ‘Main St’ design = small entrances to mask mass
 Learning from Las Vegas
o Modernism abandoned iconology but became ducks themselves – they are entirely
ornamental and non-functional in their mimicry of industrial iconology
o Siegfried Gideon’s abstraction of architecture into form and space (No discussion of
beauty in architectural discourse, only the notion of progress)
o “Their buildings were explicitly adapted from these sources, and largely for their
symbolic content, because industrial structures represented, for European architects,
the brave new world of science and technology. The architects of the early Modern
movement, in discarding the admittedly obsolete symbolism of historical eclecticism,
substituted that of the industrial vernacular.”
o “It is now time to re-evaluate the once-horrifying statement of Ruskin that architecture
is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all
right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.”
 Metaphors We Live By
o Metaphors as a means of understanding and constructing the world
o Metaphors as the unity of reason and imagination (Imaginative rationality)