Architecture as Signs and Systems
For a Mannerist Time
Published on 1. November 2004
Book
Hardback
264 pages
978-0-674-01571-5 (ISBN)
Description
Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.
The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.
Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.
The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.
Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.
Reviews / Votes
Architecture as Signs and Systems is based on lectures at Harvard which provided [Venturi and Scott Brown] with the opportunity to reflect on their careers...Their key achievement was to overthrow an arid modernist orthodoxy and to prepare the ground for today's pluralism. They nonetheless profess to remain wedded to a central tenet of modernism, that architecture should be appropriate to its age... But whatever qualifications or disagreements one may have, the Venturis remain among the most refreshing, inspiring, least pompous presences on an architectural scene peopled with prickly egos, whingeing prima donnas and ideologues. Their greatest virtue...is that they genuinely invite open debate on the big issues of architecture and urban design. -- Jules Lubbock * Times Literary Supplement * [Venturi and Scott Brown's] new book, Architecture as Signs and Systems, is a direct challenge to architecture's increasingly tortuous quest for shapes and spaces that might give new physical meaning to that increasingly diffuse term, modernity...[Their] new polemic is a wonderfully intelligent provocation. -- Jay Merrick * The Independent *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass.
United States
Publishing group
Harvard University Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
333 color illustrations, 45 halftones, 14 line drawings
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 216 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
748 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-01571-5 (9780674015715)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Robert Venturi was principal in charge of design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Pritzker Prize and the Centennial Medal of the American Academy in Rome and, with Denise Scott Brown, the National Medal of Art and the Vincent J. Scully Prize of the National Building Museum. He taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. Denise Scott Brown is principal in charge of urban and campus planning and design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the ACSA-AIA Topaz Medallion for Architecture Education and the Chicago Architecture Award. She has taught at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.