Two cheers for democary is one too few : on the work of Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown

• In the course of their career, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have distanced themselves further from the kind of architectural criticism that deals not so much with the buildings themselves as with the philosophical implications of those buildings. For these architects, who have two of the most influential bocks on architecture of the latter half of the twentieth century to their credit, it has become clear that words always fall short of practice. In the course of their professional life they have found out that architecture is a craft, and that an architect's philosophy can better be one of action. This emphasis on the deed has kept them out of the centre of the theoretical arena in recent years. Nonetheless their appeal for an architecture that 'communicates', even if it dates from a quarter century ago, has become utterly relevant to today owing to the soaring growth of the communications industry. Communication - admittedly of a very specific kind - has meanwhile become a human right. Owing to this contemporary relevance Venturi and Scott Brown remain susceptible to criticism that goes deeper than the architectural object as such. The repercussions of the widespread tendency to equate architecture with language are affecting people all around the world. These repercus­sions are the subject of the present essay. 

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Keyword

The Invisible in Architecture

Robert Venturi

Denise Scott Brown

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)