Lessons at the roadside

Extract

Architects should learn to communicate more through their architecture. The commercial vernacular architecture of the American ‘strip’ – motels, gas stations, fast food outlets – communicates loud and clear. In comparison, high architecture, particularly the high architecture of Modernism, is sullen and silent. This, roughly, is the thesis of Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen Izenour (1972 and 1977), one of the key texts of the Post-Modernist movement in architectural theory of the early 1970s. Venturi et al thought architects could learn a lot about symbolism and communication from the sort of non-judgmental study of roadside architecture that their students had undertaken at Yale. In the second half of the book the idea was developed into a theory and encapsulated into a universal building concept, ‘the decorated shed’, which has since become a cliché of architectural criticism. The decorated shed was designed to overthrow the most cherished beliefs and rituals of Modernism. Expression through form was to be replaced by the ‘persuasive heraldry’ of the totem and the billboard; articulation of detail was to be replaced by old-fashioned applied ornament; and the ‘heroic and original’ was to be replaced by the ‘ugly and ordinary’. But the emphasis was on the decoration rather than the shed. Learning from Las Vegas did not have much to say about the way that the sheds of the commercial strip were constructed, other than describing them vaguely as ‘system built’, or about the implications that the technology of their construction might have for architectural practice.