In the Academy's Garden: Robert Venturi, the Grand Tour and the Revision of Modern Architecture

摘要

In 1966 the direction of architectural discourse was changed by two books published just a few months apart: Aldo Rossi's U architettura della citta and Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Their simultaneity marked the climax of a crisis in architecture widely felt among a younger generation of theoreticians and practitioners. Venturi's book in particular claimed to be a manifesto (albeit a gentle one) for a new beginning. Ironically, this rhetoric of renewal was linked to a re-examination of architectural history which - at least on the surface - had been suppressed by the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. Indeed, a large number of the images reproduced in Complexity and Contradiction referenced the buildings of mannerism and late baroque in England and Italy.' Venturi's reconsideration of the canon of architectural history, however, was not intended to herald a return to the classical language of architecture, as was erroneously believed by some later protagonists of postmodernism. Rather, the point was to illustrate the existence of another tradition of architecture that had not been acknowledged by the purity and ahistoricism of late modernism -an approach against which the book was ostensibly directed.