Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and… Out of the Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates

Through Feb. 2, 2003

The Carnegie Museum of Art

4400 Forbes Ave.

(412) 622-3131

The Parthenon is a duck.

As analogized by two of the most influential architects of the late 20th century, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the Parthenon, a building that primarily communicates through its outer appearance and is rarely used inside, is similar to a building formed as a duck in Long Island where people bought the birds for their dinner.

Venturi and Scott Brown formulated the analogy as a way for them to think about architecture during an architectural study they and their students made of the Las Vegas strip in the late ’60s. They made their first trip to Vegas after Scott Brown, co-chair of the Urban Design Program at UCLA, invited Venturi, co-chair of Architecture at Yale, to be a guest lecturer.

They didn’t get married in Vegas, but it wasn’t long after their four-day weekend – about seven months actually – that they wed back in California. They also became partners in architectural design when Scott Brown joined Venturi’s Philadelphia-based firm in 1969. “Duck” and the “decorated shed,” the concepts they formulated on the Vegas Strip, were later published in a book titled “Learning from Las Vegas,” and became guiding principles of design throughout their award-winning careers.

A retrospective of their work, “Out of the Ordinary,” is currently exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland, where more than 150 drawings, models, photographs and decorative objects fill the Heinz Architectural Center. Originally organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Out of the Ordinary” is arranged by building type – civic, commercial, houses and housing, museums, universities and decorative art – and shows the wide range of designs by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

In the Hall of Sculpture, which is a replica of the interior of the Parthenon, are multimedia installations designed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. The 30- and 40-foot installations vividly demonstrate the firm’s philosophies, history, influences and ideas that span the past four decades.

Reacting against the oversimplified forms of Modernist architecture of the 20th century – its peak in America in the early ’60s was reflected in a preponderance of rectilinear, unadorned, ascetic corporate architecture – Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates incorporated qualities they studied in vernacular architecture, such as Laundromats, gas stations, fast food restaurants and casinos.

They embraced the large signage, “supergraphics,” they admired in the Las Vegas strip and integrated it into their designs of civic and commercial buildings to create architecture that would communicate. Rather than creating monuments to their own talents, they focused on designs that respected the surrounding environment.

In a short film that accompanies the exhibition, Venturi explains the inspiration the architects found in Las Vegas: “One fundamental reason we began the study of Las Vegas – we found it exciting. It was essentially a study of architecture, which was seen from the automobile when you are going 35 miles an hour … It had to tell its story quicker, and you did that better through symbols and signs.”

A commercial building they designed, which particularly embodies the principles they theorized, is the Langhorne, Pa., Showroom for Best Products Company, a chain of catalogue showrooms. Part of the building’s original facade, a photograph and a drawing of the building constructed in the late ’70s are in the exhibition. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates conceived a rectangular building covered with applique of a floral pattern in vibrant complementary colors, an extension of its surrounding fields where wildflowers grew.

In 1992, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates were awarded the commission of the Hotel Mielmonte Nikko Kirifuri, built outside of Tokyo. A DVD from the architects’ collection in the exhibition shows their design for the large resort hotel, in which both traditional Japanese villages and contemporary culture were evoked using small buildings and an interior pedestrian “street.” An abundance of large, colorful, two-dimensional signs showing traditional and modern Japanese symbols, such as lanterns, flowers and electrical transformers, decorate the “Village Street” lobby, creating a busy yet attractive and familiar space.

In addition to their love of the vernacular and the contemporary, the architects also admired elegant historical styles, sometimes reinventing them in playful ways. In a series of chairs included in the retrospective, they juxtaposed 18th century European decorative styles with laminated plastic.

Venturi and Scott Brown’s journey of challenging Modernist architecture in the late 20th century is a fascinating and fun ride.