Sunday, March 28, 2010

The Bob and Denise Show


My review of the What We Learned: Architecture After Las Vegas symposium at Yale is viewable over at Icon Eye. Sadly, the intended accompanying interview didn't exactly materialise. I managed a brief chat (which I'll try to edit and post up here) with a clearly exhausted Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown after their marathon three day symposium, but I am no Jeremy Paxman. I'm not even a Terry Wogan come to that. Scott Brown was, as usual, highly articulate, while Bob Venturi was clearly ready for his lunch. And who can blame him, it was lunchtime for one thing, and for another there were really no more questions left to ask.....

....particularly as it came after an informative seminar - A few More Words - hosted by Jimmy Stamp, of Life Without Buildings fame, who managed to ask all the best questions. The whole thing was also filmed as part of Jimmy Venturi's marathon odyssey documenting his parent's work. I'm the one near the front staring glumly at Paul Rudolph's orange carpet in the picture at the top of the post. Sean Griffiths is sitting beside me wearing a suede bomber jacket and looking interested.

A couple of mildly pedantic points. My review didn't quite make clear that the exhibition running alongside the symposium was actually two separate shows; a Yale commissioned exhibition of the work of VSBA, and Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, curated by symposium speaker Martino Stierli along with Hilar Stadler.

I would also have liked to have had space to mention Kurt W Forster, whose brief summing up at the symposium was hilarious and seemed to concern itself mainly with Otto Wagner's glass bath tub, of which, possibly, more later...

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