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...

Learning From New Haven

More holiday snaps I'm afraid, this time from New Haven. The dashboard of this blog is a veritable graveyard of 'draft' posts and half-written rants at the moment. The photos below were taken a couple of weeks ago and will, no doubt, be added to after subsequent visits.

Eero Saarinen's Yale Hockey Rink zooms out in front of Philip Johnson's Kline Biology Tower. The latter is from Johnson's fascist architecture phase, as opposed to his fascist politics phase.

Inside, Saarinen's building really is like being in a upturned Viking long boat sitting over a frozen sea. I base this observation on my vast experience of being in Viking long boats, whether upside down or not.

Americans love quilted stainless steel. Does this material exist in any other country in quite such abundance? Does the quilting offer genuine insulative qualities, as it's usually used on hot dog and burrito stands?

Shamefully, I don't actually know who designed this. I suspect it might be Josep Luis Sert. Perhaps someone will be good enough to enlighten me.

Muscular and super-scaled 19th Century faux-medievalism dominates much of the Yale University campus.

Much of it emblazoned with industrial age heraldry.



Random, but very sweet, treasure-chest like synagogue...



"Hogwarts meets the Ministry of Information" - Sean Griffiths.



Entrance court of interesting building by little known American architect*.

Epic meeting point of AC duct, concrete column and inlaid marble floor...

Louis Kahn's take on the English Country House interior; patterned carpets, club chairs, oak paneling and oil paintings of animals...

Probably the best multi-storey in the world - Paul Rudolph's Temple Street car park.



...and at night.

Mind you, this uncelebrated multi-storey nearby is also fairly impressive, a vast constructivist machine for parking automobiles.

Rudolph's Crawford Manor housing block - the villain from Learning From Las Vegas - seen from an alley running between two clapboard houses.

And his Architecture and Art building, complete with slightly underwhelming extension by Charles Gwathmey to the right. If you look closely you can see....

....the poster for the Venturi Scott Brown What We Learned symposium and exhibition. Their final victory over Paul Rudolph? Or the other way around?

Lurking scandalously inside are the McDonald's Golden Arches from Signs Of Life....

....and some exquisite photographs from Learning From Las Vegas, hung against the tectonic fuck you-ness of Rudolph's bush hammered concrete.

The A&A building contains some truly bizarre and fabulous spaces, reminding me of Cedric Price's quip about Leslie Martin's Harvey Court building in Cambridge: "Just the middle ages with 13 amp power sockets". Which, even if you are a fan of Price, sounds just great in many ways, and a bit like Resident Evil.

Here we are in the dungeon, sorry, lecture hall where the head of a classical Ionic column is displayed on a modernist spike. The paprika coloured carpet is everywhere.

Modernist masterpiece composition in the rain: Kahn's Yale University Art gallery on the left, Rudolph's A&A Building on the right and Kahn's British Art Centre in the middle.

New Haven's premier nightspot - The Anchor bar - home to the demonic Sea Hag.

* Actually, as if you didn't know, Louis Kahn's British Art Centre.