“hy Ember 1187-099 Contents BIBLIOTECA ESCUELA DE ARQUITECTURA UNIVERSIDAD DE PUERTO RICO Nov 12 Foreword Olga Viso Acknowledgments Preface: Worlds Away and the World Next Door Ancrew Biauvelt Introduction: A Conversation with Andrew Blauvelt and Tracy Myers Katherine Solomonson ‘Our Sprawiing, ‘Supersize Utopia David Brooks Laura E. Migliorino Dan Graham. FlotosWarner FT (Fashion Architecture Taste) Learning from Levittown: A Conversation with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Beatriz Colomina In Praise of Chain Stores: They aren't destroying local flavor— they're providing variety and comfort Virginia Postrel Michael Vahrenwald John tehr sre Gregory Crewdson The View through the Picture Window: Surveillance and Entrapment Motifs in Suburban Film Robert Beuka | Intermediate Landscapes: Constructing ‘Suburbia in Postwar American Photography Holley Wlodarcayk Sarah Mekenzia Chris Faust Estudio Teddy Cruz Larry Sultan Suburban Aesthetics Is Not an Oxymoron John Archer ‘New Urbanism’s Subversive ‘Marketing Ellen Dunham-Jones 10 v7 26 3 38 a3 49 B 76 B 86 101 113 116 120 126 129 107 LIL Architects Chris Ballantyne Greg stimac CoensPartners Campus, Estate, and Park: Lawn Culture Comes to the Corporation Louise A. Mozingo Edward Ruscha « Center for Land Use interpretation (CLUD Stefanie Nagorka Julia Christensen The Afterlife of Big Boxes: A Conversation with Julia Christensen Andrew Blauvelt ‘The Terrazzo Jungle: Fifty years ago, the mall was born. America would never be the same. Walcolm Gladwell Interboro Paho Mann Brian Ulrich Lateral Architecture Benjamin Edwards Jessica Smith Cathenne Opie Andrew Bush Matthew Moore Learning from sprawt Robert Bruegmann cove eee Aexicon of Suburban Neologisms Rachel Hooper anc Jayme Yen 8 3 INABA/C-Lab Kim Beck ‘Adam Cuilanovic Lee Stoetzal ‘Angela Strassheim Artist Biographies Exhibition Checklist Index Lenders to the Exhibition Reproduction Credits a9838 88888Learning from Levittown A Conversation with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Beatriz Colomina, October 9, 2007 Robert Venturi and Denise Scot! Brown are founding principals of Ventari, Scot Brown and Associates (V8B4), an award-winning architecture and planning firm. Robert Venturi is the author of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), which received the ALA’ Classic Book Award. Scot Brown, Venturi, and Steven Izenour are the authors ofthe seminal book Learning from Las Vegas (1972/1977). In 2007, Venturi and Scott Brown were honored with the National Design Mind Award, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, Beatria Colomina is professor of architecture and founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her latest book is Domesticity at War (2007). “We shall be more interested in what people make of their housing than in what architects intended them to I. We shall be more interested inthe iconography of ‘Mon (split-level, Cape Cod, Rancher) Repos’ the iconography (or structure) of the Dymaxion house or Fallingwater. We shall be more interested in the marketing of industrialised house components than in their design. This is not a course in Housing, but an ‘camisatin of the field from an action-oriented and architectural point of view, designed to make subse- ‘ent, deeper study of housing nore meaningful, We shall not be ivolvd in dvi or community action to do in this studio, but in learning what is needed to make our professional contribution to this action i.” —Denise Scott Brown, “Remedial Housing for Architects,” studio brief, 1970 Beatriz Colomina: Following your “Learning from Las Vegas” studio at Yale, which resulted inthe famous book Learning from Las Vegas, you conducted a less well-known studio called “Remedial Housing for Architects or Learning from Levittown.” Could you. tell us about your impetus to study American suburbia and Levittown at that moment in 19702 Denise Scott Brown: The idea of looking at suburbia derived from many strains of thought, buta great number came from the social sciences I studied during my city planning edu- cation at Penn. Some planning faculty showed unremitting scom for architects, primar- ily for the scorn they in turn showed for the everyday environment and the architecture of suburbia, It so happened that the urban sociologist-planner, Herbert Gans, moved 9Ta cova PrTTERobert Venturi: Learning from Levittown to Levittown asa participant-observer in that new community during the course I took with him when I first got to Penn in 1958. We visited him there. In planning school we saw all around us evidence of harm that architects had brought about in urban renewal, dreadful stories of what happened to low-income people asa result of housing that was built to look like the social housing of Europe but in fact housed the rich, We were sur- rounded by that critique as Penn social-scientist planners admonished us that we should bemore open-minded if we wanted to be city planners who did not do harm. T came out of the New Brutalism in England and the social upheaval of the 1950s there, where the same questions were asked by architects and others. They said, “We've made mistakes in moving bombed-out people from the East End of London into the new towns, and destroying their social fabric.” But my AViican experience had already harshly underlined cultural differences, particularly between popular, folk, and domi- nant cultures. So the African and English stories were in my mind very strongly when I got to America. Here I eamed the issues more broadly, particularly from Gans, him- self a German refugee who had lived in England before coming to America. A fumous English postwar study of social and kinship pattern in the London East End wason his reading list, and he had written a book on the effects of urban renewal in the West End of Boston. Then, from the East End and West End he moved, literally and conceptually, to Levittown and later to developing his ideas on popular and high culture. 1y about this ideal form of social housing. The European continen- talidea of housing as high-rise buildings in a park, the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier, was imposed in American cities where, as Jane Jacobs indicated, it had lttleto do with Americans’ notions of community. Even I, when T was young and working for Oskar Stonorov, was in on the design of a high-rise public housing project, which forty-five years later was destroyed because it was not appreciated. In America, the idea was to ina suburb; and there was no proletarian class; even the poor hoped to come up in the world and live in the ideal suburb, So this imposition of the European socialist idea on the American working class or lower-income people—this whole thing was full of ironies, and that’s what made us say, “Let's look at what people want to live in.” And there were other reasons. There were many nonarchitects in planning school in the 1960s because there was so much federal money available for urban renewal. So our faculty and our student body contained both architects and nonarchiteets, and there was frequently warfare between them, The architects were horrified to hear some professors say, “You should go look at the automobile cities of the Southwest. You can’t afford to ignore them. They are a trend that’s logical in terms of the technology of movement today, and you need to be open tothese things and understand them.” So when I moved from teaching at Penn to teaching at the University of California, it was partly for that reason. But there was the influence of Popartsts as well, who were also finding inspira- tion in popular culture. We were fascinated and inspired by them. We forget now how much suburbia was despised at the time by the idealists. A bus- Joad of students came up from Columbia to attend the jury at the end of the Learning from Levittown studio, to boo, boo, boo. Robert Stern, now dean of Yale's School of Architecture, was there at the time, and Vincent Scully was on the faculty, They had been very friendly and agreeable to us before this, but they were against Las Vegas and Levittown. What we were doing was extremely unpopular. SLBeatriz olomina DSB: RV: 2 The notion of permissiveness was important in planning then. Planners were taught be open to different stimuli; not to say, “This one’s wrong, that one’s right,” but to reserve judgment at first, to make subsequent judgments more sensitive. In the 1960s I wrote an article, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” in which | the photographs of Ed Ruscha as my example of how urbanism and the Pop Art move ment could be linked. I think I was one of the first people to publicize Eid Ruscha, am he was grateful. When we stopped in Los Angeles with the students on our trip tLe Vegas, he gave us a party inhis studio. There is the irony also that classic European modernists in the early twentieth et tury acknowledged the significance of American industrial vernacular architect and essentially based the architectural vocabulary of modemism on American fact systems, But they wouldn’t consider the next American generation's commercial residential vernacular. In that sense, it can be said that you were a modernist, to0, in claiming that it was necessary t0 look at the vernacular next door, at the suburban houses of Levittown, f ‘example, or the commercial street. But why Levittown? Were you interested because: ‘was unique or because it was generic? Because, like the Strip, it was an archetype. You couldn’t say the Las Vegas Strip generic, but it was the most extreme example, There are many merchant builder in America, and most do fewer than a hundred housesa year. After World War, ately priced housing was built in Philadelphia by private-sector developers, butt cess and rationalizing the timing and procedures of development as much as plan the house itself: Rather than thinking of high-tech housing, he thought of procedu To improve his distribution systems, he acquired many of the elements ofa co tion industry. And he did introduce technological innovations in the house but witot ‘making t“modem—things still looked colonial or whatever, but they were constucted more cheaply. Levitt listened very carefully to what people wanted, He would bang around the model homes to overhear visitors’ remarks— that was his market sl sis—then he worked by trial and error. He'd build six houses and see how they went sales were good, he'd try more. His thought was in advance of other merchant bullet and took directions that seemed to us to be correct. Levittown was based on the automobile culture. Levittowners could afford cars anid depend on buses, trains, and trolleys. Another condition we enjoyed investigating #8 how people decorated their houses on the outside. Soon after they moved in, 201 variation and individual expression appeared on the house fronts and in the yards 1) This was a continuation of our interest in the symbolism of Las Vegas. Anott route to Levittown took us from the commercial areas we'd been studying into th residential subdivisions nearby. A further influence was Sybil Moholy-Negy *™ recommended that architecture students investigate merchant builders" housing. also did content analysis, looking at “literatures” [Rex 2-4]. A literature could be? Disney Daisy Duck cartoon, or TV ads and sitcoms, or articles in Popular Mecha magazine and home builders’ journals, We analyzed all these for their housins °°Alecia Aluminnm a modest su Sioa 10 bri ightenearis Close retaion of housing differed from thes cen ie iden bNB TTT jour, Theaimwas'0 Re BNE Suden py forexample the oe yedidn't look only at Levittown. We considered ape A Gen on bousink: ANT g public housing ves ot housins eNE gest he first impulse of he tt yg BC Yes, ve nT cusing For Architects,” and that Leaning fom Levins ty called "Remedi studi bref at 07 from Levittown yar ty i ele What éyoumem yeni Deni sanding ois tere 8 nahi that Fae gy ats ra taste ie intent Kea tig Rendle enone Wally ren subject mater coursesin lane gure sohool—howsig economies and sociology, ore conn requiedreconsideration stead of inking ofp ee yen our ideas of function f yeni ve nected refine it frou ileret ee. anton nd sync demands among those to be understood, economic, and 8 seorgenoy symbolism smestimpotan Tha what ve HE See fy Theor niet ha bee express) how st by the modems aha i edo te lin te symbolicndstal vocabulary the empye hi ak of Leaning from Leviownas he diet follow-up o Lay bine ep seri fr sting ie bl ine peng ee symbols the American suburban howe? pps ‘Rone wedmre than symbol, The sressonsmblsmaoy ea say teksts They a SUC pas a sybase” AMM ATS We ar yea exer ere in symbolisn bat when we introduced our ideas on cone ‘potion and popular clue, Bob and Ibeeame unpopular wth ache samt avote ie oureassesomet of smal, but wt ies Pa urer Srithcon called “active sccioplastcs.” I had to do with understadg Thoway peop: realy live, prtcaary wih th lifeon the stets of Lenox seep had tried Working with sociologists to translate these ieas into digg tevaow social housing, but he had given up. He felt the sociologists would hve extend their field before he: -could work with them. I began to feel that he was vroog a cs for muy reasons were the ones who ha finda way toa ‘social information into physical terms. So that’s what we've done as designers fof ways of giving physical form tothe social, economic, functional, andsybit pater of our lens progam. av; Rovireconitere the dea of elctoie technology. It is important shove that we are no longer [living] in te age of industrial technology. HC: Tresudi looked Levitown housesand the changes that owner had mud oon Futnoot frm the ide ta that sense it ean be sid that you Were teig ost 4s media, as billboards, ina kind of echo of Las Vegas. ‘The modernists were saying we design from the inside out. We said you desig f= the ouside nas well athe inne ont Both Learning from Las Vegas and Learning from Levittown were studios ante tt of oth studios had the same structure. In which way was the teaching etnias rg hat sei inter RY:DSB: RY: DSB: RY: DSB: DSB: BC: Learning from Levittown entin Learning from Levittown? Did you leam something from the Learning from Las ‘Vegas studio that you then applied to Levittown? Those two studios were part ofa series of, think, eleven that I’ve given overmy career, about half of them in urban design and planning. ‘Together we gave a studio at Rice and three at Yale, Their structure came from Harvard, via my Penn studio critic and advisor, David Crane I'd not seen studios like his before, because in architecture studios people worked individually, often competitively, and there was neither an organized research phase nor a discussion of getting from research to design. These end the research-design relationships we set up came from years of experience in planning school, where the poor architects were often lambasted by faculty who said, “You did a ritual dance called research, then you closed that book and went on toyour favorite activity, design, taking no note whatsoever of the research.” So we were always asking ourselves how to make the one flow into the other. When planning the Yale studios, I told myself**Theseare not planning students; I can't try for the overall comprehensive integration of everything, that [attempted with planning students.” But still wantedto give theman understand- ing of the breadth of everything, so I introduced lecturers for some subjects, while the students worked themselves on others. We tried hard to tune the subject matter to their interests. Both studios had to be very controversial, because in the 1960s if you weren’t “agin’ the government” in some way, forget it. And if your aim was to get students to read, you had better find something they really needed to read in order to do theirdesign work or they wouldn't read it. So I tried to design problems that would fascinate them, and at the same time make them need information and learn how to go get it. All my studios had that aim, but the “Learning from” and those that followed were looser and freer than the earlier ones. The heads of the schools weren’t very happy about what we did. Even Charles Moore ‘was unhappy, although you think of him 2s connecting with the everyday environment, What did he say once at some conference? “I did not learn anything from Las Vegas.” On the other hand, Yale let us absorb all the students’ credits for the semester into the studio. This meant that the reading and research had to give them the equivalent of about four courses. A semester seems like a very short time for such complex research, Did you ever con- sider repeating the subject, doing Learning from Levittown again, for example? That would be boring, The fin is that you're entering a new subject, anew adventure, with fifteen eager collaborators. But Id love to see further research, notrepetition, done ‘on this subject, and am very happy you are doing it. ‘Wewere thinking of writing a book called Learning from Levittown, but our architectural partner John Rauch said, “Let’s not do it” He had a point. We had spent so much time writing Learning from Las Vegas that it interfered with our work as architects, It was important to us that we were architects as well as writers, thinkers, and academics, I think itwasin 1972 that gave up teaching. I decided | couldn't doboth. In the old days you could, but now things have become so complex that if you do both, you don’t do a 00d job of either, and it becomes superficial. A lot of people still do both, but I didn’t think I could. 1972? So after the studio from Levittown, you never taught again? 55Beatriz Colomina RY: DSB: DSB: DSB: BC: RV: DSB: % Thave not taught since then. I’ve lectured a lot. Another thing: those two studios were almost all research. Dean Holmes Perkins cized meat Penn for stressing research in studio, He said, “You can’t take: thesestud, away from thei first love—design.” So, in the Las Vegas studio, when they got ay from Las Vegas, I said, “We're going to doa design.” The theory was, and I agree yig the theory, that you do a design as part of the research, Design is seen as a pantgy,, way of bringing information together that can tell you what other information is need So design is a heuristic for research, not only the other way around. Therefor, |g, them a four-day sketch design. They called it “That busywork Deniseis givingus."fy, architecture students to call a design “busywork” was very funny. The Levittown sn, ended with some fun, free-floating designs. They did marvelous jobs on those but, spent only three weeks. Only three weeks for design’ Denise, you come fiom planning, and planning stud, 2s you said, are always about collaborative research on the city. How about you, Bj) You come into this from the world of architecture, which is all about objects. Was the a connection between research and design studios in your background? For exampl, when you went to Rome, you did a lot of research In Rome did research in a sense by looking, traveling, absorbing. I summed up ay experience in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. [found that [had o wt, Iconsider myself essentially an architect, but as a young architect, I couldn't get ny ideas down through building because I didn’t have the opportunity. I did not have ig connections to get good projects, and what I did build was not that likeable; not may people wanted it, So in order to accommodate myself and not feel too frustrated, described my ideas in writing Bob had ways of doing research that I think came from his historical studies, andip some extent from Labatut, his teacher at Princeton. He used a comparative meth He’d say, “Let’s look at the architecture of vast space everywhere, at Versailles, on the expressway, and on the Strip.” Or, “Let’s look at pleasure architecture. What i its innate characteristics? What makes a pleasure environment, in the Middle Eastin Europe, and in Las Vegas?” That kind of analysis was a huge addition to our stuio research topics. Itis importantto mention how grateful I am to have been a student at Princeton in the mid- 1940s, Atthattime, the great schools of MIT and Harvard did not look at history. Forthen, history started with the modemist movement and would evolve from there. Princeton ws the one place where you could be a modernist who looked at history. That was fortunte for me, because | always loved history and historical architecture and felt inspired byt. For me, connecting with the historical past enriched what we were doing now I think one of the most interesting things about your practice is the way in which yu have reinforced the idea that the designer is a researcher and a communicator. In fa, much of your research is about architecture as a form of communication. What woud you say about the suburbs and communication today? You mean latter-day suburbs since our study? ‘Yes. We haven't kept up. We are repelled by MeMansions—we're utter snobs about that. We're saddened by the latter-day Las Vegas, by its Disneyfication.BC: RV: DSB: RV: BC: DSB: BC: Learning from Levittown But it’s interesting that you went back to Las Vegas and did a subsequent study that analyzed Las Vegas in that sense, demonstrating how it had changed so much from the 1970s, and how it was no longer about symbols but about scenography. Did you ever consider going back to Levittown and thinking about how ithas changed in the last few decades? Inwould be very fascinating to do that, because suburbia is really changing enormously. Thave watched some outskirts of Philadelphia develop as a mish-mash between hous- ing and office parks, with perhaps a little New Urbanism seeping in atthe seaming of the two, But | haven’t been able to follow it systematically. We're too old. We'll be the critics, but someone else needs to do it. We're fascinated by a parallel direction, the taking over of industrial loft buildings and making them residential. We're sympathetic to that, and intrigued by it. love industrial lofis. fe! they, along with industrialized symbolic signage, are great building types of the twentieth century. ‘And then there’s edgecity—the vastly dense sprawl you get in Dade County and around Washington, D.C., and maybe Boston—I think it’san order we haven’t understood yet. I don’t know whether the studies of itare well based or what its future pattems will be, and Ihaven’tseen a studio take it on, It would be a very big task. We have not kept up with the idea ofthe suburb and how it deals with community and how it connects with the commercial. And we don’t have any specific ideas. We do think a lot of New Urbanism tends to be sentimental picturesque, How well it works, 'm not sure, Do you consider Leaming from Levittown an unfinished project? Or did you getto test these ideas in your practice? Do you regret never completing the book? What was the relationship between the Leaming from Levittown studio and the office at the time? Iesashame we couldn't writethe book. Other people have threatened to do it. Working today, they’d need to see our study as history and take the research further in different directions. A young architect, Steven Song, is writing an essay called, “Renovating the Decorated Shed.” The theme is that much has changed in the world of electronics and today, if you can use an iPod or make private cell-phone calls in a public place, then architects must once again reconsider and redefine subjects such as flexibility and the differences between public and private, updating what we did in the 1960s and 1970s, These conditions aren’t exactly new, there was always private life in public places (and vice versa) but certainly electronics are affecting the architectural conditions we described, and it's very good to see the discussion take that direction 'm fascinated that your studios are not only based on research but that they can turn into books. Did you already have this idea while you were doing the Learning from Las Vegas studio or did it happen afterwards, perhaps when you were doing Learning from Levittown? While teaching, I felt [was involved in professional rather than academic education, and I scomed the maxim “publish or perish.” To digress a moment: I practice architecture and planning and teach architects, urban designers, and city planners, but some people forget that I’m an architect. 1 was angry the other day when someone said, “She's a sociologist.” I'm not, luse sociological material for architectural purposes, That's what professional practice requires. So my teaching includes helping students use academic information for design purposes. At Penn I gave a course on theory of architecture, city 37RY: DSB: BC: JFmy job was t0 teach a seminary, mbers relevant £0 Students’ probjen “Ry II design research topies in bujtgj’ he in, 1s books such as The Minor Arey te in . So tndse ane culty ME this, gave sm fo do studio. fed as source aegis of questions thal would guid then ance. For each WUGY ‘ow housing project | asked, “ ing’ af Hence, For eo thet desis Fort have the reality? And iui ou, of privacy © ‘house plan?” They also were supposed to do ce wi ht questions, they wouldn’t do the na _ ty ties in the “Learning from” sia seminar bel ‘with designing Ths stetoned (0010 TE y Mops at Penn was the result of @specifig taken a theory course, I've ney a ree Taaked him. “Holmes, were there ayy rid at that time?” “No,” he said. “Yours wasn courses elsewhere MIEN aquse he was & Harvard Bauhaus guy. But! ting first one.” That's Very ON, «pony one around atthe time WHO Wasaga ke asked me becatt what sad some knowledge of history, which derive, a architect anda studio ckground and my particular interest. I sim unig making book out oF te research of astudio—was thee ay Butthe | My precedent for this? dig “['ve nevel . me by Hol ins. Heplied, e 4 Py 3 fi course in arc! ite : ofa theory rein the academic ¥ “ 1s 9 promote and publish their ideas on Some ah tt a search, By 1968 we had already aoa an ee eo oeted wo run a studio on Las Vegas when | was teaching sUctaand vas planning it as my next PFO}. butinseal tee teaching at Yak with Bob, Then thought, “Why notdo it at ‘Yale? Once we had done it, and because. we had two articles and all oUF write and mapped studio material, it scemed a very vsod idea to compile it into @ book: see ‘nd of Learning from Las Vegas, there is already a hint of Leaming fron Levittown ina section of the book with atitle | love, “From La Tourette to Levittown? Youtalkabout how modem architects "W hho can embrace vernacular architecture remot, aoa and place reject the current vernacular oF ‘Re merchant builders like Levitows in fhe commercial vernacular of Route 66.” So i is as if you conceive of these twe vernaculars, the public and the private, jintandem, and you cannot separate them, Wer you thinking about the commercial and the domestic vernacular in parallel? ssl we started thinking about the commercial fist, andl we evolved that from Denise’ ee twent to theesidential, othe suburb, and in that move we were ine hat by Gans. At the time I was thinking, “I want 10 look at what hi There really was a problem with the modem There was this irony that modernism said, “Get rid of this horrible Ecole des Beau: ‘Arts background. Throw that out.” But modernism had really become like the Ecole des Beaww-Ars in the sense that ithad a very narow, over ly idealistic vision. The course 1 100k with Gans was in 1958. In 1960 I wrote a term paper for David Crane een builders, and I was totally intrigued by Southern California, ingle-family, hed, rualscale, urban-suburban housing. So 1 had been interested in both past work. Thi enced somew! because I'm going to learn from that.— ee eee Le Reta acoBeatriz Colomina DSB: RV: Jong time. On the other hand, the realization that the big, striking signs of Las Vi. had a parallel in the smaller imagery of Levittown came later. This late part of Learning from Las Vegas where you refer to Levittown could als, seen as an anticipation, a preview of something to come, in the same way tata, very end of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, you wrote that “Main Sy is almostall right,” ina way anticipating Learning from Las Vegas. Is Levittown alnoy all right? Yes, especially when you consider what the Levittown inhabitants do to it, which’sy, individualize it The studio looked at Levittown houses and the changes that people made to the ey, riors. It’s interesting that you also asked students to look at the way in which houses were represented in television commercials, home journals, car advertisements, Noy Yorker cartoons, films, and even soap operas. So the house is a form of media andtty media is full of houses. What is the relationship between the suburbs in the streetsanj the suburbs in the media? ‘That's a great question for research. Thinking on our feet, houses in the media are thee for many purposes, including to sell things. We investigated the media as an alteraie filter—not the architect’s—on the reality of housing. We put our own mesh on realy, and we see what we want to see. People in marketing use their mesh. How do yousel pickles to a housewife? You give her a very beautiful kitchen, and there she is onthe ‘TV screen, holding the pickle jar with the kitchen behind her. Marketers have to wor, ‘out what would be looked upon as a beautiful kitchen by their pickle customer. Inthe studio, we explored the lifestyles around housing of very low-income people as wellas the different lifestyles and markets within middle-income groups, and we documerted the information in illustrated matrices [figs 6-7]. One student read forty-four booksan sociology to make her matrix. She couldn’t find color pictures of very low-income lifestyles, so she used black-and-white ones from news stories and charity brochures, Color infuses her matrix as income rises. We were trying to learn about society andto teach ourselves that our mesh was not the only one, Although we haven’t studied it or thought about it much, we find Main Street and te Strip of the recent past more likeable emotionally and aesthetically than MeMansitns and malls—the manifestations of current suburbia. We don’t go there much. So there is not so much to learn from the current suburbia? Maybe if we were a generation later, we might learn. I think we do have a kindof snobbery. We have noticed an enormous number of titles in your work that start with the word ing”: Learning from Las Vegas and “Learning from Levittown,” of course, but also “Learning from Pop,” “Learning from Brutalism,” “Learning from Hamburger,” “Leaming from Lutyens,” “Learning from Brink,” “Learning from Philadelphia” “Leaming the Right Lessons from the Beaux Arts,” “Learning the Wrong Lessons frat the Beaux Arts,” “Co-op City: Learning to Like It,” even “Learning from Everything” inyour Spanish book, Aprendiendo de todas las cosas. \t’s a lot of learning. Whatis he meaning of the word for you? I think it’s absorbing the culture that you are in, and connecting with it. In the early dasslit BHI = gercon" Ria GE PYLING. ffi ser. space » wacesv FERED ex andy tinpanalyes baud fm he *Lesening from Levitown” soBeatriz Colomina RY: BC: RV: BC: RV: BC: DSB: 2 of modernism, architects said, “The current culture is no good. We are revolutionariey think we are saying, “Evolutionis as significant as revolution.” There are moments, revolution makes sense, and there are moments when evolution is right, And when yp, are indulging evolution, you want to absorb what's there to evolve from and out of Every study we do, whether for an architecture project, a campus plan, or a city, sin, with a “Leaning from” study—you could say adventure. We try to do it very eal the project; to make ourselves super sensitive to vibes as we first encounter the envin, ment we'll be working in and on. And we acknowledge what we think we'll evolve from and revolt against. I’m very interested in this insistence on “leaming,” because again, it emphasizes te idea that your mode of operation as architects is as researchers. We do research because we think the idea of evolving from as well revolting. Against issig. nificant. Revolting, for us, derives fromacknowledging what is evolving. So Werevoleg against the modernist aesthetic of minimalism and purity partly as aresult of appreciatng the evolving quality, the freedom and excitement, of the everyday landscape, So, revolting and learning, the ugly and the ordinary. The research of “Learning fram Levittown” materialized in the exhibition Signs of Life: Symbols in the American Ciy [ex #9]at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 1976, where you put iogeter the signs and symbols of the commercial strip and the home to bring together Learnrg from Las Vegas and “Learning from Levittown.” For the home section, we learned from Ray and Charles Eames, who were unusual fr thatera in that they lived ina modem house, but it was cluttered. Then we loved lookrg at the Victorian aesthetic —especially the cluttered Victorian house. We said, “All thse small objects can be significant, can be beautiful, can enrich your life, your memories, Hey, let’s go back to an aesthetic of anti-minimalism, of clutter if you will, and let’s ook at the everyday.” So we showed photographs of the cluttered facades and intriorsof three houses. In the ranch house, for example, word balloons like those in comic tps refer to the pseudo-Chippendale chair or the modern radio and acknowledge that may associations are connected with these elements. How would you describe the relationship between the research in the studios and tke exhibition? Were the students involved in some way in the exhibition? What was te role of Steve Izenour, who had had such a big part in Learning from Las Vegas? Steve Izenour had been our student at Penn and was our student assistant for Learnng from Las Vegas, but not Levittown, He felt it would be logical to go on to the symbsl- ism of Levittown, but he didn’t work on the studio because by then he was workngin our office. As to the show, Joshua Taylor, director of the National Collection of Fine Arts, approached usto design the Smithsonian Institution’s bicentennial celebratin, Sigs of Life was his title. | think the Smithsonian was getting interested in non-minimalt exhibition design. He knew about us, and the kinds of things we might do—perhap, too, because he had been at Princeton with Bob. The show had three foci: the city, te strip, and the house. We had to build the city exhibit from scratch, For the others, ¥¢ didn’t directly use the work of the students, but ourthemes were basically those wel evolved with them. We commissioned photographs and gathered hundreds of lust tions like those we'd collected in the studio from magazines and other sources. Tha we used them in making big illustrated panels on chosen subjects. Our exhibits wertLearning fom Levittown far from minimalist, but they were disciplined. To present “far too much” information, wwe treated cach panel like anewspaper, with strong headlines, subtitles, and text. Some photographs and models were huge, like the billboard that stretched the length ofa wall, orthat wonderful Styrofoam faucet with the water droplets [ig 10) Steve Izenour had a majorrole in the conception and implementation of the show. And he, more than the Smithsonian, was its organizational arm, He got all the stuff, supervised its produc- tion and erection, and did extra fund-raising. All ofus did the research, designed the layouts, and wrote the texts. Inthe studio brief of “Learning from Levittown” you said tothe students, “Do for hous- ing what [Claes] Oldenburg did for hamburgers.” What did you mean’? What would be the equivalent in architecture? was thinking of Oldenburg’s soft sculpture, particularly his soft hamburger. Ifhe had away of artistically interpreting a hamburger, weas architects should be able to artist cally interpret a suburban house. ‘We loved him and learned from him. But how do you translate that in architecture? Is the Levittown house a hamburger that through some artistic, or inthis case architectural, intervention gets to be seen in a dif ferent light? Our students” response to the problem was to design a huge blowup of a Levittown ‘house, then to divide it into four or five apartments for low-income people. For another problem, I said, “Think of the possibility of integrated residential areas where family incomes range widely but where we might be pretty certain that everyone has suburban values.” How could we insert low-income housing ino this suburbia without threaten- ing people living there? So students tried to design housing that looked like the suburban houses nearby, but was in fact made of smaller houses put together. As architects you were interested in Pop Art, and at the same time, some artists were interested in popular architecture and studying the American vernacular. Ed Ruscha’s photographs of the Strip in Los Angeles were, of course, a very important reference in Learning from Las Vegas. Were youalso aware of Dan Graham's Homes for America’? He photographed the facades of New Jersey tract houses and the additions that owners have made to them. ‘And he takes their theme as an inspiration for his artistry. Dan Graham began Homes for America [g-it)in 1966. It was published in Arts maga- zine in 1967. The parallel with your work is very interesting because Graham was also fascinated, and still is, with the litle transformations that people make to their houses, particularly the decorations Italian Americansadd, such as madonnes on the lawn. There isa clear parallel between his work and yours at that time, but there doesn’t seem to have been any awareness of this coincidence either way. ‘We didn’t know too much bout him then. I suspect he may have heard or read Herb Gans, because Gans talked about how he could recognize an Italian American's house in Levittown from its wrought ironwork. ‘That's interesting, the ethnic symbolism, “Remedial Housing for Architects or Learning from Levittown” was both architecture and planning, but you did the studio in the School of Architecture at Yale at a time ‘of enormous tension between both programs. In fact, historically it coincides with the 65DSB: DSB: BC: DSB: Ww: DSB: Learning from Levittown separation of planning and architecture in many schools. What did it mean to be in the middle of this? What was the context at Yale at that time? Penn was where I was really held in tension, not Yale. At Yale there were some interesting planners, bt they weren't social revolutionaries like Paul Davidoft. In fact, | introduced Paul to Yale. He lectured there fora while, but there was no tension between architecture and planning around us—perhaps because we spent our days in studio and saw few others, But during the semester I began to wonder how these Yalies could deal with this ‘material when they weren’ttaking any planning courses a all. Perhapsit was a later era, orpethaps they were just more generally educated than the young urban designers I dealt with at Berkeley or Penn—had more under theirbelt from undergraduate school. What about the influence of Vincent Scully at Yale? The significance of modem planning vas inthe air via his extremely popular and influential course on modem architecture, but it didn’t really help to orient students in our direction. Yalies who took Scully's course gained a sense of the change of ideas with time and shifting circumstances. So they could be more sophisticated clients than many. Also, Scully was deeply involved with social planning for the Hill Community in New Haven, and he was very aware of himself as someone who had won e scholarship to Yale. You have such warm feelings for Scully, and of course he was and still is so important at Yale. Why do you think he was so negative toward the Levittown studio? Vince’s son, our good friend, was inthe Las Vegas studio, and that blunted his criticism a little, but with the Levittown studio it all came out. His complaints were a mixture of “You have to maintain standards, ths isnot art,”and, unspoken, “Where isthis woman leading this man?” It’s been aback and forth, but he’s been very good to us. Toyou! Sara Stevens (SS, student): Between “Learning from Las Vegas” and “Learning fiom RV: DSB: Levittown,” you taught a studio at Rice [University] and you looked a! the Westheimer commercial strip in Houston as well as at housing—apartment buildings that come up later in a Levittown studio piece. lam wondering if the studio you taught at Rice led you from what you had been doing with the Las Vegas studio toward the Levittown studio? I think it did, yes, because it did connect to the more typical and ordinary landscape as ‘opposed to the sort of hyper-exaggerated landscape of Las Vegas, even the earlier Las. ‘Vegas. So think that was influential and it wasa wonderful studio, but it did iritate a lo of the other people on the faculty. We were controversial. We analyzed the Westheimer strip asa sequence of events. had already looked intensely at|960s suburban group housing in Los Angeles, which was a stage se, where secretar- ies sunned themselves around the young executives t the pool, and the place was called something like the Taj Mahal. Even more so in Houston, they built housing environ- ments forthe newcomers who were flooding the city and who wanted what Colin Rowe called an instant “décor de la vie,” meaning a setting for themselves against which they could form a social life. You could choose among amazingly different backgrounds. ‘When youtaught the studio at Yale in the spring of 1970, the Black Panther trials were going on and there were riots inthe city of New Haven, sothere was a lot of social unrest ‘The fire in the school of architecture happened about the same time as well. Could you speak generally about the immediate context of New Haven at that moment?Beatriz Colomina DSB: RY: DSB: ‘The first studio was taught in the architecture building. The second had to be moygy owing tothe fire. But we were more involved with social unrest and the ocil-plaming movement in Philadelphia than at Yale. At the office, in parallel with the Las Vegas, dio, we were running an advocacy planning project, fighting an expressway on bey of communities on South Street. Given their subject matter, the issues to be tackled ay the mandate to be open to other people’s values, we felt that the thrust of both projec, in Philadelphia and Las Vegas concerned both social justice and aesthetic excitenen, (And we had the joy of flying Alice Lipscomb, matriarch of the South Street lov-incong Hawthorne community and leader of our community, to New Haven to lecture on hs, ing to our Levittown studio. She held them spellbound for five hours.) My mother wasa Socialist, which is unusual for an American at that time. Sol hadtha, in me in the first place as I grew up. In planning school, because I sat cheek by jowl with the social planners, I was theone they attacked. But | loved and respected people like Paul and Linda Davidof, sts was very challenging for me. The rest of the architecture school went along its mery way. Even [Louis] Kahn said, “How can you believe in the sociologists when they believe in 2.5 people?” Yet I believe Lou’s experience of working with social lamers in Philadelphia in the 1940s made his work different from that of his followers. Inany case, that ardent social-physical debate was what I was coming from, and I wasn't going to leave half the argument out. Gina Greene (student): I’m curious about why you were interested in suburban architecure DSB: RV: SB: RV: DSB: at aparticular historical moment when it seemed that urban centers were such an objet of focusin the late 1960s, Was there something specific that made you want to tum avay from focusing on the urban? We didn’t tum away. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s we worked continuously forsmall, generally low-income communities as architects and advocate planners. From 196810 1972, mainly as volunteers, we helped South Street’s inner-city communities first sop the expressway and then make their own plans. In Las Vegas, we were into urbanism very much, of course. Gans’ move from the West End to Levittown was a departure from the traditional urn approach of his mentors, but he felt profound social changes were happening for lage populations in the new lower-middle class suburbs, and he influenced us. However, we continued social and physical planning for little towns and inner-city areas until, under Nixon and Reagan, reduced funding caused urban-planning agencies to become haunted houses. The planners left, and the young architects and young lawyers who remained spent their time on aesthetically based design guidelines. I couldn't get the dataneeded 10 do the responsible planning Davidoff would have called for, and we lost so muzh money making aplan for downtown Memphis that | felt I could no longer do that to cur firm. I may be the last person alive to use Paul’s social-planning methods, but aply them now to campus planning. think you could say that suburbia is urban, It’s low-density urbanism, but it isurba, Our community and campus plans are seldom published. If you use the fine-grained data that goes with low-income and inner-city situations, it doesn’t show up clearly whee architects publish. Since the early 1960s, we’ve been doing the kind of mapping tttLearning from Levittown is now suddenly fashionable in architecture. I believe most architects use it to evolve urban sculptural shapes, but for us it’s a design tool. We try to go from social forces to physical forms via an analysis of the social and physical pattems in maps. Diana Kurkovsky (student): | guess this is a wrap-up question. I was wondering what you learned from the “Learning from Levittown” studio, what were your surprises and disappointments, what did you discover that you didn’t expect to see there, and how did everything you learned influence your attitudes toward housing and your subse- quent work? RV: One sad answer is that we have not had the chance to work on a Levittown-inspired project. Developers don’t come tous for housing. Occasionally we do individual houses, but that’s entirely different. So we have not had a chance to be stimulated into thinking about suburbia further, by dealing with the realities of the subject as designers. DSB: it’s hard to decide what we learned from Levittown, It was easier with Las Vegas. When people first asked, “Just what did you learn?” it puzzled us. | finally grew impatient and said, “What did you learn from the Parthenon?” The next answer I gave was, “See what we do tosee what we leamed.” The next, mainly from Bob, was, “We basically learned about symbolism.” But we also learned how to put active socioplastics on the ground. And there is a piece of the answer I haven’t covered yet. It concerns thinking in the 1960s about complex systems, particularly in the field of regional science. From them, began to learn some basic ways of going from forces to form, and I’ve followed their methods ever since—including in Las Vegas, where we mapped land uses and activity distributions across the city and eventually inside the casino complexes. This showed us that, despite their seemingly huge variety, they all worked by the same system, and that was very meaningfl to us. Now we say we do land-use and transportation planning inside buildings. So a combination of Gans and the systems planners helped us get by Smithson’s problems with active socioplastics and mave from forces to form, RY: Orwe could say we went from complexity and contradiction tocomplexity and perver- sity. [laughs] BC: Thank you very much. RV: Thank you for the lovely questions. Thisinterview is par ofan ongoing research project onthe studio “Remedial Housing for Architects or Learuing from Levittown” rua by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi at Yale University in 1970. The research team, led by Beatriz Colonna, includes students in the PhD program in Architecture and the Media and Modernity ‘program at Princeton University: Pep Aviles, Gina Greene, Urtzi Grau, Joy Knoblauch, Diana Kurkovshy, Daniel Lopez-Petez, Joaquim Moreno, Enrique Ramirez, Rafico T. Ruiz, Molly Wright Steeason, and Sara Stevens.