From Bauhaus to Outhouse

By James Panero | Wednesday, November 19, 1997

Dartmouth College should not have chosen the architectural firm Venturi Scott-Brown to design a project like the Berry Library. Certainly the design team of Robert Venturi and his wife, Denise Scott-Brown, has gained notoriety over the past few decades, but it's been for the wrong reasons. Venturi Scott-Brown specializes in post-modernism, a style of architecture that, simply put, takes the ornaments of past styles (neo-classical, georgian, modern, etc.) and mixes them together. At its best, the result is unimpressive but benign. (notice the Venturi designed Thayer Engineering School addition, a shed-like structure across from the River dormitories.) At its worst, the result is downright ugly, and, I'm afraid, the Venturi designed Berry library is an example of this.

One might ask how a professionally-trained design team could produce something so unattractive. The answer is in post-modernism's driving ideology: the ideology of irony. While modern architecture was a optimistic look to the future, post-modernism looks mockingly and pessimistically to the past. It's ornamentalism of older architectural styles is done in parody, not flattery.

Irony is the central tenant of post-modernism. It is not coincidental that the Berry design looks like a Manchester, NH factory. The architects at Venturi intend to equate a college library with a sweat-shop. They will not admit this, since the idea seems abhorrent to us. But they do it anyway, because a firm like Venturi only partially designs for a client. 'We don't do imitations,' a Venturi spokesman said recently. Rather, Venturi designs for the history books, and moreover for its own notoriety within the architectural circles of New York and Philadelphia. Unfortunately the College is a $55 million guinea pig in this equation. And we lose out doubly with Venturi, because not only is their design work unattractive, but their very style of post-modernism is on the wane.

Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic of the New York Times, had this to say about Venturi (from the New York Times Magazine, 7/7/97,):

'Post-modernism, 'with its sad air of the parade's gone by,' in Arlene Croce's choice phrase, started out as a constructive movement. In the mid-1960's, a few architects set out to educate themselves about the history of an art form that a Bauhaus-influenced education had plowed under. Gifted architects like Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi and Charles Moore used these ideas to free themselves from the strangulating orthodoxies of the modern movement. This period lasted for 10 years. By the mid-1980's, the movement had deteriorated into a career strategy for reactionaries, opportunists and their deeply uncultivated promoters... Even without the help of the Disney company, architecture plummeted into the realm of the packaged tour.'

Before the Berry library design was even disclosed, Roger Kimball of The New Criterion noted that Robert Venturi's specialty is 'the decorated shed.' Venturi has done it again with Berry. The design is a football-field length shed, deliberately uninspiring and uninviting.

The Dartmouth faculty rightfully opposed this design in recent weeks, while the Venturi team has demonstrated only contempt and arrogance to criticism. Venturi's performance at Wednesday's open forum was no exception. The question is now how to proceed. For one, the groundbreaking deadline of next spring should be extended. Second, the firm Venturi Scott-Brown should be removed from the project — their architects have proved only hostile to criticism.

As for an appropriate Berry design, the premise is simple: Berry should defer to Baker. The new library could either imitate Baker's neo-georgian style, without overshadowing the original library, or, better still, it could depart from neo-georgianism all together — in effect respecting Baker by leaving it alone. (The Fairchild building is a decent example of the latter approach. Its design managed to connect Steele and Wilder without duplicating them).

In the past year, a number of new projects have gone up around the world that demonstrate a bold new direction in architecture away from post-modernism. Two immediately come to mind: Frank Gehry's design for the new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the new J. Paul Getty museum in west Los Angeles. In Bilbao, Gehry has designed a museum that looks more like a sculpture—a titanium-skinned whorl that spins out into the Basque countryside. The Getty museum is more conventional, a design that takes the smooth lines of modernism and /mixes in glass and unexpected verandas over its white-tiled surface. The museum is thus brought down to a human scale, avoiding the often overpowering monumentality of modernism. Granted, neither design would translate immediately to Dartmouth (imagine plowing snow off a titanium whorl) but they show we do have possibilities. Berry can be more than just a shed.

From Bauhaus to Outhouse

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