The Dartmouth Review: Kimball on Venturi and Post-Modernism

Editor's Note: Roger Kimball is the Managing Editor of the New Criterion. Educated at Yale with degrees in Philosophy and Classical Greek, he has written extensively about architecture and its role in modern society. His articles have appeared in Architectural Record and the New Criterion, covering such topics as Post-Modernism (TNC 6/88), Bob Venturi's design for the National Gallery in London (TNC 12/91), and Dartmouth's own Hood Museum (TNC 11/85).This interview originally ran in the April 10th, 1996 issue of The Review. While Berry Library has since been built, much of Mr. Kimball's commentary remains relevant today.

Robert Venturi and Roger Kimball

The Dartmouth Review: While the plans for the expanded library have yet to be released, the College has announced that Bob Venturi will be the library's architect. What is Bob Venturi's role in contemporary architecture?

Roger Kimball: The important thing to understand about Venturi is that he has instantiated post-modernism perhaps more adroitly, more cunningly than almost any other architect. Philip Johnson once said that post-modernism installs the giggle into architecture. I think that was a very sly and accurate observation on Johnsons' part. Venturi has been very adept at providing the architectural landscape, especially the cultural architectural landscape—museums, educational institutions, and so on—with a kind of nostalgic look back to the past that is fake through and through. There is something deeply fraudulent about what Venturi does. In his repudiation of modernism he has embraced a kind of jokiness in architecture that is at odds with the seriousness of the institutions that he is proposing to serve.

RK: If you look at his museums, for example, they're really all about a kind of cultural consumerism, rather than about the housing and safe keeping of works of art.

In his work he has done for educational institutions—Princeton and elsewhere—there is a kind of jokiness in his designs that is deeply at odds with the purposes of those institutions. At a college like Dartmouth, any kind of large-scale expansion should be undertaken with great wariness.

These decisions are really irrevocable; it is very difficult to tear down a building once you put it up. These buildings are going to become part of the identity of the institution. They may not contribute to the identity of the institution in a way in which thoughtful people would think best. They may in fact be at odds with the best of Dartmouth as it were.

Venturi can never resist a joke, and there are some endeavors in which a joke is out of place. The choice of an architect is among the very most important decisions to be made. To entrust something like that to a man who is a kind of Oscar Wilde of contemporary architecture may be a mistake. While I am a great fan of Wilde's writings, I don't know if one would want that kind of campy sensibility defining a college campus.

TDR: Venturi has already designed two buildings here at Dartmouth: The Rockefeller Center and Cummings Hall at the Thayer School of Engineering. I know he has also designed a number of buildings at Princeton. How do you think these specific institutional designs turned out?

RK: It's the usual postmodernist stuff. One of his main ideas is that these are decorated sheds; that's really what he does.

He provides what are essentially modernist buildings with kind of icing on them—postmodernist do-dads. While one may believe that architecture should have a kind of organic honesty to what it is, to its materials and so on, Venturi is in a class of postmodernists whose buildings pretend to be something that they aren't. Like Philip Johnson, like Michael Graves, and so on, he's engaged in a kind of production of staged sets.

Robert Venturi's original plans for Dartmouth's North Campus expansion, which were mercifully scrapped by the College. Venturi envisioned something like a mill complex.

TDR: You wrote two long articles, one on Venturi's Sainsbury Wing for the National Gallery in London and another on his museum in Seattle, Washington. Could you briefly explain how Venturi seemed to approach these two projects?

RK: I called the piece on the Sainsbury Wing "Clipper Classicism." It is said he boasted that he came up with the idea for the building riding over in the late lamented Pan Am clipper class—their version of first class—he kind of coats everything with a sweet glaze of nostalgia, hankering after the past in a way that is not genuinely historical. It has a very high element of fantasy.

TDR: You wrote that Postmodernism treats tradition as a storehouse for stylish tricks. Just as modernism in architecture may be brutally honest, what drives postmodernist architecture to be so dishonest?

RK: Fundamentally, the techniques of pastiche of parody come to the fore. One is no longer interested in building in such a way that there is an effort made to materials honestly, to ornament honestly. The appliqu� of historicising ornament comes forth so that you will have a building that is essentially a modernist shell with curtain walls. Then stuck up on top of it would be a classical pediment. It is just fake through and through. Postmodernism is an architecture of the dear, an architecture of the Hollywood stage set.

RK: Well, he's certainly not the wildest. He's known for his intelligence, his puckishness. He's known for giving a certain kind of cultural client just what the client wants. The German philosopher Schiller once said that there are many matters in which one should give people not what they want but what they need. In my view, there is kind of an element of very high-class intellectual and artistic prostitution about Venturi. In an educational institution this ought to be avoided.

TDR: Could you comment on the current architectural style of the Dartmouth campus?

RK: You have that Wallace Harrison modernist building, the Hopkins Center. There's a lot of Georgian, and pseudo Richardsonian with the brown stone and Romanesque arches. Though by and large, with a few exceptions, it is a fairly traditional New England college campus. If one were going to expand, one should find an architect who could fit into that context.

TDR: In 1962 the College picked Wallace Harrison to design the Hopkins Center. Harrison might be called the Venturi of his day — Harrison designed the modernist Lincoln Center in New York City. As for the Hopkins Center, though, would you call it an architectural success?

RK: No, it is not a success. It could be worse: that was only one building. An expanded library would dominate the campus much more that the Hopkins Center.

TDR: Venturi aside, how should any architect, in your opinion, approach a library design especially within the context of Dartmouth?

RK: Make it as inconspicuous as possible. When you have an established architectural ensemble, you want an architecture that can devote itself to the task at hand and not call attention to itself. Postmodern architecture is egotistical, often largely at odds with the purpose it means to serve.

TDR: A bit of a quandary, then, is how to create a building that is impressive and at the same time suitable and fitting.

RK: Indeed. One of the faults of many architects today is a longing for monumentality that is often inappropriate to the situation.

There is a place for grand architecture. I am not sure a small college campus is one of them.

If the library that is already in situ will continue to be Dartmouth's architectural focus, then you want an addition that blends in and defers to the original.