By Bill Kent
|
|
|
Drawing from the roadside vernacular of A-frames and lobster shacks, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates created a home for a summer arts project in Main. The building is typical of the firms's work, which often celebrates the extraordinary in the ordinary. (Photo by Steven Izenour). |
|
Steve Izenour adores pink flamingos, porcelain lawn statues, and the speedy efficiency of roadside hamburger joints. A partner in the Philadelphia-based Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA), one of the world's most controversial architectural firms, Izenour, age 60, eschews flashy clothes. In good weather, a cotton shirt and cargo pants are better to commute by bicycle from his house near the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches, to his firm's Manayunk office, where he works six to seven days a week with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Venturi's wife. Of the firm's controversial body of work, Izenour says, "We're just a bunch of architects who want to design good buildings and teach on the side. If we have a characteristic, it's that we're unpredictable. You never know what we're going to come up with next." But their writings and innovative use of decoration, unexpected cultural references, and graphic displays show there is more to architecture--and art--than the austerely geometric glass-and-steel boxes of the 20th-century modernism. Swarthmore's William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Art History T. Kaori Kitao put it this way: "Though he denies that he is the creator of postmodernism, Robert Venturi is, in fact, that. Modernism emphasized innovation and form. In their writings, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour inquired into the meaning of the form.They looked at architecture as a cultural language. In a sense, their contribution is the revelation that buildings speak to us. We may not hear what buildings say, but, on some level, what is said becomes part of a larger, richer cultural conversation that has been going on since before any of us were born, and continues, whether or not we choose to take part." Though he has been involved in one way or another with a lot of the firm's work, the projects on which Izenour has been the lead designer have been what he calls "the fun stuff," such as the Children's Garden at the New Jersey Aquarium in Camden and the spectacular animated lighting of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, a collaboration with his father, lighting and theater designer George Izenour (who, in the late 1980s, designed Swarthmore's Pearson-Hall Theater). He has also kept one foot riveted in what he calls "the basement of the ivory tower," teaching seminars and architectural studios (postgraduate classes involving research, analysis, and design) at Yale, Drexel, and the University of Pennsylvania on such flamboyantly low-brow subjects as the Las Vegas casino strip; Levittown housing facades; the Atlantic City and Wildwood, N.J., boardwalks; and, most recently, South Jersey suburban sprawl. Studying what is now called "vernacular" architecture is "considered not quite serious in most architecture schools," Izenour says, "but it's tolerated if you don't stick your neck out too far. A few years ago, I had to go to bat for a student who did a master's dissertation on miniature golf courses, but the treatment he got was nothing like the antagonism and resistance I had when I started doing it." In 1963, when Izenour teamed up with architecture professors Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at the University of Pennsylvania, "to look seriously at anything that wasn't Bauhaus or Mies van der Rohe was considered subversive, insulting, highly annoying, and offensive. I just had to see what all the fuss was about."
It started with toys: Legos, construction toys, "things you put together that don't have to be put together correctly to be played with, so if it's dumb or weird, you can either pretend it's really cool or take it apart so nobody will know how dumb it was." As a child growing up in New Haven, Conn., Izenour didn't care that buildings were created by designers called architects, but his father did. George Izenour had worked with numerous architects in designing theatrical lighting systems and acoustic environments and soon began to take his son to visit building sites and architectural studios, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen studios in Wisconsin and Arizona. "Wright had just died, but he might as well have been alive. His ghost walked the halls. For a while, I became a complete Wright aficionado because of the way his buildings seemed to mean something beyond just being shelter." The younger Izenour came to Swarthmore because it was "small, close, and had that great reputation as a school where social conscience is very important. I thought it would be the right place to go to make up my mind about being an architect." He was an indifferent student, at best, spending "entirely too much time exploring the aesthetics of Frisbee" and taking pictures for the student newspaper and yearbook--until he took a course with Hedley Rhys, Swarthmore's architectural historian. "He kind of adopted me, sat me down, and asked, 'What can we do to keep you in school?'" Izenour took every course taught by Rhys. "I couldn't get enough of him. It got to the point that I would look for excuses to sit in on his classes, even after I'd taken them. It was a case of fanatical discipleship. I'd carry his notes, run his slides--anything." While helping Rhys with his slides, Izenour met his future wife, Elisabeth Gemmill '63. Two of their three children, Tessa '90, a painter who is now Swarthmore's graphics and photo curator, and John '95, who runs VSBA's computers, also went to Swarthmore. VSBA also currently employs Lauren Jacobi '98 and has welcomed numerous Swarthmore students as interns over the years. As a student, Izenour also became a fan of courses taught by Bob Walker, professor of art history. "Walker was an amazing architecture groupie, a really sweet guy. He had the only modernist house in Swarthmore, and he had a fabulous knowledge of Philadelphia's architectural history. Bob could show you that Philadelphia wasn't just a museum of different architectural periods and styles, but that the buildings kind of resonated with each other. He made a walk through the city a very dramatic, fun thing to do. During his college days, Izenour sat in on a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania by Architecture Professor Robert Venturi and "just like it was with Rhys, Bob and I sort of clicked. Bob's ideas about architecture just blew me away." They didn't especially please the architecture faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, however. "Bob knew he was controversial, and when the Yale position opened up, he went for it, and I followed him." When Izenour, who was finishing a Yale M.E.D., returned from a Fulbright year in Denmark and Sweden in 1967, Scott Brown persuaded her husband to bring him and other students out to the Nevada desert to study the animated electric signs that were enticing gamblers to Las Vegas. "It was Denise's idea to study stuff that nobody liked, that was considered low or junk culture," Izenour remembers. "She came up with the concept of learning from what you hate or don't understand." Las Vegas was considered to be the absolute nadir of crass materialism and bad taste. But what surprised Izenour was the cleverness of the place, the "way it seemed to wink at you, like this was all some vaguely naughty party and weren't we lucky that we'd been invited." That and the fact that the wild signs were part of a commercial culture that had some similarities to forms of so-called high culture hallowed by academics. The result of their findings, published in 1971 in a slim book called Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbol of Architectural Form, became a manifesto for the postmodern design revolution. In the book, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour compared a casino strip sign with the facade of a French cathedral and showed how both were responding to a specific cultural milieu. Both used decoration to attract the faithful and offer "propaganda." The cathedral's propaganda was salvation, redemption from sin; the casino sign promised the acquisition of riches, glamour, sex, and a chance to see Sinatra. |
|
The book "made a splash" when it was published, Izenour says, "because it was obvious that these big imposing modernist buildings that had become the symbol of urban development weren't doing what they were supposed to do: They weren't turning the downtown, urban core of a city into a place that people wanted to live in. The suburbs had already replaced the cities as the symbol of the good life, and sterile modernist downtowns, with their elitism andexclusivity, appeared to be a good reason to stay out." Izenour is also co-author of the 1979 book White Towers with architect Paul Hirschorn on the evolution of the now-forgotten White Tower hamburger stands. The postmodern solution that Learning From Las Vegas recommended was to design buildings that learned from the existing cityscape, buildings that used familiar cultural cues to communicate more upbeat, inviting, amusing, and otherwise humanistic values.
In the nearly 30 years since Learning From Las Vegas was published, the Venturi firm has grown from a six-person office on Philadelphia's Antiques Row to a 50-employee operation whose buildings have won awards and become the subject of numerous academic studies.Izenour himself has a shelf of design awards, including an American Institute of Architects award for a house on the Long Island Sound that Izenour designed in 1982 for his parents. He admits to being a workaholic who also organizes many of his firm's design competitions and graphic displays and balances what Scott Brown calls "the firm's tendency toward gravitas with an exuberance, wit, and intelligence." Says Tessa Izenour: "As early as I can remember, my father has been working on dozens of different things at once. Though I get much of my artistic sense from my mother, from my father I get this appreciation for the visual, how things look, and why they look the way they do." Adds John, who runs the firm's graphic computers, "my father has an irreverent side that he hides, but it comes out in different ways. He has a playfulness that I can see in the Children's Garden or in the Ben Franklin Bridge lighting. When things get tense, he can come into a situation and say something funny that'll usually solve the problem without anybody thinking the solution came from him." Izenour continues to teach because "I have a lot of respect for the idea of discipleship--that you can bump along aimlessly in life until you meet the right teacher, and, like Hedley Rhys did for me, he's there to give you just what you need to get to the next level and find your own voice. Also, there's a lot of very interesting stuff out there that's worth studying because of what it reveals about ourselves." He tends to avoid studying contemporary architecture because "despite everything that happened with postmodernism when Bob started talking about it, we're still living in a modernist world. Architects are still mostly ignoring the cultural or human context that a building inhabits and going for the guts 'n glory stuff that flatters the client and wins commissions. I run into entirely too many architects who say, 'Uh-huh, we get it: fancy facades, wild colors, weird shapes, decoration that doesn't look like it belongs on a building and maybe an ironic cultural reference thrown in.' They've come up with buildings that look like they're going trick-or-treating on Halloween. Or they go the expressive route and make buildings that go so far away from being functional that they end up looking like oversized abstract lawn sculpture, you know, the stuff people put in their yard that makes you stop and say, 'What's that?' rather than take a good look at that great pink flamingo." That some people stop and say similar things about Izenour's buildings is not necessarily a bad thing, Izenour says, taking refuge in Venturi's famous quote that because no work of art is ever accepted completely in its time, "what matters is only that the right people hate it." "I wouldn't mind it if everybody loved what we did," Izenour says. "But, if you really hate something, you have the potential to learn from it. At worst, you learn why you hate something. At best, you come up with new ways of appreciating things that you used to think were unworthy." Bill Kent saw his first VSBA building as a student at Oberlin College. He is the author of five books and teaches novel writing at the University of Pennsylvania. |
ALUMNI DIGEST / BACK PAGES/ BOOKS BY ALUMNI / COLLECTION / EDITOR'S NOTE / FEATURES / IN MY LIFE/ LETTERS / PROFILES / ARCHIVE / TALK BACK
Swarthmore College. Copyright 2000
