Maarten Delbeke

Mannerism and meaning in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Introduction ‘This is not an easy book’, opens Vincent Scully’s introduction to Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Nonetheless, the object, as well as the aim, of Complexity and Contradiction seems straightforward enough: a theory of design providing an alternative to ‘orthodox modernism’. Venturi is also quite explicit about his method and his preferences. Still, Scully is right. Complexity and Contradiction amasses a body of historical exempla that becomes more impressive with each perusal of the book, and classes it with virtuosic flair under an array of headings (such as ‘Contradiction Juxtaposed’) that seem at once self-explanatory and oracular. Many authors and artists are referenced, each time adding a new layer to the already dense exposition. As Scully observes, ‘[the] whole [of Complexity and Contradiction] is . . . hard to see, hard to write about . . ..’ This essay is an attempt to read and interpret Complexity and Contradiction and, to a limited extent, Learning from Las Vegas, by examining the rôle of mannerism and baroque in the formation of Venturi’s design theory. Scholarship has frequently drawn attention to the central position of mannerist and baroque architecture in Robert Venturi’s work, and Venturi himself has expressed and examined his own interest in mannerism throughout his career. This reading of Complexity and Contradiction will argue that the notion of mannerism, and its juxtaposition with baroque, is crucial not only to Venturi’s conception of formal complexity, but also of architecture’s cultural meaning. Recalling his stay at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize winner in the years 1954– 55, Venturi said in an interview: ‘[D]uring my last months in Rome, I realized that Mannerist architecture was what really meant most to me, and I reexamined a lot of Italian historical architecture for its Mannerist qualities. This was important when I came to write Complexity and Contradiction in the following years.’ Mannerism operates both as a period term and the appellation of qualities that sixteenth-century architecture shares with buildings from other periods. In fact, Complexity and Contradiction declares the author’s ‘particularity for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo especially.’ The book discusses the work of Baldassare Peruzzi, Michelangelo, Palladio, Vignola and (just once) Giacomo della Porta. Venturi pays little attention to the architects of the early seventeenth century—a point that is not without significance— but he gives Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini equal consideration, and the work of Pietro da Cortona figures as well. Testament to the acuity of Venturi’s Roman observations is the extensive range of late seventeenthand early eighteenthcentury Roman architecture, a production that today still exists in the shadow of the so-called high baroque. If Roman and Italian examples are prominent, seventeenthand eighteenth-century architecture from France, England and Bavaria is 267

Elevated twins and the vicious sublime: Gianlorenzo Bernini and Louis XIV

Bernini, the greatest artist of his age and Louis, the greatest King on earth, are of the same mettle. Tracing Gianlorenzo Berninis relation to Louis XIV in biographies of La Chambre and Domenico and the treatise of Bouhours has revealed a network of intertexts. Bouhours employs La Chambres praise of Berninis royal portraits to criticize the vice of exaggeration. Domenico, lifts La Chambres careful distinction between the artist and the King and treats them as composti of equal mettle. Three different models emerge, each with their own distance between the artist and the monarch, and between art and its elevated subject. In all three accounts Louis XIV retains the same position: he is sublime, a vast compendium of virtues. In Domenico, nudged on by La Chambre, this model of kingship serves to reinvigorate and expand an older notion of artistic genius unbound by rules and guided by higher insight. Keywords:Bouhours; Domenico; Gianlorenzo Bernini; la Chambre; Louis XIV; Vicious Sublime

The inconceivable agenda

While the ‘unthinkable doctorate’ conference aimed at forming the ground for an inquiry that is at once legitimate, necessary and important, its premises, as articulated in the call for papers (see above: Introduction), failed to grasp the conceptual (and institutional, and historical) foundations of what its organisers considered to be ‘the current lack’ by posing this question through a rhetoric of ‘inconceivability’. In a direct response to the conference call, this essay argues that the classical separation of architectural science from architectural practice is all but productive as a starting point for rethinking and broadening the scope of the doctorate as a degree and as an academic process. Surpassing discursive and institutional frameworks upholding and consolidating the seemingly immutable division between architectural practice and the intellectualisation of architecture, we propose to position the doctorate as an investigatory ‘project’ implicating in equal measure both the university and the profession. ‘Thinking’ of ‘scientific work in architecture’ as a genuine architectural enterprise, we consider the doctorate as an institutionally authorised challenge to the disciplinary bases and techniques of architecture itself, that mobilises both theory and practice, however specific or traditional the individual project. The role of the doctorate is thus not simply to test the limits of architectural knowledge, but also the academic tools and media addressing that corpus.