The difficult whole

Kersten Geers, Jelena Pančevac, Andrea Zanderigo (eds), The Difficult Whole: A Reference Book on Robert Venturi, John Rauch and Denise Scott Brown, Park Books, 2016, 216 pages

  During the year that has recently drawn to a close, a number of initiatives took place to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of two seminal books, The Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi, and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi, both published in 1966. The anniversary coincided with some interesting examples of historic analysis, as well as editorial, carried out as part of a broader reevaluation of these works within a contemporary context. Prominent among these were the initiatives taken by Belgian architect Kersten Geers, who with Victoria Easton and Guido Tesio, examined Rossi’s work in an exhibition shown at the Swiss Institute in Milan last autumn, while translating into book form – The Difficult Whole, Park Books, 2016 – a reevaluation of the rise of Venturi, conducted together with Jelena Pančevac and Andrea Zanderigo. This reevaluation has taken place in various forms: a written one, with various contributions from the editors, and a visual one, presenting a selection of projects from between 1959 and 1989 taken from the archive of the Venturi studio. This latter section is further enriched by new iconographic material, 16 colour perspectives drawn by students and a new photographic description of three buildings, by Bas Princen.

  The book is the fruit of a careful construction, based on an assembly of parts, with new perspectives placed on the fringes of the book. The image of the publication, with Joris Kritis responsible for the graphic design and the photographs of Bas Princen already mentioned, and drawings with which the students reinterpret the designs of the Venturi practice, re-propose a visual language peculiar to the group FORM Laboratory for Architecture as Form, EPFL / ENAC, already used in Architecture without content (Bedford Press, 2015) highlighting a notional continuity between the two texts.

The enigmatic title The Difficult Whole refers to Chapter 10 of Venturi’s book, “The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole”: a Whole that can be taken back, via Gestalt, according to Venturi himself, to the architectural Form. This is the key to reading the entire book, through which Geers, Pančevac and Zanderigo extract from the theoretical framework of the American architect 19 “Observations” and make a selection of projects, translated into buildings or otherwise, each of which is representative of exquisitely compositional themes. The architecture of Venturi (and Rauch and Scott Brown) is assumed “as a model for a universal architecture that seeks a cultural context without really having one”: form and composition are the only instruments for giving new vigour to the potential of “complexity and contradictions in art and experience”, therefore the government of the process of formalisation is the only opportunity for design that is more fragmented than ever today. Hence the almost manual-like usefulness of The Difficult Whole: a repertoire of solutions for architectural design intended as a “radical strategy of survival in a world without established physical or cultural contexts.”

  For this operation the editors concentrate on the first (but not the very first) Venturi, expanding the selection of projects with respect to that included in the edition of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (that obviously stopped in 1966), with a temporal break (1989) that roughly coincides with the emergence from the studio of J. K. Rauch, and excludes the rich successive production. They underline with emphasis the preoccupation of eliminating the interpretative encrustations from Complexity, disconnecting the work from subsequent interpretations and affirmations, even by Venturi himself (who in 1977 on the occasion of the second edition, had distanced himself from the text): admitting in this way to reinventing an architect.

An interpretation that could open up many discussions. Robert Venturi concluded the chapter “A gentle manifesto” stressing that “an architecture based on complexity and contradiction requires a special commitment to the whole: its real value has to be in its entirety, or in its implications of entirety”, and this should also go for the whole of the architect’s development of design, theory and construction.

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