Taking on Mies: Mimicry and Parody of Modernism in the Architecture of Alison and Peter Smithson and...

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Taking on Mies: Mimicry and Parody of Modernism in the Architecture of Alison and Peter Smithson and Venturi /Scott Brown

Martino Stierli

Any attempt to discuss the common ground in the architectural thinking of Alison and Peter Smithson on the one hand and Robert Venturi and Denise

Scott Brown on the other starts with 1950s London. It was there and then that the impact of an imminent postwar consumer society on architecture and the arts was discussed by cultural practitioners for the first time. It was also in London that the paths of these protagonists in postwar architectural history crossed.

After having enrolled in the liberal-arts and architecture programs at the Uni-versity of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1948, Denise Scott Brown came to London in 1952 to join the Architectural Association School of Architecture, where she received her diploma in 1954.1 In this habitat Scott Brown encountered a lively cultural and artistic scene, one of whose focal points was the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Between 1952 and 1955 the ICA, as it was com-monly known, was host to regular gatherings of the so-called Independent Group (IG), an informally organized gang of young artists, architects, authors, and critics, who continued their exchange and friendship informally after the dissolution of the more or less formal sessions in 1955.2 The IG’s main aim was to question the established understanding of postwar British modernist culture by introducing aspects of mass culture and a neo-Dadaist “as found” attitude into the debate. The architects Alison and Peter Smithson regularly attended the IG’s sessions and actively participated in its activities.

Scott Brown was not involved in the activities of the IG and she knew neither its name nor who attended the gatherings.3 However, together with other archi-tectural students at the AA she followed the activities of individual IG members from a distance and saw some of the exhibitions staged by the IG and its members in the early and middle 1950s.4 Scott Brown has retrospectively described herself as having been “around, but not in, London’s avant-garde movement” at the time. By her own account, she was familiar with the work of the IG members Alison and Peter Smithson, architects; Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson, artists; and the critic Reyner Banham, and she had seen the Parallel of Life and Art show

NeoAvantGarde_3P.indd 150-151 7/22/10 1:15:42 PM

In: Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman (eds.), Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, Studies in British Art 21 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

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worked as Kahn’s assistant both at the University of Pennsylvania and in his archi-tectural office.12

What excited Scott Brown in particular about the Smithsons’ concepts were their interest in social questions and their attempt to derive beauty from everyday reality, something she later called “active socioplastics.”13 This entanglement of social and aesthetic concerns has become a hallmark of Venturi and Scott Brown’s architectural thinking and informs their seminal study Learning from Las Vegas, which was conducted as a research and design studio at Yale University in the fall of 1968 and published under the same title in 1972.14

Although the two architectural couples shared many tastes and influences, they did not see eye to eye in all respects, and their disagreements are as informa-tive as their sympathies. Though they agreed on the precepts of modernism they differed substantially on its legacy and on the nature and aims of contemporary architecture. The Smithsons never wrote about Venturi and Scott Brown’s later work and seem to have judged it rather skeptically.15 The two pairs did engage in a rare professional exchange in the pages of the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1969, controversially debating the legacy of Sir Edwin Lutyens,

that the Smithsons had organized in collaboration with the IG members Hender-son, Paolozzi, Ronald Jenkins, Toni del Renzio, Banham, and others at the ICA in September 1953.

In any case, Scott Brown shared a number of aesthetic interests with the IG. During her time in London—and earlier, too—she photographed the everyday cityscape and life in the streets around her in much the same spirit of the as found expressed by some IG members (fig. 33).5 The IG was, at this time, preoccupied with the imagery of American mass culture, as evident, for example, in Paolozzi’s collages; indeed, the group is considered a precursor to the Pop art movement both in Britain and the United States. However, the as found attitude espoused by the IG was generally based on a Dadaist affinity for the crudeness of everyday materi-als, while Pop art tended to refine and ironically glorify popular imagery and to draw from mediated images rather than directly from harsh bites of reality. Nev-ertheless, both currents shared a fascination with the aesthetic of the readymade, which both the IG and, later, the team of Venturi and Scott Brown drew upon. American Pop art became a chief point of reference for Venturi and Scott Brown’s “pop architecture” of the 1960s;6 more, Pop art’s working method of adopting and transforming popular imagery and introducing it into a high-cultural context was taken up as an important modus operandi in Venturi and Scott Brown’s design process in a way similar to that of IG artists.7

The personal relationship between the Smithsons and Scott Brown is a par-ticular focus of interest. Though they appear never to have had more than a loose acquaintance, they had several encounters of importance to Scott Brown’s develop-ment. Peter Smithson taught at the AA, but not before 1954 and hence only after Scott Brown had graduated from the school.8 Nevertheless, according to her own account, the influence of both the Smithsons was increasingly felt at the AA from the early 1950s on. Scott Brown recollects having casually met Peter Smithson for the first time at a lecture in 1953. In 1954 the Smithsons informally critiqued her thesis project at the AA for a Welsh mining village, which was informed by the Brutalist ethic of materials.9 Scott Brown’s personal slide archives reveal that she visited the Smithsons’ first executed project, Hunstanton School, upon its completion in 1954—a fact that suggests how much attention was given to this building in London architectural debates of the time. It was Smithson who advised her and her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, in 1955 to study with Louis Kahn—advice they followed by enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958.10 The Smithsons admired Kahn’s urban-planning proposals for Philadelphia of the early 1950s and invited him to the 1959 meeting of the Team 10 group in Otterlo, the Netherlands.11 Kahn also exercised considerable influence on the young Venturi, who had gotten to know him in 1947. Subsequently, in the early 1950s, Venturi

33. Denise Scott Brown, Street scene, London, photograph, probably 1950s.



strongly associated with the Smithsons’ work.18 The Smithsons’ design was greatly indebted to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, whose importance to their debut work they readily acknowledged. More precisely, Hunstanton was indebted to the image of Mies’s architecture, rather than to his built work, for the Smithsons had not had the chance to visit any of the master’s completed projects. Well into the 1950s the postwar years in Britain were marked by an economy of scarcity, which among other things limited the funds available to public employees for foreign travel. Visits to Germany or to the United States, where Mies’s architecture could be studied in situ, were out of reach for young British architects.19 Peter Smithson traveled to the United States for the first time only in 1957 and returned there in 1958. It was on the occasion of one of these visits—some four years after the completion of Hunstanton—that he saw Mies’s Chicago buildings for the first time.20

Instead of personal experience in front of and inside actual buildings, photo-graphs of Mies’s architecture served as points of reference in the design of Hun-stanton School. (Claire Zimmerman explores this in her essay in this book.) Mies’s master plan for the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and the first buildings erected there had been published widely in British and American architectural magazines,21 but according to Peter Smithson’s personal recollection, it was the publication of the small Metals and Minerals Research Building in The Architects’ Journal in January 1946 (see fig. 34) and, in particular, drawings with the construction specifications, that made a lasting impression on Alison and him.22 Furthermore, in 1947 the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated an exhibition to Mies van der Rohe and published a catalogue, which the Smithsons bought in 1949. This book illustrated Mies’s early German work in drawings, plans, photomontages, and black-and-white photographs of both interiors and exteriors, as well as his early Chicago projects. As Peter Smithson recalled in 1966, “Those IIT workshops really were world-shaking. But what we wanted to find out was how to use Mies’ method without mannerism.”23 If Hunstanton, as we shall see, differs considerably from Miesian precedent, then this deviation has to be understood as a productive “misreading,” based on published images of his IIT buildings and their grammar of steel, glass, and brick infill.

Given the unavailability of travel funds for young architects in these postwar years, architecture books and magazines were highly important for professional and intellectual exchange. Britain had notoriously been quite hesitant to adapt the aesthetics of modern architecture from Continental Europe, and, even when mod-ernism became the accepted style after the war, British architecture cultivated a specific flavor: a modified and “humanized” version of the International Style. Whether or not this was a consequence of a particular national character, as Niko-laus Pevsner controversially argued in his Reith Lectures, on the “Englishness of

who had been one of the stars of Venturi’s 1966 manifesto, Complexity and Con-tradiction in Architecture.16 The diverging stands taken by the two teams on this architect reveal their respective views on modernism and its relationship to con-temporary architecture. The Smithsons followed an avant-gardist path by deni-grating premodern, eclectic architecture, whereas Venturi and Scott Brown considered Lutyens’s contribution significant for contemporary architectural prac-tice. In their reply to the two harshly critical essays published by the Smithsons on Lutyens, they attacked the Smithsons’ stance as typical of what they called “heroic modernism,” implicitly elitist and with a dogmatic approach to the canonical account of the history of modern architecture, flaws that rendered it irrelevant for contemporary discourse.17

ARCHITECTURE AND ITS IMAGE

In their respective attempts to define a material, social, and aesthetic base for contemporary architectural practice, both the Smithsons and Venturi and Scott Brown confronted the legacy of modernism. Although they embraced its tenets equally, the historical context in which both teams operated called for specific interpretations and adaptations of it that were responsible for their formal and ideological differences. They split along lines that, roughly speaking, may be labeled “neo-avant-garde” and “postmodern,” respectively (to the extent that such a sharp differentiation is even possible or sensible). For a clear understanding of the continuities as well as the differences between them, it is indispensable to discuss their respective foundations in modernism and the ways in which they deviated from it. For both teams, the example of Mies van der Rohe was a par-ticularly important point of reference, and both oeuvres must be interpreted as a coming to terms with Miesian concepts and aesthetics, as embodied in the works of both the master himself and his immediate followers and imitators.

The Smithsons triumphantly established themselves on the stage of interna-tional architectural debates with their Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (Hunstanton, 1954). Their prestigious success in the competition for this building in 1950 came as a surprise, as both Peter (at the time 26 years old) and Alison (21) had only recently graduated from the architecture program at Durham University and since 1949 had been working for the Schools Division of the London County Council. Hunstanton was widely admired and allowed the couple to establish an independent architectural practice. Later, it was retrospectively recognized by Reyner Banham as an initiating point of the New Brutalism, an attitude that was to dominate British architectural discourse in the following decade, and that was



of Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) left a decisive mark on the Smithsons’ architectural thinking and specifically on their Hunstanton project.30 When the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects published a critical review of Wittkower’s study in 1952, the Smithsons replied with a letter to the editor in his defense, calling the book “the most important work on architecture published in England since the war.”31 This letter was written at the time when the Smithsons were working on Hunstanton School, and suggests the degree to which their architectural thinking was informed by Wittkower’s thesis. If Hunstanton looked to Johnson like a victory of Miesian internationalism, the building also introduced a particularly English aspect into the debate, namely, the revival of the tradition of British Palladianism, albeit in a modernist garb. Indeed, in the rigorous symmetry of the floor plan the Smithsons seem to depart from purely Miesian precedent and adhere—perhaps involuntarily or uncon-sciously—to that tradition.

The Smithsons’ interest in Palladianism must be interpreted in light of a con-temporary architectural debate in Britain about the way the Continental Interna-tional Style was being interpreted there, which took the form of a polemic against what was known as the New Humanism. This denomination was synonymous with “people’s detailing,” the New Empiricism, and William Morris Revival; it signified a “humanized” version of modernism that included familiar architec-tural motifs and materials such as pitched roofs, wood shingles, or brick walls.32 All of these elements were directed at substituting the cold intellectualism attrib-uted to the International Style with a modified, even cozy interpretation of mod-ernism. Given that Nikolaus Pevsner, one of the editors of Architectural Review, had been working on a definition of the national character of English art for some time, it is perhaps not surprising that such trends were first introduced in the pages of this journal.33 In essays such as “The Heritage of Compromise” (1942)34 and in his Reith Lectures, Pevsner argued that English architecture was marked by the “picturesque” principle, characterized by informality, asymmetry, and variety in building materials. All of these made the New Empiricism look like the truly appropriate and genuinely English answer to the challenge of the International Style. However, Pevsner’s thesis was soon attacked by advocates of the classicist English heritage founded on the works of architects like Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones. In a reply to “The Englishness of English Art,” The Listener printed a satirical letter to the editor that congratulated Pevsner for having proven “that the ideal of such architects as Thorpe, Webb, Inigo Jones, Gibbs, Holland, Cham-bers, Adam, etc., are un-English.”35 Hunstanton School was the Smithsons’ built manifesto against attempts to reintroduce the picturesque into contemporary architectural discourse. The catchy epithet “New” Brutalism was swiftly coined to

English Art”(1955),24 has been the subject of much debate. The compromised, anglicized reading of modernism was much critiqued. Robert Maxwell described it as “lacking in precision.”25 While this assessment seems to indicate a normative point of view that judges the original more positively than its variant, Maxwell’s observation is also an invitation to look for the differences between the original and its interpretations, and to examine their significance. If seen this way, the term “imprecision” certainly applies to a situation in which architectural knowledge is passed on primarily by means of such media as photography. The role of images and of their interpretation in such cultural transfers is still not sufficiently under-stood, but perhaps they should be seen as catalysts for genetic mutations that are capable—as in the case of Hunstanton—of changing the course of modern archi-tectural history.

THE POLEMICS OF FORMALISM

Not surprisingly, the international fame of Hunstanton School was based to a considerable extent on a review in Architectural Review, whose author, Philip John-son, emphatically declared himself “an American follower of Mies van der Rohe.”26 Given this background, Johnson interpreted Hunstanton School as a literal trans-lation of Miesian aesthetics, rather than an interpretation based on productive misreadings of the photographic evidence. He thus praised the plan of the building as “not only radical but good Mies van der Rohe, yet the architects have never seen Mies’s work.” He was also impressed by the quality of the steel engineering.27 On the other hand, he recognized the departures from Miesian grammar, two of which are particularly noteworthy as indicators of the Smithsons’ accomplishment. These are 1) the rigid formality of the plan, based on a strongly symmetrical layout; and 2) the structural framing system employed in the building and its consequences for architectural expression.

As far as the formality of the plan is concerned, Johnson is full of admiration for his young British colleagues. Though he diagnoses some problems in fitting the program into architectural form—the asymmetric projection of the chimney, the water tower, and the kitchen from the symmetrical front facade28—he stresses that these disruptions of the formal composition of the building do not seriously compromise the overall impression of a strictly formal layout. The impression of a formal rigidity was confirmed by contemporary observers, such as a reader of Architectural Design who characterized Hunstanton School as “definitely formalis-tic in character”29 (see figs. 54, 55). It was this feature that prompted Johnson to call the building a “radical” solution. It has been noted in this respect that the publication



identify the hard-line style exemplified by Hunstanton, although the word “new” was meaningless, since there had been no prior Brutalism; it marked a polemical—and parodic—opposition to the New Empiricism and the New Humanism.36 Ironically, the Smithsons’ design for the Economist Building in London (1959– 64) was later praised by the supporters of the Townscape movement, who were propagating an urbanism based on picturesque principles, as a masterly pictur-esque composition.37

AS FOUND AND THE RHETORIC OF NO RHETORIC

The second departure from Miesian precedent in the design of Hunstanton School, as noted by Philip Johnson, concerned the framing system, of which Johnson was decisively critical: “By using a ‘frame’ system the architects have given themselves a difficult problem where the frames meet at right angles. Their solution is to have two separate columns almost touching but with their axes at right angles. In the main hall we have, for example, three different conditions in one room. Definitely not elegant.”38 Indeed, when comparing the photographs of the Metals and Minerals Research Building at IIT published in The Architects’ Journal (fig. 34) with the details at Hunstanton, we see that Mies’s building is characterized by smooth surfaces, whereas Hunstanton has a strong aspect of assemblage. Retrospectively, Peter Smithson has commented on this feature, reflecting on his fascination with the aesthetics of engineering, which he came to esteem during his wartime military service with the Indian Army Sappers and Miners: “Mies’ work interested me because it seemed a pure way of building and was something I could be capable of. But the taste for Mies is not an easily acquired thing . . . I found his details formalistic—too studied: far more likely, at this period, was my affection for the simplicity and directness of the Bailey Bridge,” a portable, prefabricated metal truss bridge used in the war.39 In another context he remarked: “On the way to IIT, one sees derelict houses and workshops with all the vocabulary of IIT in embryo. These were buildings which were just made. With Mies, they become thought about. They become an idea, a stylistic operation.”40 With Hunstanton, Miesian elegance was transformed into material austerity. The Smithsons’ interest seems to have been more with structural and material expressionism than with Mies’s refined handling of struc-tures and materials. To display a building in a quasi-embryonic state such as at Hunstanton meant to find an architectural image for the postwar reconstruc-tion of British society of which Hunstanton School became such a powerful visual metaphor.

34. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Metals and Minerals Research Building, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, The Architect’s Journal (January 3, 1946).



Despite the apparent aesthetic dimension of the as found, this attitude has often been interpreted as an ethics rather than an aesthetics and associated with such moral qualities as honesty, directness, and truthfulness. The as found ideology is indeed an important concept in the Smithsons’ program of an “architecture without rhetoric,” according to which architecture is to communicate “directly” through its material and constructive qualities.45 However, the Smithsons’ alleged unpretentious honesty was in fact highly pretentious and rhetorical.46 Rather than the romantic imagery and the coziness of the New Empiricism or Mies’s detached abstractions, the Smithsons’ grammar was that of an assemblage of materials. By celebrating the rough beauty of the bare elementariness of available building mate-rials, Hunstanton School embodied a structural sublime. This sacralization of the available made it a monument to the postwar condition britannique of economic scarcity. In fact, the appearance of Hunstanton School was decisively shaped by the specific economic situation: as Peter Smithson recalled, they had intended to use silver paint for the steel elements and plum-colored bricks for the infill panels in their original competition design.47 A shortage of funds led them to abandon those materials and eventually to invert the original color scheme. Unintention-ally, it also helped underscore the as found aesthetics.

The ambiguity of Hunstanton School’s allegiance to and subversion of the Miesian precedent can be characterized as a form of mimicry. While mimicry is etymologically related to mimesis, and refers to an aesthetic category, the British nineteenth-century biologist Henry Walter Bates introduced the use of the word to designate a form of deception in animal evolution, wherein one species mimics another as a kind of camouflage, so that the two become indistinguishable.48 Con-trary to popular perception, mimicry—or mimesis—cannot simply be equated with exact imitation. Ernst Cassirer stated in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: “Mimesis itself belongs to the sphere of poiesis, of creative and formative activ-ity.”49 This is a positive reevaluation of the ancient idea of mimesis as a sort of deception or (immoral) disguise, as put forward in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and present throughout much of the history of Western thinking about the image.

The category of mimicry was introduced into postcolonial critical theory by Homi Bhabha, who argued in The Location of Culture that mimicry can be under-stood as an instrument of the subversion of colonial power structures: insofar as colonized people are kept from full normalization (and therefore full equality), their representation of the superimposed colonial culture is only partial. What results are “authorized versions of otherness.” This “representation of difference” is “itself a process of disavowal.” Mimicry thus always relates to mockery, and its effect on the authority of colonial discourse is “profound and disturbing.”50 It is tempting to think of Hunstanton School as an instance of subversive mimicry of

This specific handling of materials has been called, not least by the Smithsons themselves, an as found aesthetics.41 “We were,” as Peter Smithson put it, “making a composition out of common existing components rather than designing them.”42 This “ ‘select and arrange’ aesthetic”43 was characteristic of a neo-avant-gardist reenactment of Dadaist sensibilities.44 The treatment of building materials as readymades in a way similar to that of Dada artists is most evident in the Braith-waite water tank at Hunstanton, which was not only left visible for everyone to see but was actually monumentalized and displayed ostentatiously at the front of the building, like a symbol of the school’s constructive principles. With its allover pattern it is not only an example of the presence of structural ornament in mod-ernism, but also emblematic of the Smithsons’ quest for beauty through structure and function. The Braithwaite Company advertised the aesthetic appeal of their water tanks in contemporary architectural magazines—propaganda that the Smithsons were happy to embrace (fig. 35).

35. Advertisement for pressed steel tanks, Braithwaite and Co. Engineers, The Architects’ Journal, January 3, 1946.



style served as a starting point for the search for an updated image of the American city, a more adequate image for a society in an emerging mass culture. Again, Complexity and Contradiction provided the battle cry for this emancipatory realign-ment in American architectural culture: “Is not Main Street almost all right?”56 The question was aimed as a polemical reply to Peter Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard, a visual indictment of the alleged deterioration of America’s landscape from which Venturi had taken his Main Street image in the first place (fig. 37).57 The contem-porary American city was thus no longer to be epitomized by the unifying smooth-ness of the Miesian curtain-wall skyscraper, but by the contradictory, collagelike image of the commercial main street.

International Style rhetoric in a period when the former British Empire was not only suffering the phantom pain of the amputation of its former colonies, but was, in light of the advent of mass-consumer society, subject to an economic colo-nization itself.

LESS IS A BORE: THE POLITICS OF POLEMICS

Venturi’s and Scott Brown’s take on Mies was more overtly polemical than the Smithsons’. Venturi famously took a stand against the purism of “orthodox Mod-ern architecture” in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. At first sight, his objections to late modernism seemed directed more against Mies’s epigones than the originals. Thus, the first two images in this “gentle manifesto” show Philip Johnson’s Wiley and Glass Houses (New Canaan, 1952 and 1949, respectively, fig. 36), and Venturi leaves no doubts about his reservations: “The building becomes a diagram of an oversimplified program for living—an abstract theory of either-or. Where simplicity cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture.”51 An example of Mies’s own architecture is only shown later in the book, where Venturi makes similar comments, but not as harshly, about the Seagram Building (New York, 1958): “Mies and Johnson reject all contradictions of diagonal wind-bracing in favour of an expression of a rectilinear frame.”52 How-ever, Venturi’s catchy formula “complexity and contradiction” is obviously devel-oped in antagonism to Mies’s famous dictum “less is more.” “More is not less,” Venturi states at the end of his programmatic first chapter, and elaborates it into his famous “less is a bore” in the following section. In fact, this whole second sec-tion of the book, entitled “Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification or Picturesqueness,” can be seen as a sort of counterargument to Miesian doctrine—or to the polemical image Venturi had sketched of it. Interestingly, this stance is again developed not by direct reference to Mies himself, but to the “expansions” of his “magnificent paradox” (“less is more”), which, in Venturi’s view, amounted to “rationalizations for simplification.”53

As did the Smithsons, Venturi responded to a certain image of architecture. He was familiar with Mies’s architecture from the 1947 exhibition catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Philip Johnson, of which he owned a copy.54 He also took notice of the impact of the Miesian curtain-wall facades that increas-ingly dominated postwar American cityscapes. If this aesthetics had originally been conceived of as a bold utopian avant-gardist gesture in the early 1920s, by the 1950s it had become the established architectural lingua franca of high capitalism.55 Venturi’s criticism of the contextual insensitivity of this international corporate

36. Philip Johnson, Wiley and Glass Houses, New Canaan, Connecticut, from Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1977), 2nd ed.



cordon sanitaire

Venturi and Scott Brown were looking for a renewal of architectural practice from vernacular sources from the 1960s on. They had in mind the commercial American roadside vernacular, which they set out to analyze in Learning from Las Vegas. Venturi had called for a “pop architecture” in an early article, and a number of the firm’s early works can indeed be called pop architectures because of their obvious references to the popular imagery of the American city.58 Among these are the Guild House (Philadelphia, 1961–66, see fig. 87), with its large inscription on the main facade, reminiscent of a shop sign; the remodeling of the exterior of Grand’s Café in West Philadelphia (1961, fig. 38); and the Lieb House (Loveladies, New Jersey, 1967). “Pop” in Venturi and Scott Brown’s terminology is ambiguous, referring to

37. Wallace Litwin, Typical Main Street, U.S.A., photograph (date unknown), as reproduced in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1977), 2nd ed.

38. Venturi and Rauch (architects), renovation of Grand’s Café, West Philadelphia (1961).



Brown, the Smithsons seem generally to have been interested less in adapting the imagery of popular culture into their architecture than in coming to terms with the architectural and formal consequences of mass production in the building sector. In other words, they displayed a neo-avant-gardist/productivist rather than a postmodern/consumerist attitude.

It is interesting to note in this connection that the Smithsons directly related their interest in commercial ads to their equally strong preoccupation with Mies van der Rohe. Thus, their pop sensibility signified the obvious divide between their own neo-avant-gardist position and Mies’s original stance:

Our 1950s attitude was a change from the venerable pavilions that we inher-ited from the Modern Movement. . . . Mies could take quietness for granted in the first half of the century. He could be sure of the individual rights of the undisturbed, inhabited place situated away from industry until almost at the end of his life, when the new state highway was built directly opposite his last pavilion, the Farnsworth House. . . . Starting to work in the 1950s we never could make the innocent assumptions available to the Heroic Period of Modern Architecture. In the American magazines of the 1940s and 1950s we could foresee the consumer-oriented society that would, through advertise-ments, change all our lives, . . . World War II had acted as the great divide between ourselves and grandparent architects.65

The awareness of a fundamental difference between their cultural climate and that of the first generation of modern architects was shared by both the Smithsons and Venturi and Scott Brown. However, as far as the relationship of contemporary architecture to popular culture and its imagery is concerned, they had opposing readings and opposing positions. Both stances have a common interest in the imagery of postwar popular consumer society, and acknowledge its cultural sig-nificance. In the Smithsons’ case, however, references to pop culture are relatively independent from the actual production of architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown, conversely, argue for a pop architecture that draws directly from the imagery of popular culture, which is therefore conceived of as a sort of sourcebook of forms for the production of architecture. As they stated in their introductory remarks to Learning from Las Vegas, “To gain insight from the commonplace is nothing new: Fine art often follows folk art. . . . We can . . . look downward to go upward.”66 And “Learning from popular culture does not remove the architect from his or her status in high culture. But it may alter high culture to make it more sympathetic to current needs and issues.”67 Like the Smithsons, Venturi and Scott Brown were aware of the increasing challenge to high culture (to which the art of architecture

popular (i.e., vernacular) culture on the one hand and to Pop art on the other. Scott Brown’s article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning” (1969) was illus-trated by photographs of the Los Angeles cityscape by the artist Ed Ruscha, and argued that Pop artists had reacted more sensitively to the transformations of American postwar cities than architects and urban planners; her text “Learning from Pop” (1971) referred more directly to the imagery of popular consumerist American culture.59

The Smithsons had already, in 1956, declared, “But Today We Collect Ads.” In this short, programmatic statement they had aligned themselves with the modern-ist tradition of the appropriation of vernacular imagery (a position Venturi and Scott Brown were to take up in Learning from Las Vegas):

Gropius wrote a book on grain silos,Le Corbusier one on aeroplanesAnd Charlotte Periand [sic] brought a new object to the office every morning,But today we collect ads.60

Collecting and collaging commercial ads in scrapbooks was a fruitful working method for the artist members of the Independent Group. Despite the Smithsons’ emphatic embrace of this working method, their architectural oeuvre remained remarkably free of any too-overt references to the aesthetics of plenty and the imagery of consumerism, with the prominent exception, perhaps, of their House of the Future, on show at the 1956 Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition.61 Signifi-cantly, this (only seemingly) all-plastic utopian vision of the dwelling of the future dates from the same year as their enigmatic text, and was therefore characterized by Banham—not surprisingly—as “a serious attempt at a pop architecture.”62 In similar terms, Kenneth Frampton interpreted the House of the Future as a celebra-tion of “conspicuous consumption.”63 Alison Smithson commented on her design in comparable language: “The overall impression given to the public should be one of glamour.”64 The House of the Future was the ideal interior in which to install the various self-indulgent services and amenities that made, in the words of Rich-ard Hamilton (an IG member artist), today’s homes so different and so appealing. It was the epitome of British postwar consumer society: obsessed not only with the mechanization of the house, but also with the consumption of mass media. The Smithsons’ interest in pop imagery also surged in their various publications, as well as in their photomontages for proposed projects, which included cutout photographs of famous actors and media stars like Gérard Philippe, Marilyn Mon-roe, and Joe DiMaggio (see figs. 15, 18). Nevertheless, unlike Venturi and Scott



make-believe, after all, but the enacted dialogue, even clash, of historicist ‘enve-lope’ and modernist ‘content’?”71 In fact, could it be that such—again, collage-like—juxtapositions of slightly distorted architectural images, of both historical and modernist parentage, are a key element in Venturi’s and Scott Brown’s archi-tecture in general? While their historicism has often been commented on and criticized, this dualism seems indispensable for a full understanding of their archi-tecture, and their oeuvre is hardly thinkable without the strong presence of Mies in the background, in a way both comparable to and at the same time clearly distinct from the Smithsons.

belonged) from low, popular, and commercial cultures. Lawrence Alloway has argued that high and popular cultures form a continuum, rather than two oppos-ing poles.68 Even so, the Smithsons treated the two as separated by a cordon sani-taire, as described by Reyner Banham in “Towards a Pop Architecture”: “The cordon sanitaire between architecture and Pop-Art . . . represents a very deep-seated desire as old as the reformist sentiments of the pioneers of modern architecture, that the profession should not be contaminated by commercialism.”69 Venturi and Scott Brown, on the other hand, explicitly worked toward the merging of the two and the blurring of their boundaries, even though their “learned” appropriation of popular and vernacular forms was to remain clearly distinguishable and situated within a sophisticated architectural discourse. The Smithsons and Banham acknowl-edged both high and low cultures but treated them as separate but equal domains that should not be mixed; Venturi and Scott Brown’s cultural model was based on a bottom-up movement in which popular imagery was taken from low culture and, by transformation, introduced into high-cultural circulation. Comparing Banham with Venturi and Scott Brown, Nigel Whiteley characterized the latter’s stance justly (but perhaps a bit misleadingly) as a “vertical” model of culture.70 Accordingly, the Smithsons’ insistence on the cordon sanitaire could be termed a “horizontal” model of cultural exchange. While the former model explicitly calls for a contamination of high culture by low imagery, the latter explicitly resists it. This programmatic difference helps to explain why, despite their joint sources and interests in popular imagery and commercial ads, the two architectural teams never converged on aesthetic terms.

PARODYING MIES

Despite Venturi and Scott Brown’s open polemics against alleged simplification in Mies’s late-modernist architecture, the impact of his steel-and glass-aesthetics on their own architecture is clearly traceable. Many of the facades of their public buildings—such as the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery (1986–91, fig. 39), the Hôtel du Département de la Haute-Garonne in Toulouse (1992–99), or their various laboratory buildings on American campuses—include substantial steel-and-glass portions. Contrary to the Miesian precedent, however, they are usually ornamentally gilded or appear behind a first layer, executed in more traditional materials such as brick and stone. Stanislaus von Moos has observed a comparable strategy in their San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art at La Jolla (1996), where the historical-pastiche street facade gives way to an International Style glass vol-ume in the museum’s lobby: “Could it be that the theme of the building is not

39. Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (architects), Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London (1986–91), exterior view of stairwell.



1. Venturi’s appreciation for English architecture made itself visible some years later, with the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966. Earlier, the lure of Rome, with its historical and architectural wealth, was much stronger for him than that of London. He was at the American Academy in Rome from 1954 to 1956. For a discussion of the impact of his sojourn on his architectural thinking see Martino Stierli, “In the Academy’s Garden: Robert Venturi, the Grand Tour and the Revision of Modern-ism,” AA Files 56 (2007): 42–63.

2. On the history and activities of the IG see David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modern-ism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995); Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, eds., The Independent Group: A Special Issue, October 94 (Fall 2000): 1–128. Peter Smithson has retrospectively disputed the characterization of the IG as formal, calling it rather “an arena to celebrate friendship with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson.” See Beatriz Colomina, “Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson,” October 94 (Fall 2000): 3.

3. For Denise Scott Brown’s personal recollections of her exposure to 1950s London and the IG see her “Learn-ing from Brutalism,” in Robbins, Independent Group, 203–6.

4. Robin Middleton, personal communication, November 14, 2006. Middleton, later professor of architec-tural history at Columbia University, like Scott Brown originally came from South Africa and knew her when she studied in London in the 1950s.

5. The photograph reproduced in figure 33 bears no date and it is uncertain whether it was taken in the early 1950s, while Scott Brown was living in England, or not. Scott Brown has consistently argued that her inter-est in popular culture and imagery and in documenting it photographically stemmed from her upbringing in a colonial context in South Africa. See, for example, Denise Scott Brown, “Some Ideas and Their His-tory,” in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004), 105–19.

6. See Robert Venturi, “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” Arts and Architecture 82, no. 4 (April 1965): 22.7. See Martino Stierli, Las Vegas im Rückspiegel: Die Stadt in Theorie, Fotografie und Film (Zurich: GTA, 2010).8. See Peter Smithson, “Reflections on Hunstanton,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly 2 (Summer

1997): 40.9. See David B. Brownlee, “Form and Content,” in David B. Brownlee, David G. De Long, and Kathryn B.

Hiesinger, eds., Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Associates, Architecture—Urbanism—Design, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), 5.

10. Scott Brown, “Learning from Brutalism,” 204.11. See Irénée Scalbert, “ ‘Architecture Is Not Made with the Brain’: The Smithsons and the Economist Build-

ing Plaza,” in Pamela Johnston et al., eds., Architecture Is Not Made with the Brain: The Labour of Alison and Peter Smithson (London: Architectural Association Publications, 2005), 15.

12. See Denise Scott Brown, “A Worm’s Eye View of Recent Architectural History,” Architectural Record 172, no. 2 (February 1984): 73; Diane L. Minnite, “Chronology,” in Brownlee, De Long, and Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary, 246. Kahn also decisively helped Venturi to win a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, which he only did on his third attempt, in 1954. See Stierli, “Academy’s Garden,” 54, n. 7.

13. Scott Brown, “Learning from Brutalism,” 203.14. “Architects’ concerns with form and its aesthetics [can] be reconciled with their social concern and social

idealism.” Denise Scott Brown, “On Architectural Formalism and Social Concern: A Discourse for Social Planners and Radical Chic Architects,” Oppositions 5 (1976): 110−12. The Las Vegas study was published as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).

15. Scott Brown, “Learning from Brutalism,” 205.16. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).

For the exchange on Lutyens see Alison Smithson, “The Responsibility of Lutyens,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 76 (April 1969): 146–51; Peter Smithson, “The Viceroy’s House in Imperial

The preferred mode of intertextual reference in the architecture of Venturi and Scott Brown is not mimicry, but parody or even travesty (given the idea of disguis-ing or wrapping that appears in their work).72 Like mimicry and other forms of quotational reference, parody is not simply an elaborate mode of artistic playfulness, but rather a major form of artistic discourse, simultaneously self-referential and critical. According to Linda Hutcheon, parody can be defined as “repetition with a critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity.”73 Insofar as architec-tural parody operates in the medium of the image, it is a powerful instance of an iconic criticism. Rather than trying to hide its sources, parody tends to make frank acknowledgment by incorporation of the sources referred to—in the way that Venturi and Scott Brown make visible their Miesian borrowings while at the same time marking their critical distance and ironic departure from Mies. Neo-avant-gardist mimicry and postmodern parody thus constitute two shades of an attitude that is at the same time referential and critical. While mimicry operates from a posi-tion of seeming subordination, parody acts with self-confidence and ironic detach-ment. Thus, it should be stressed that the two modes of ironic citation discussed here are not as clearly distinguishable from each other as may have been suggested. On a more general level, it must be added that while the analysis of architectural phe-nomena by means of literary tropes may have proved illuminating in explaining the transformations between a modernist standard and a late-modern and post-modern adaptation, the interpretation of architecture certainly cannot be reduced to such literary operations. Rather, it must include considerations of genuinely architectural themes, such as the conceptualization of space and the use of materi-als. Nevertheless, one lesson from the recent history of modern architecture is evident. Contrary to Peter Bürger’s assessment that postwar neo-avant-gardes sim-ply and vainly restaged avant-gardism’s former critical operations,74 neo-avant-gardist and postmodern strategies of defamiliarization, as applied by both the Smithsons and Venturi and Scott Brown, were directed at a common critical and productive goal: to redefine, through critical transformation, the place of architec-ture in a society increasingly dominated by images, media, and consumerism.



38. Johnson, “School at Hunstanton,” 152.39. See Smithson, “Reflections on Hunstanton,” 35.40. Conversation with Irénée Scalbert, May 19, 1994, quoted in Scalbert, “ ‘Architecture Is Not Made with the

Brain,’ ” 27–28.41. See “School at Hunstanton Norfolk,” Architectural Review 116 (September 1954): 153; and Alison and Peter

Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found,’ ” in Robbins, Independent Group, 201–2; Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, eds., As Found: Die Entdeckung des Gewöhnlichen (published in English as As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary), exh. cat. (Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, and Baden: Lars Müller, 2001). For a discussion of the material ethic of the Smithsons in light of Sartrean existentialism see Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Freedom’s Domiciles: Three Projects by Alison and Peter Smithson,” in Sarah Wil-liams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 75–95.

42. See Smithson, “Reflections on Hunstanton,” 40. For an attempt at theorizing this “Dadaist” approach in terms of an architectural design based on the availability of prefabricated building materials see Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, who call it adhocism: “Perhaps the largest implications of adhocist means, method and sensibility in architecture suggest that adequate shopping for parts is crucial. In adhocism’s full stylistic swing, a good architect would be a consummate shopper.” Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1973), 171.

43. Louisa Hutton, “Godparents’ Gifts,” in Johnston et al., Architecture Is Not Made, 53.44. For a critical assessment of the neo-avant-garde see Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1974), published in English as Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984). Bürger has in turn been criticized for his simplified understanding of neo-avant-garde prac-tices; see, for example, Benjamin Buchloh, “Theorizing the Avant-Garde,” Art in America 72, no. 10 (November 1984): 19–21.

45. See Alison and Peter Smithson, Without Rhetoric: An Architectural Aesthetic, 1955–1972 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).

46. As Royston Landau put it: “The Smithsons’ approach to the expression of materials and to the expression of services, whether pipework, electrical conduits, or ventilation ducts, had an unpretentious (or overpre-tentious) honesty which extended beyond Mies van der Rohe’s own work.” Royston Landau, New Directions in British Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1968), 24.

47. Smithson, “Reflections on Hunstanton,” 40.48. For a general introduction to and discussion of mimicry as a cultural category see Andreas Becker et al.,

“Einleitung,” in Andreas Becker et al., eds., Mimikry: Gefährlicher Luxus zwischen Natur und Kultur (Schliengen: Argus, 2008), 7–30. For a picture theory of mimicry see the writings of Roger Callois, for example, his “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, October 31 (Winter 1984): 16–32.

49. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, Language (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), 183.

50. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. See also Becker, Mimikry, 20–21. For a discussion of alterity in anthropological postcolonial terms see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 2003).

51. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architec-ture, vol. 1 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 25.

52. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 56.53. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 24.54. See Karin Theunissen, “Flows from Early Modernism into the Interior Streets of Venturi, Scott Brown and

Associates,” ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly 14, no. 1 (March 2010): 53–62. 55. See Joan Ockman, “Toward a Theory of Normative Architecture,” in Steven Harris and Deborah Berke,

Architecture of the Everyday (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 122–52.56. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 102.

Delhi,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 76 (April 1969): 152–54; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Lutyens,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 76 (August 1969): 353–54.

17. See Venturi and Scott Brown, “Learning from Lutyens,” 353–4.18. Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (New York: Reinhold, 1966). 19. It was only thanks to a scholarship that Peter Smithson was able to travel to Scandinavia in 1947, where he

visited buildings by Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Arne Jacobsen, and others. For reminiscences on this trip see Ron Simpson, “From the Beginning,” in Johnston et al., Architecture Is Not Made, 78–79.

20. See Smithson, “Reflections on Hunstanton,” 34, 40.21. See “Buildings to Come,” Architectural Forum 76 (February 1942): 14; “Metals and Minerals Research

Building, Illinois Institute of Technology,” Architectural Forum 79 (November 1943): 88–90; “Architecture ‘Speaking for Itself ’: Library and Administration Building, Illinois Institute of Technology,” Architectural Record 100 (December 1946): 85–90; “Modular Purity at Chicago,” Architects’ Journal 105 (March 13, 1947): 206. In September 1947 Architectural Record published a longer article with a lavishly illustrated overview of Mies’s oeuvre that included his works from the prewar period in Central Europe. See “Mies van der Rohe,” Architectural Record 102 (September 1947): 81–88.

22. “Alison had sent me tear-sheets from Architects’ Journal (1946) with the steel-details of a small building by Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.” Smithson, “Reflections on Hunstan-ton,” 35. See also “Metals and Minerals Research Building, Illinois Institute of Technology,” Architects’ Journal 103 (January 3, 1946): 7–15.

23. Peter Smithson, in Jeremy Baker, “A Smithson File,” Arena: The Architectural Association Journal 81 (Febru-ary 1966), quoted in Marco Vidotto, Alison + Peter Smithson: Works and Projects (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1997), 11.

24. See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art: An Expanded and Annotated Version of the Reith Lectures Broadcast in October and November 1955 (London: Architectural Press, 1956).

25. Robert Maxwell, New British Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 8.26. Philip Johnson, “School at Hunstanton: Comment by Philip Johnson as an American Follower of Mies

van der Rohe,” Architectural Review 116 (September 1954): 148, 152.27. Johnson, “School at Hunstanton,” 148.28. Johnson, “School at Hunstanton,” 148.29. Alexander Aikman, “The Hunstanton School,” Architectural Design 25 (March 1955): 96. For similar assess-

ments see also “Thoughts in Progress: The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design 27 (April 1957): 111–13, which includes comments from an anonymous panel discussion.

30. See, for example, Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118, no. 708 (December 1955): 358, 361.

31. Alison and Peter Smithson, “Correspondence: Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 59 (February 1952): 140. The influence of Wittkower’s study can be seen in the early work of his student Colin Rowe; see Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).

32. See Banham, “New Brutalism,” 356.33. See “The New Empiricism,” Architectural Review 103, no. 613 (1948): 9–22; Reyner Banham, “Revenge of the

Picturesque: English Architectural Polemics, 1945–1965,” in John Summerson, ed., Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing presented to Nikolaus Pevsner (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 267–73.

34. Nikolaus Pevsner, “Heritage of Compromise: A Note on Sir Joshua Reynolds Who Died One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago,” Architectural Review 91 (February 1942): 37–38.

35. Quoted in Banham, “Revenge of the Picturesque,” 268.36. See Banham, “New Brutalism,” 356.37. See Gordon Cullen, “The ‘Economist’ Buildings, St James’s,” Architectural Review 137, no. 816 (February

1965): 114–24; J. M. Richards, “A New Building for The Economist,” Listener 72, no. 1863 (December 10, 1964): 933; Scalbert, “ ‘Architecture Is Not Made with the Brain,’ ” 14.


174 Stierli

57. Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (New York: Holt, Rine-hart and Winston, 1964).

58. Venturi, “A Justification for a Pop Architecture,” 22.59. Denise Scott Brown, “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Plan-

ners 35 (May 1969): 184–86; “Learning from Pop,” Casabella 35, no. 359/60 (1971): 15–23. 60. Alison and Peter Smithson, “But Today We Collect Ads,” Ark 18 (November 1956), repr. in Robbins, Inde-

pendent Group, 185–56. For a discussion of the influence of commercial magazines and ads on the Smithsons see Beatriz Colomina, “Friends of the Future,” 3–30; and Dirk van den Heuvel, “ ‘Picking Up, Turning Over and Putting With . . . ,’ ” in Dirk van den Heuvel and Max Risselada, eds., Alison and Peter Smithson—From the House of the Future to a House of Today (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004), 13–17.

61. For an exhaustive interpretation of the House of the Future see Beatriz Colomina, “Unbreathed Air, 1956,” in van den Heuvel and Risselada, Alison and Peter Smithson, 30–49.

62. Banham, New Brutalism, 62. Sarah Williams Goldhagen has recently questioned this definition, interpret-ing it as an attempt to produce “authenticity” and “freedom” in an existentialist sense. See Goldhagen, “Freedom’s Domiciles,” 84–88.

63. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 265.64. Quoted in Alison and Peter Smithson, The Charged Void: Architecture (New York: Monacelli Press, 2001), 176.65. Alison and Peter Smithson, “The Nature of Retreat,” Places 7, no. 3 (1991): 11–12. 66. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, xviii.67. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 108.68. Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959): 25–6, repr. in John Russell

and Suzi Gablik, eds., Pop Art Redefined (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 41–43.69. Reyner Banham, “Towards a Pop Architecture, “Architectural Review 132, no. 785 (July 1962): 44.70. “Each of the different architectures [in Banham’s model] existed on a continuum: all were valid and equal,

and no particular one should necessarily learn from another. They were successful when they grew out of, and expressed, their one socio-cultural ‘ecology.’ Compared to this, with ‘high’ drawing on ‘low,’ Venturi et al.’s model is vertical.” Nigel Whiteley, “Learning from Las Vegas . . . and Los Angeles and Reyner Ban-ham,” Visible Language 37, no. 3 (2003): 322. See also Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

71. Stanislaus von Moos, “Tableaux,” in Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli, eds., Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (Zurich: Scheidegger und Spiess, 2008), 177.

72. Mimicry, parody, travesty—these are all forms of intertextuality, or quotation. The exact definition of these various kinds of artistic quotation (in its broadest sense) has been a matter of much scholarly controversy in recent years. I am following here the propositions of Linda Hutcheon, who has made a very plausible attempt to define parody and to distinguish it from other, related art forms. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), chap. 2.

73. Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 6.74. “Da inzwischen der Protest der historischen Avantgarde gegen die Institution Kunst als Kunst rezipierbar

geworden ist, verfällt die Protestgeste der Neoavantgarde der Inauthentizität. Ihr Anspruch, Protest zu sein, ist nicht mehr aufrechtzuerhalten, nachdem er sich als nicht einlösbar erwiesen hat. Daher rührt der Ein-druck des Kunstgewerblichen, den neoavantgardistische Werke nicht selten hervorrufen.” Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 71.


Taking on Mies: Mimicry and Parody of Modernism in the Architecture of Alison and Peter Smithson and...

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