And if we think about what modernism holds; these really strong ideas, these ideas that are going to, that need to be followed in a very kind of careful way, a real canon of good design ideas, then being questioned...well, "What are we gonna do now?" If we, if we knew what was "right", but now we've decided that what was "right" is not entirely right, we've got to open the doors again, and that's exactly what post-modernism does. Post-modernism opens the doors. In America, one of the leading proponents of post-modernism is Robert Venturi. Now Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour write a book called, "Learning from Las Vegas". "Learning from Las Vegas" is a book that basically tracks a course that they teach in Las Vegas, that involves a look at architecture and urban planning from the point of view of what exists; not what architects want to have exist, not what designers determine is the best solution, but instead what happens to an area or city or the strip, in this case in Las Vegas, when it's just allowed to kind of grow up on its own, answering its own problems, coming up with its own solutions that function for the way that Americans live today. And what they find in looking at the strip is that much of the life of Americans and cities in the 1970s is about the automobile. So we see, here, an image of the strip with all of the cars driving down that main drag and we see, off to the right, the centurions from Caesar's Palace heralding the fact that the car is now driving by Caesar's Palace and that is the whole idea. The whole idea is that the person in the car is going to know where they are and what they're going past. Now symbols have become a part of fine arts and popular art at this point. We see the kind of explorations of Andy Warhol in taking the tomato soup can from Campbell's and making that part of the art scene. The repetition of an image, taking the original object, in this case, Marilyn Monroe, and turning it into a stamp, something that is just an image that symbolizes all kinds of things about our culture but really is, in many ways, removed from the original person. And this idea of commercialism, of being able to repeat things through different kinds of technology, whether it be photographic, or through screen printing, or whatever, it and which, of course, has only increased with, with our digital world, is something that Andy Warhol explores in his work, but it's also something that enters into the world of art and architecture, in general; the idea of symbols becoming a big part of our vocabulary. Here, for instance, the Parthenon ceases to be great architecture and symbolizes a cup of coffee from a Greek coffee shop. The idea that the Parthenon could become a symbol for coffee is something extraordinary, but it, also in accepting it, actually, is the response that the post-modernists are actually thinking about, because it's, it's not what it ought to be it, it's actually responding to what it is. We'd already met this idea of the architect or the designer actually accepting what exists, as opposed to what they are wishing would exist, or what they thought should exist, when we looked at the work of Corbusier, decades prior to this. Where he's saying to the architect, look at the accomplishments of the moment with your eyes wide open, see what's actually happening, and respond to that, as opposed to looking back to the past. And in his case, what he was asking people to look at were the the great accomplishments of engineering at the time; so he's enamored with the automobile and the grain silo. What Venturi is asking people to take a better look at is the city as it actually exists, and so, here, looking out over Las Vegas on the Las Vegas Strip, what becomes apparent is that the city, when designed for the automobile, is about signage and symbolism. It's about allowing people in a car traveling at a speed of 15 to 25 miles an hour to be able to know where they are and what's available to them. And so the signage then becomes central to the architecture. And he sees it as being both integrated into the architecture, as you can see with the Golden Nugget, or as standing separate from and being out closer to the road, as we can see in the Stardust, both of them are using this idea of letting the passerby know what's going on in the structure through, through a way that's possible to read as, as they're driving along. This boils down to an idea that Denise Scott Brown puts together about two different kinds of modern architecture; one she calls the duck, and the other she calls the decorated shed. And what we see with these two are two approaches to allowing people to know what the architecture is about. With the duck, the architecture embodies the idea that's being expressed and the simplest expression would be for it to become that thing and certainly with the Long Island duckling building we see that happening; the building itself looks like a Long Island duckling and you can go inside and buy ducklings. That's sort of the most simplistic level of that, she also talks about how the Seagram's building can be seen as a duck, because it embodies the kind of power and wealth and forward-thinking ideas, that a large corporation wants to express and so she also sees, sees that in lots of International Style architecture, especially when it's being used for corporate headquarters. The decorated shed on the other hand is a building that's built really just to answer the program, it doesn't matter what the architecture itself looks like, you could just build a rectangle and fill it up with the things that need to be inside of it, make sure it's the right size, the right height, and everything's fine; and then you decorate the exterior. You either incorporate the decoration into the façade of the building so that it's all one, or you can put a sign out in front of the building, very much like a lot of those hotels in Las Vegas. Now Robert Venturi himself had been exploring some of these ideas and we can see that in the house that he builds for his mother, Vanna Venturi, in the early to mid 60's. And this is probably the earliest really kind of clear expression of some of the ideas of post-modernism. And in order to understand this house, we also have to think about something else that Venturi wrote which was a book called, "Complexity and Contradiction". And what he's putting forward in that book is a group of ideas about architecture through time, not just modern architecture, but architecture throughout Western architectural history, and how the architecture that is most engaging is the architecture that expresses ideas of complexity and contradiction. That in order for it to really be trying to express ideas about the society in which it's being built and the program that it's being built to address, it necessarily needs this complexity and these contradictions; that there isn't really any room for perfection in good architecture, because perfection, in fact, means that you have to reject parts of the program and parts of society in order to be able to fulfill the the goal of perfection. He actually says, "Mies says, "Less is more", I say, "Less is a bore." And what we're looking at here is an exploration of these ideas of complexity and contradiction. So from the get-go it looks like a house, because it's got that peaked roof, right? And that peaked roof tells us that it must be a home, it seems to be symmetrically organized as well, but when we start to look closer we realized that that peak roof is broken in the middle, so it's actually a broken pediment, which really doesn't symbolize a house, so now what are we looking at? And although it's symmetrical, there are lots of contradictions to that symmetry, for instance, the arrangement of the windows on either side of that central opening is not symmetrical, and, in fact, that opening which promises to be a front door doesn't seem to have a door, the door itself is, is in fact off to the right of that opening. It has an arch over the door, but that arch is broken and it's clearly just an applied element, so it's the lintel that's actually supporting it...or is it? Is that also applied? We start to question. Look at the windows themselves, they're telling us about the function of the house on the interior so they're very much about modern architecture. they're telling us that this building isn't being held up in a traditional way, it's being held up by modern materials, he's used the strip window, I mean, he's also used this floor-to-ceiling window on one side, again, letting us know what's going on, on the interior. The fireplace must be central in the house because there's this very large chimney, but is it really a chimney? Only a portion of it, off-center, is actually functioning as a chimney, and the rest of it, well, we're just not really sure. In looking at the floor plan you can see that there was, originally, maybe, in the beginning, some symmetry to this plan; if we move a couple of the walls over we can come up with a symmetrical floor plan. What Venturi says is that symmetry is wonderful, but it doesn't always work, and that, in fact, you have to contradict the symmetry to allow the program, and the way that the space needs to be used, shape that space and so we see that where a room needed to be larger, and another needed to be smaller, the walls have shifted. So while he starts with symmetry, he ends with a contradiction to symmetry. And, as we move around the side of the house, we can see that, in fact, the front of the house is expressed very clearly as a façade, it is in fact a parapet wall, it's not a traditional peaked roof, and the thinness of that is telling us about the building materials themselves; these are, these are clearly modern building materials that are being used. And look again at the side of the house, how there are openings that express the use, and that, and the kind of function of the interior of the house. And as we come around the side, we can also see that that large space at the top of the house that looked like a very big chimney is, in fact, a small room at the top of the house that has large windows on the sides. Let's go into the house now and let's see what we see in there. Well, there's this strange staircase and fireplace arrangement. It has a kind of traditional quality at first, it tells us about home, which fireplaces often do, they give us a place to gather round; but in this case the way that the staircase is integrated into the, into the interior is peculiar. It seems to end at the chimney wall and then just a little, tiny, narrow staircase passes by it. The way that Venturi actually talks about this, is that it's, it's a bad design; we look at it and we say, "Oh it's, that's a bad design." He said but then there's this wonderful contradiction because, while it doesn't really function all that well as a staircase, that space toward the living room is actually great for putting things that you've forgotten when you want to bring them back upstairs, and you can store them there or you could sit there and read a book and look out over the room, so what was a bad design becomes a good design, because it has a functional purpose. We can also see this kind of play with the molding of traditional interiors being used; look at the millwork as it runs around the room. We've got this chair rail that just begins and ends wherever it needs to, it's just chopped off, it's not being, it's not being used in a traditional way, but it's reminding us of chair rails, it's reminding us of those traditional stories. We see, as well, in the bookcases how the kind of arch that we would expect to see in built-in bookcases is now not ending where support would actually hold it, it's the the supports, or the beginnings and ends, of those bookcases have nothing to do with those arches. And maybe what's most startling for a modernist building is that the furniture that's in this interior is completely traditional; and, in fact, Venturi encourages his mother to bring the furniture from her older home into this house; for continuity, for relationship to the past, for comfort, for all of those things that this group of furniture symbolizes for his mother, because the important thing for Venturi is this continued conversation, the complexity, the contradiction of everyday life, the complexity and the contradiction of that continuum of history in our design world, and being able to connect both to the modern architectural dialog and the the dialogue of the everyday person. Now Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown not only form an office together and work together, but they also they, they marry and they continue to explore their interests in architecture, in, in the design of furniture, and also in urban planning; both together and individually. In the 1970's and early 80's, they work with Knoll and they produce a whole line of furniture and you can see just two of the pieces here that are based on ideas about modern furniture design, about modernism, and plywood, using new materials, exploring all of that, but also including these ideas of post-modernism that explore history and the kinds of symbols that that people react to. You can see in looking at this as well that there's a certain amount of humor involved and post-modernism definitely uses a lot of humor. The idea is always that the conversation is taking place on a multiple of levels; so that you've got that kind of highest, most elite ,those that are in the know, those that have taken classes like Historical Styles, those that have an interest, a vested interest in the design world and that conversation, but also those that haven't; those that don't want to take those classes or read those books, but who are part of the culture all the same, and who need to have a level of conversation involved in the design world around them. And so we can really see this with their furniture designs; they have a sense of humor, they have a warmth about them because of that, they say "I am a chair." historically and also in the modern context. They actually produce a whole series of designs for this and you can see they've got some Biedermeier in there, and some Chippendale, and some Art Nouveau, and they use a variety of surfaces to them both more apt, some that are more abstracted, and some that refer to the classical styles, but the whole idea is, is to kind of bridge that gap and post-modernism is about opening up, being inclusive about taking a look at a much kind of broader scenario in the world, as opposed to the kind of very narrow canons of "good design" that we see in Modernism. And certainly their own home from the 1980s expresses this quite clearly; they lived in a bungalow kind of style house and they didn't change the architecture at all, but they did apply layers of reference in the interior; so we've got, for instance, the names of great architects through history as the frieze in the room, and you can see that there's a kind of Art Nouveau line that kind of ties that all together, the way that the walls have been treated lower down is reflective of Viennese Secession or the work of Gustav Klimt, specifically, and we also see some images; both from people like Adolf Loos and from Andy Warhol, so all of this kind of comes together in their interior; you can see that they're drawing inspiration from a really wide variety of designers and artists. This is also the time in the early '80s when we see the work of collectives like the Memphis Design Collective coming to the United States from Italy. And a lot of the kind of experimental "anti-design" work that's happening in Europe is now coming over to America and mixing into this post-modernist movement. Here we have Charles Moore working in New Orleans and his Piazza d'Italia is meant to represent the Italian-American community in New Orleans. It's a very, very playful plaza; it's one that invites people to interact with it, unlike a kind of monumental work where one feels kind of in awe of a piece and, and stands there and thinks, "Oh, well, you know this was a wonderful time, or this is a wonderful community." Here what he's doing is actually inviting the viewer to interact with the monument; he does that through the use of a variety of colors, he does that by taking these classical architectural elements and mixing them in ways that include both ancient and modern interpretation; so he has a Corinthian column, but he also has columns that are made of polished steel. He has these going to of classical masks, but if we look at them closely they're actually a mask of his own face, and the water is kind of spewing out of his mouth. Look at the way that the staircases actually go right down into the water, inviting people to get their feet wet, to play in the water, to become part of it, and then at night the whole thing lights up with neon; again, inviting this interaction and bringing a kind of sense of joy in the architecture to anybody; not any kind of exclusive knowledge of Italian architecture, but instead a kind of playfulness in the pleasure of being in a plaza, of being in a public space that invites people to interact. We also see Philip Johnson, now Philip Johnson, really interestingly, stays very much on the cutting edge of architectural movements throughout his career, so while he is first known as being responsible for bringing a lot of those International Style architects to the attention of American architectural community, he continues to be seeking, continues to be involved, with answers to architectural questions, and so we see him a proponent of post-modernism as well. And the work that he does in New York City on the AT&T building has really, has a tremendous effect on the skyline of New York; one that when it is first built seems very radical. The building doesn't look like architecture it looks like a piece of furniture, that broken pediment makes it look like a case piece from the 18th century, as opposed to a large important building. As we look at it even more closely, we can see that he's playing with ideas about the temple, when we look at the top you can see that it's almost as if it's a temple form that sits on top of the building, and then it's got that long shaft that is kind of fighting between the vertical and the horizontal that we saw first in modernism, it's clearly a curtain wall building, although it's completely sheathed in brick this is not a structure that even reads as being supported by the brick covering, the covering has now become a skin, because of the horizontality of those ribbon windows that tell us that it is not a masonry structure. When we get down to the bottom of the building we see a Palladian window, only this is a massive one, it's three or four storeys high, and again he's playing with the kind of scale there that, that takes us out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. He does the same when he's, when he's building for a glass manufacturer in Pennsylvania. He builds a building that plays with the ordinary and brings it into the extraordinary, by the time these buildings are built, glass curtain wall buildings are the norm, this is already the 1980s, but what he's done with it is he's brought this kind of Gothic cathedral element to it, playing with this idea of the palace of light, that the Gothic architects wanted to actually achieve, and now he's doing it for the manufacturer of glass; a kind of wonderful sort of play. The building itself has wonderful texture, it's, it has a kind of extraordinary soaring quality that any passerby would be able to relate to, and yet from an architectural history point of view, it's almost tongue-in-cheek. Michael Graves is an architect that Philip Johnson actually really gives a great deal of support to, for a long time in Graves career he's doing works on paper and models of buildings and you can see actually the model of this Portland building here on the right-hand side of the screen, his work was very successful in that respect, he was quite a popular architect on paper, but he was having trouble getting anything built. Well you can see these are extremely playful buildings, the Portland Building was a competition and Michael Graves got a lot of support from Philip Johnson in this competition and ultimately wins it, and what he builds is a building that is extremely playful. Now the Portland Building is a government building, so this houses offices for the city of Portland, and while it has this wonderful playful quality, it also, in some ways, is irreverent because, of course, one wants to be sort of serious about their state offices, and post-modernism is irreverent, it is fun, it does have that kind of playful quality. Well looking at the façade of the building, we see the use of the keystone over and over again, you can see it in the central upper portion that kind of triangulated element and then, below that, you can see key stones that have been turned on their side and then used as the capital, capitals for those flat columns that are really just sort of applied to the surface. Graves is clearly using completely modern construction methods and post-,modernism does. This is a façade on a building and he's talking about the fact that it's just an applied surface, a skin on the building, and he's using it rather like a canvas. He's got lots of references to classicism in the use of the columns and the use of the keystones but none of them are being used in an architectonic way; in other words, none of them are saying this is how the building is being supported, even visually they're not being used that way. And as we turn the corner on the building you can see that again he's got this kind of fluted columns that are really just being alluded to through the kind of rust colored element on the surface of the building, but then everything else is this little square window, and then a kind of ribbon motif that goes across the tops of those columns that, again, has nothing to do with a kind of architectural vocabulary, it's not saying that it's holding the building up, it's making references instead to historical elements and, and decorative elements at that. The whole building actually looks as if it's a portion of a column ,sort of chopped off, with this strong grey base and then the light stone colored surface of the rest of the building, and yet it isn't, so it is and it isn't, and that's part of the playfulness. One of the things that becomes rather controversial in this building is the inclusion of a statue of Graves' designs, called Portlandia, which is a mythical figure that Graves actually makes up as a representation of the city of Portland; it's not something in Portland's own history and for some people this was kind of, a little bit over the top. Where he's just not, ever, over the top, is in resort architecture. And one of his big clients has been Disney. He designed the Swan and the Dolphin hotels in Disney World, in Orlando, and to great success. And here this kind of over-the-top quality really finds a wonderful place. Now a resort is when you want to forget everything and you want to be playful; he uses again classicism as the kind of inspiration point and we see this really throughout Michael Graves career, he's really very much about that kind of late neoclassicism that we saw in the Empire style and the Biedermeier style and here we can see in the shell motif and the use of the oversized swans at the top of the hotel, references to Empire style in France. We have the wave motif that comes from ancient Greece that runs across the surface of the hotel and you can see that in the large arched portion of the building, and then there are various other Greek inspired motifs that run around the building. Notice as well to the right that there is this covered outdoor space that looks like blue and white striped tenting, this is another motif that runs through the whole hotel, and what's interesting about this is that he's taking these ideas, but he's also taking lots of other architectural ideas, lots of other design ideas, and mixing them together. Again, this is very much a modern building, he's not denying modern architectural practice, he's actually embraced it and incorporated it. He's also talking about the façade of the building much in the same way as we saw Otto Wagner in Maiolica House where it's as if the surface of the building is wallpaper or a canvas that one can paint on. And when we get to the interior of this building we can see how he's playing with scale in some of the same ways that we see in the Art Deco movement; where we see classical elements that have been brought to such an oversized scale that they become something entirely different, for instance, the potted palms that make up the frieze that runs around this space that has this oversized tent motif at the top of it; we see these very large, reeded columns and then these sofas are benches that look like garden furniture from about the 1820s. Here in a kind of palm court that he creates, we've got all of the elegance and grandeur of a triple height space, so this idea of a kind of palm court that we could see fitting very nicely into those ideas that we encountered in the Regency in England, in places like the Brighton Pavilion, but here the background that it's, that it's set against is very modern. Now Michael Graves' career continues all the way up to today and he has a variety of things that, that he's focused on, not just architecture, but also the design of furniture, and housewares, and and this tea kettle that he does for Alessi becomes a very big selling design in this post-modernist era. It represents both the kind of functionalism that one wants out of a tea kettle and also a playfulness that one expects in a post-modernist design. So he's got the rubberized handle to keep your hand from burning and he's got a whistle to let you know when the water is boiled, but it's not just an ordinary whistle, it's a little bird that makes a very kind of shrill noise. We also see a number of furniture designs coming from his studio in the 1980s that very much reflect his interest in that late neoclassical period; this chair certainly looks an awful lot like a Biedermeier chair only even more simplified, if one could imagine that that was possible, and then in the lower right hand corner we have a toaster that he designed for Target; he does a whole line of designs for Target in the 1990s, that are both simple, simple functional solutions but also have a kind of playful quality. Just taking a look at the Graves residence in Princeton, New Jersey we can see how this idea of classicism permeates his own interiors and he collects classical objects and classical furniture, as well as building and designing himself, in this kind of classical motif; but always with a very strong sense of modernism, and I think that's beautifully played out in the image of the fireplace in his home, with the windows on either side that are completely symmetrical, but also reflect some of those ideas of factory windows that we saw in the Bauhaus; this is kind of a beautiful merging of those two worlds. And here are just a couple more of those designs that are based on classicism that he produces in the 1980s and you can see how similar they are to Biedermeier, yet the kind of blockiness that they have really is, is quite different.