Pioneer's Vindication

By KURT ANDERSEN

Robert Venturi, the man who launched architectural Postmodernism a quarter- century ago, is not exactly unsung: only a few of his living peers are better known, and none has been credited with more deeply influencing the way houses and cityscapes look. Still, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, his wife and partner, feel chronically underappreciated. They have never got as much work as they might have: after almost 40 years as architects, much of that time as world-famous architects, Venturi and Scott Brown have built a few score buildings, many of those within driving distance of their office and none of them very large. Spring after spring, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, a 13-year-old pseudo Nobel, went to other people, sometimes Venturi's inferiors.

Now, at age 66, comes vindication -- kudos, prestigious buildings, the works. Last April, Venturi won the Pritzker. In July his impeccable addition to the National Gallery of Art on Trafalgar Square in London was dedicated. And now all of haute Seattle is celebrating his latest creation, the city's fetching new art museum.

Is he finally happy? Almost. "You always look at what you have done and say, 'Oh, I could have done that better.' " But, he agrees, it's a pretty nice museum, particularly given its hemmed-in, heart-of-downtown site. "It is a little building with big scale," Venturi said on the eve of the grand opening, "surrounded by big buildings with little scale."

That sounds familiar -- and, sure enough, he used it in his seminal book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, to describe one of his early buildings. Complexity and Contradiction was a galvanizing manifesto, liberating architects from Modernist, minimalist dogma. "Less is a bore," Venturi declared, meaning that it was time to begin using ornament in buildings again. And also, "Main Street is almost all right," meaning that familiar, off-the-shelf architectural forms also deserved to be revived. The past could be a rich source of inspiration for contemporary architects. Relax, Venturi told his snobbish profession, and enjoy the old-fashioned gewgaws, the color, even the kitsch.

This is now conventional wisdom, but in the early '60s it was crazy talk, downright revolutionary, particularly coming from a respected young Princeton graduate and Rome Prize winner. By the time his book was published in 1966, Venturi had actually built a house illustrating his alarming, thrilling ideas in a Philadelphia suburb, for the perfect client: his well-to-do socialist mother. As with much of his work since, he took the debased, muddled classical references residually present in most suburban houses and made them self- conscious, explicit, arch. The house was two decades ahead of its time. Imagine a Pop artwork from 1945, or a rap recording from 1965.

Amazing -- and not always, at the time, likable. His 1973 addition to Oberlin College's art museum has a checkerboard exterior and a comically oversize Ionic column inside. Outrageous! The molecular-biology lab at Princeton, designed in 1983, has a wild Argyle sheathing of bricks and oddly orientalized archways. Ridiculous!

By the mid-'80s, however, the movement that Venturi had provoked was ascendant, ubiquitous. The more popularly celebrated and lucrative careers of Michael Graves and Robert Stern in the '80s and '90s depended on Venturi's breakthroughs in the '60s; Philip Johnson's highboyish AT&T Building, dreamed up in the late 1970s, might have been created by Venturi a decade earlier. "If you invent something," Scott Brown says, "it has a sort of agony to it. Your followers can take that as a point of departure -- it is much easier for them to make it beautiful." Finally Venturi gets to the bottom line: "They are selling what you have originated." The followers -- not Venturi -- get to design Disney's buildings. "For some reason," he says, "we haven't been able to please them."

Occasionally, however, it all works out. The five-story Seattle Art Museum is good-size but hardly expansive. The interior is lucid and properly restrained. It is, in Venturi's famous phrase, a "decorated shed." Around the front doors, the facade is a riot of color, pattern and material: red granite topped by green, blue and yellow tiles, zigzags of terra cotta, bluestone squares and vaguely Moorish arches in sandstone. A grand staircase runs the length of the building, paralleling the street outside; in fact, the stairs become something of an interior street, giving on to an open-front mezzanine cafe three-quarters of the way up.

The two floors of permanent galleries have a similar elegant coherence. On each floor a wide corridor runs east to west, with floor-to-ceiling windows at each end, to bring in natural light and let wanderers know where they are. Throughout are refined Venturi details (granite thresholds, for instance) and also Venturi perversity (columns placed a few inches from a wall simply to create an unnavigable isthmus).

All in all, the museum is like the city -- stylish but not quite trendy, unpretentiously cosmopolitan. Seattle seems to agree. On the day the first part of the museum opened to the public in December, there was a line around the block until closing time at 9 p.m., despite a rainstorm. "When people don't like it," Venturi says unconvincingly, "it doesn't bother me too much. On the other hand, I find that I do love it when people like the building." He may be the most influential American architect of the late 20th century, but in the end, like Sally Field, he just wants to know that they like him -- they really like him.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/Philadelphia