Vanna Venturi House

Introduction

The Vanna Venturi House is one of the first notable works of postmodern architecture. It is located in Chestnut Hill&action=edit&redlink=1 "Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia) (not yet drafted)"), just outside the city of Philadelphia (USA). It was designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother, Vanna Venturi, and built between 1962 and 1964.[1] The house was sold in 1973 and has since acquired a private character. It has five rooms and about 30 feet (9 m) high from ground level to the top of the chimney. It has a monumental façade, an effect achieved through the intentional manipulation of architectural elements that indicate the scale of a building.[2] Architectural historian Vincent Scully described it as "the largest small building of the second half of the 20th century."[3]

The client and the architect, mother and son

In 1962, Mrs. Vanna Venturi commissioned her son, the then young and promising architect, Robert Venturi, to design a house in Chestnut Hill (Philadelphia). This house, although one of his first works, is complex and contradictory in both its formal and functional aspects and soon became a platform from which Venturi achieved international recognition. The Vanna Venturi house has served as a reference for contemporary architecture.

The design of the "Mother's House", as Robert often calls it, was affected by Vanna's ideas as a client, whose needs had to be met, and also as a mother who helped develop the architect's talent and personality. Vanna was a feminist, socialist, pacifist and vegetarian, with an active intellectual life. He was born to Italian immigrant parents in Philadelphia in 1893.

Next to a 19th century house

In 1959, Robert, the architect's father, died, leaving his wife enough money to build the house and live comfortably. The designs for Robert, Jr.'s house evolved over four years, but the architect had only two fundamental disagreements with his client. When the work was about three-quarters complete, he looked at the traditional nineteenth-century house next door and remarked, "Oh, isn't that a beautiful house?" He also rejected the marble floor in the dining room, considering it ostentatious, but finally relented as the house was nearing completion.

Vanna Venturi House

Introduction

The client and the architect, mother and son

Next to a 19th century house

Design

View from the rear of the house (south). Venturi designed the Vanna Venturi House, at the same time he wrote his anti-modernist and controversial text: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. A description of the house is included in the book and the house is seen as an embodiment of the ideas in the book. He states:

Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture. I like elements that are hybrid than "pure" ones, rather than compromising "light" distorted instead of "easy." I favor messy vitality over obvious unity. It included the non sequitur and proclaimed duality.

Many of the basic elements of the house are a reaction against standard modernist architectural elements: the gabled roof instead of a flat roof, the emphasis on the central chimney, an enclosed ground floor "established firmly in the earth" instead of the modernist columns and walls of glass that open the ground floor. On the front elevation the broken pediment or gable and a purely ornamental appliqué arch reflect a return to Mannerist architecture and the rejection of modernism. Thus, the house is a direct break from modern architecture, designed in order to destabilize and contradict the formal modernist aesthetic "Modernism (art)".

In this work Venturi materializes his theories of Complexity and Contradiction, using clearly postmodern resources such as collage, quotation, and even irony; for example: the chimney deviated from the axis, the reference to a Greek front on the façade, etc. The house has a unitary appearance, even simple and symmetrical. However, between that appearance and its compositional center a whole series of alterations, geometric changes and unsuspected itineraries are established. His unitary concept is not, despite everything, a historicist instrument, but, as he himself stated, the understanding of the silhouette as a whole. It represents in simplified form the image of the house that we have in our memory. Robert Venturi used to say: "The House... is House." It rescues urban Popular Culture, because the volumetry of the house reproduces a popularly accepted model of a house.

View from the side (southeast). The site of the house is flat, with a long path connecting to the street. Venturi placed the parallel walls of the house perpendicular to the main axis of the site, defined by the driveway, instead of the usual placement along the axis. Unusually, the gable is placed on the long side of the rectangle formed by the house, and there is no matching gable at the rear. The fireplace stands out for the centrally placed room on the second floor, but the actual fireplace is small and off-center. The effect is to enlarge the scale of the small house and make the façade appear monumental. The upscaling effects do not transfer to the sides and back of the house, so the house appears to be both large and small from different angles. The central fireplace and staircase dominate the interior of the house. Two vertical elements - the fireplace and the staircase - compete, so to speak, for the central position. And each of these elements, one essentially solid, the other essentially empty, come into conflict. The staircase suddenly contracts its width and distorts its path because of the chimney. Themes of scale, contradiction and "fantasy" - "not inappropriate to an individual house," can be seen at the top of the staircase, which appears to go to the second floor from a non-existent third floor. For one thing, she's going nowhere and capricious. The change in scale of the staircase on this floor contrasts even more with the change in scale in the other direction at the bottom. The house was built with intentional formal architectural, historical and aesthetic contradictions. Venturi has likened the iconic façade to "a child's drawing of a house." However, he has also written, "This building recognizes complexities and contradictions: it is both complex and simple, open and closed, large and small, some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another, its order adapts to the generic and elements of the house in general and the circumstantial elements of a house in particular."

Spaces

Small, but at the same time large in scale, its spaces are very complex, both in their form and in their relationships.

The access is difficult to identify, that is, a typical entrance porch is evident, but not the access, which is located on the sides of it.

The ground floor contains an entrance hall, living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and bathroom. On the upper floor, it has a study, a small sanitary center and two storage areas.

Simply a gabled house. The access to the center of the house, long, has a small atrium, where on the side is the entrance door. An equally long double-leaf door, with a glass window, through which you can see the interior. The atrium is topped by a horizontal beam that can be seen along its entire length, which passes through the central opening. An arch at the top overlaps the beam, like a second finishing of the access.

The front triangle formed by the gable of the roof is cut into two halves by a vertical void. The arch is also divided into two parts. Only the beam remains uncut, although it is intercepted by the arch.

Behind the cut in the front, an orthogonal volume of the upper bedroom rises. An extension of the length of the atrium, which was previously empty, now becomes full. The asymmetrical chimney tip crowns the volume. The asymmetry is reinforced by the different positions of the windows. A long, horizontal window in the kitchen. In the bedroom, a large square window divided into four smaller squares. In the bathroom, another square. Two horizontal lines, one thin and one thicker, join the three windows.

On the rear façade, the linear arch that intercepts the beam constitutes a square: the window and the door of the upper bedroom. From line to plane. Its volume is out of phase with the inclination of the roof. The front, previously cut vertically and divided in two, is now cut horizontally at the height of the beam, which is also offset. The lower plane is transformed into a trapezoidal object. The upper part retracts, giving rise to a small railing. The upper triangle is subdivided by the predominant volume of the asymmetric chimney.

In the lower part the staircase is expanded, facilitating the function of seating, but in its last section it follows a capricious course towards nowhere, since it does not reach any point of arrival, losing all functional relationship to become an extravagant element and lacking any practical purpose other than serving to clean some windows and store objects in the storage room.

Design

Spaces

Small, but at the same time large in scale, its spaces are very complex, both in their form and in their relationships.

The access is difficult to identify, that is, a typical entrance porch is evident, but not the access, which is located on the sides of it.

The ground floor contains an entrance hall, living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and bathroom. On the upper floor, it has a study, a small sanitary center and two storage areas.

Navegación

Vanna Venturi House

Introduction

The client and the architect, mother and son

Next to a 19th century house

Vanna Venturi House

Introduction

The client and the architect, mother and son

Next to a 19th century house

Design

Spaces

Structure

Neighborhood

Recognition

Planimetry

References

Design

Spaces

Structure

Neighborhood

Recognition

Planimetry

References