MARTIN FILLER, FANTASIA

Filler, Martin. "Fantasia." Rev. of ICONOGRAPHY AND ELECTRONICS UPON A GENERIC ARCHITECTURE: A VIEW FROM THE DRAFTING ROOM, by Robert Venturi. The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1997, p. 10ff.

Filler provides a useful summation of the career of Venturi. He briefly treats the themes and significance of both of Venturi's previous books, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and Learning From Las Vegas.

ICONOGRAPHY is a compendium of pieces by Venturi and Scott Brown. It includes Venturi's homage to Frank Furness. It further develops V.'s notion of the use of contemporary cultural elements in architecture: Filler says, "...[Venturi] is unabashedly optimistic about what he sees as the liberating potential of the new electronic technologies, which he believes are capable of infusing our public space with a new vigor equal to the glory of Byzantine architecture."

Filler, in referring to Venturi's 1966 groundbreaker, Complexity and Contradiction, says: "Not even the widely acknowledged failure of Postmodernism (now seen as but another passing phase in a period of rapidly changing architectural styles) has lessened that book's continuing relevance."

5 October 1997

Architectural and Urban Planning Practice

Return to THE PROGRAMME contents page.