To see Venturi’s original manuscript, all yellow paper, typed hand written, cut up and taped together is a text that seems to be both shredded and composed, as if placing words and sentences together were an act of composition or construction. In fact, one might imagine Venturi with his scissors working on both text and image simultaneously as he snipped and glued the papercut internal elevation of Grand’s Restaurant. Or the compositional slicing and reassembly that characterises the endless iterations of his Mothers House. The construction of the manuscript seems composed as much visually and spatially as it is a text.
Even in its subtitle, “gentle manifesto”, Venturi’s book is both proposition and performance. The phrase first soothes us but before we get too comfortable then tugs at the rug under our feet. It works like a diagram that explains the highfaluting alliterative title full of clattering consonants that precedes it: a phrase that itself is both complex and contradictory.
Linguistically the book it is a tour de force of structure and form that twists with a lithe elegance. Venturi’s language is teasing and playful. Like many of his aphorisms, his prose is full of cadences that seem to turn back in on themselves. Sentences that seem as if they stop to whisper asides to us while hiding a smile behind an almost straight face. Switching modes while pulling unexpected references as if from a magicians hat. We might even suggest that the narrative path of the writing takes in in, sideways, back on ourselves just like the staggered plan at the entrance of the Mothers House.
The architectural languages and meanings that Venturi explores are done so through a written form that is not only describing these effects but also performing them. Ideas and the medium of their communication are interwoven through the book. In the same way, text and image perform a kind of choreography through the pages, creating the very same spatial and elevational effects of juxtaposition and adjacency that make up the content. Just like the Jasper Johns flag painting (featured as an illustration) the flatness of the page becomes ambiguously active in the act of representation. At once overtly book – making us all too aware of looking at illustrations on a page – and a space too as they sidle up to the words they illustrate.
Especially in C&C, but elsewhere too, Venturi’s writing is far more than a functional window onto a world but rather a place where ideas are generated through the use of language itself. Complexity and Contradiction creates its polemic not just by what it says but how it says it.
First published in MoMA’s Complexity and Contradiction at 50 special edition.