By Conrad Cafritz
I had met Robert Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown at a dinner in DC and hearing I had just completed construction of 1000 apartments over a five-year period at a youthful age, they invited me to participate in a “jury” for the final submissions of the third-year class. I didn’t know at that point that Vincent Scully, who had given his imprimatur to Venturi and Brown’s 1969 presentation at the Yale School of Architecture of the importance of the western town stereotypical store fronts and iconography of its signage in his “Learning from Las Vegas Studio,” would be the official juror of the class.
Even though classes had been suspended at Yale in 1970 before May due to the protests against the Vietnam War, there were to be two days of submissions by the third-year class at the School of Architecture, May 29th and 30th. The subject of the class was the architecture and the iconography of the New Haven residential house. Venturi was becoming a conceptual leader of what came to be known Postmodern architecture with its attendant rejection of Modernism.
A sub theme of the class would study the work of Claes Odenburg, Yale 1950 (who had stunned the campus with the clandestine installation of “Lipstick (ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” an anti-war piece installed in front of the Beinecke Library in 1969) and, in particular, a 1968 8’ wide sculpture of a hamburger and a theme of a soft, transient reality, the hamburger, become a lasting, hard surface sculpture.
I brought to this class, apart from my experience as apartment builder-developer, three useful experiences. 1. I had taken Scully’s course at Yale. 2. I had adopted in my first marriage two teenage boys, both too old to be my natural children, who in the late 60s were subjected to the arrival of hallucinogenic drugs, the pill and the divisions and changing alliances of the Vietnam War protest movement. 3. I had briefly been introduced to Huey Newton by his white psychiatrist at a church convocation of his youthful supporters in DC.
During the first day of third-year final presentations, Venturi was absolutely silent throughout the presentations on the first day and into the second day. He seemed stilled by the chaos and disruption evidenced by the May Day demonstrations outside the two days of the jury. I assumed an equal factor in his stillness, the slapdash and unfinished nature of the submissions, at least as it appeared to me as a visitor to the Class, and I am sure all the more so to its increasingly famous professor.
Venturi did not say a word the entire two days except to briefly welcome Vincent Scully the second day. All activities of the class were directed and administered and commented upon by his wife, Denise Scott Brown, a professor of Planning, not Architecture, and Venturi’s partner in the Las Vegas Studio and in teaching the class. Ms Brown would make her comments after the student had made his presentation. Typically, a presentation would last 20+ minutes. Ms Brown limited her say on the quality of the presentations but, on occasion, she might remark on the practical realities, — that a white picket fence around the lawn of suburban New Haven house was not just emblematic of proper middle class status but also served to keep a dog in or sidewalk trash out.
Few submissions tried to encompass the sub theme of soft elements of conventional life — the hamburger —becoming hard sculptural realities. This was a peripheral amuse bouche. But to my untuned eye, the architectural drawings presented were, with one or two exceptions, poorly drafted, absent of intellectual depth and presented without a tight thematic basis.
These final presentations seemed to me as an outsider to reflect a student body not focused on its work, deeply upset by the discordancy of the Vietnam War, undercut by the social trends of drugs and despondency on their immediate future, and simply awry.
There were a few exceptions, especially one very talented student who took the mandate of the class to heart. His drawings laid out in four floors, including a basement, the Black Panther Arms, as a suburban New Haven house. The plans showed the rooms designated for the activities of an organization intent on rebellion.. The basement was deep and two levels, for armored vehicles and weapon storage. The armory, class functions and bunk sleeping quarters were laid out across the two floors and the attic under a steep roof line. In front stood the classic hitching post jockey, but rather than standing with his right arm forward, the arm was raised at a 45 degree angle in a rebellious salute.
Whereas Oldenberg had made an edible hamburger inedible metal, the student had baked a cake to match the drawings and he invited the Class to devour the cake upon its presentation. The canard was complete.
The drawings and the presentation seemed a tour de force, and the only systematic implementation of Professor Venturi’s “New Haven Studio.” Moreover, this student was one of only two National winners of the Prix de Rome award that semester, with its 3-5 year funded study at the French Academy in Rome the year following graduation.
Professor Scully could contain himself no longer and stood up immediately upon the completion of this presentation as the surrounding classmates beguiled by the humorous presentation, its full scope and its audacity, were cutting the cake for their paper plates. Scully was in high dudgeon and deeply off put by the earlier presentations and especially the immediate one. He did not attack the racial canard. No, he spoke to the lack of seriousness of the immediate presentation and the class in general. He portrayed the demonstrations and dysfunctions of the week, month, year as an undermining of Western values. He said that civilization as Yale and similar institutions were under attack, and he was not confident whether they would survive. He condemned the class’s work as not serious in any aspect and students not understanding the challenges they were facing. Scully talked to the history of Yale, the tradition of excellence it embodied, and the undermining of the institutions that was taking place on the campus and reflected in the Class. Scully stated he was not sure the University or the traditions it embodied would survive.
No one said a word. Venturi maintained his pained silence and looked away. Denise Scott Brown ended the session with minimal instructions. As her husband left, she stood there without comment as Scully looked at the students with dismay, before also exiting.
Scully was clearly not familiar with the Yippies or Abbie Hoffman. There was a humorous vein to the Anti War movement, one of spectrum of responses to the non-stop escalation of the War and powerlessness that jelled with the advancing drug culture.
It was understandable that breadth of the frustration and the sundry outlets of expression of the anti War movement would be “Greek” to Scully. I was staying overnight at Morse House where Scully was the Master. I noted the bright orange cover of the book on the desk outside his office, There were six letters in vibrant black coloration. It read simply MAU MAU. I couldn’t resist thinking this book on the Kenyan movement played some part to Professor Scully’s consciousness.
*. The osxomoronic metaphor for the famed theorist of classic architecture of Greece.