09011901.db
Medica Minerva, St. Agnes Basilica, Santa Costanza, Pantheon, Courthouse Plus Ultra, plans
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Venturi's Lieb (No. 9) House to be moved (or demolished)
2009.01.29 14:37
For clarity's sake, the Lieb House is not among the works published within Complexity and Contradiction; the Lieb House is among the works published within Learning from Las Vegas, 1st edition:
The Lieb House
Loveladies, New Jersey, 1967
(with the assistance of Gerod Clark [who may the first architect to collage magazine people within architectural renderings])
It is easy to explain what the Lieb House is not: It is not a tasteful natural-wood-shingled configuration of complex and contradictory wings and roofs. It is an ordinary shed with conventional elements. It uses asbestos shingles with imitation wood-grain relief, once the indigenous building material on Long Beach Island. And it uses big elements, such as the stair that starts out the width of the house and gradually decreases to three feet on the second floor. Its unconventional elements are explicitly extraordinary when they do occur, as in the big round window that looks like a 1930s radio loud-speaker. It is a little house with big scale, different from the houses around it but also like them. It tries not to make the plaster madonna in the birdbath next door look silly, and it stands up to, rather than ignores, the environment of utility poles.
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