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Jimmy Venturi's new website...
2005.10.14 15:59
Yes it is all closely tangential, and I'll always be on the look-out for where all the tangents fit within the continuum. Moreover, I really have not dismissed (what I'll call) adaptive reuse designing from the discussion--the Football Hall of Fame and Palais des Congrès/VPRO.
Venturi and Rauch's 1978 BASCO Showroom (the big alphabet sign) was a true decorated shed design. The shed existed long before 1978; it was NORMANDY MART, a precursor "big box" discount market. Normandy went out of business and within a couple of years BASCO bought the property. Venturi and Rauch simply painted the entire existing huge shed a dark blue and added a free-standing sign in huge letters spelling BASCO across the front facing the Roosevelt (12 green lanes of traffic) Boulevard (and across the boulevard from the local NABISCO plant whose big alphabet sign across the top of the plant's ten story production tower was already long a "landmark" on the boulevard). By 1998, BASCO then (adapted to) BEST was sitting derelict for almost a decade, and suddenly by that autumn the sign was gone. I wound up being the one to tell VSBA, and Venturi sent me nice but sad thank you letter.
The interesting thing here is that with the removal of the sign also came the removal of the architecture. The shed is still there and now a self-storage facility with even the once enormous parking-lot full of a dozen or so rows of more self-storage sheds. The predominate color now is a cheap looking turquoise. I don't like driving by the place anymore because it makes me hate the fact that quondam architecture actually exists.
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