At the book-signing after the VSBA symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I told Denise Scott Brown, "I'm writing a "thesis" which brings to light that the first "master planner" of Christian architecture was a woman, the mother of Constantine, Saint Helena."
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At the PMA symposium last summer [2001], Vincent Scully, the art historian and indefatigable Venturi defender since 1965, explained Venturi's enduring effect on architects: "He angers them because he frightens them." Just as modernism had finally stripped meaning from form, refined abstraction, and allowed architects to practice their art as escape from the real world, with an adversarial (we-know-better) attitude, Venturi "brought meaning back and cut to the root of experience." Scully claims, "He's never been forgiven." (Scott Brown, in turn, has never forgiven Scully for his inability to say "they" instead of "he.") |
Quondam © 2002.02.04 |