A Place of My Own (24 page)

One of the aims of modern architecture was to rid the sprawling, many-gabled Victorian house of its many ghosts, all the historical encumbrances and psychological baggage that kept us from stepping out into the cleansing light and fresh air of the new century. In this sense modernist architecture was a therapeutic program. “If we eliminate from our hearts and minds all dead concepts in regard to the house,” Le Corbusier wrote, “we shall arrive at the House Machine…healthy (and morally so, too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments that accompany our existence are beautiful.” In the modern view, the pitched roof was itself a “dead concept,” but equally unhealthy were all those other dead concepts that got stored underneath the gable, in the attic. For there is where the ghosts of our past reside: the bric-a-brac and mementos that a lifetime collects; the love letters, photographs, and memories that clutter an attic and threaten to bear us back in time.

Modernism’s program of psychological hygiene sought to rationalize everything about the house, to exorcise its ghosts and render it as unhaunted and transparent as a machine. Glass would supply the transparency, but it was the elimination of the pitched roof and its attic (along with the depths of the basement) that promised to vanquish the dead hand of the past, thereby helping to streamline the house’s occupants for the challenge of the new age. Of course there were some who protested the wholesale housecleaning: Bachelard’s
Poetics of Space
is an impassioned celebration of attics and basements and all those irrational but nevertheless powerfully symbolic places that modernism had banished from the house. People cannot dream in a “geometric cube,” Bachelard complained. But then, that was the point. The irrational symbolic power of things like roofs and attics is precisely what made them so objectionable.

It’s hard for us to imagine now just how powerful the taboo against gabled roofs in architecture was until very recently. I say “in architecture,” because of course ordinary home buyers and commercial developers never really surrendered their attachment to pitched roofs, though modernism did manage to diminish the pitches on the vernacular roof, working like some powerful g-force to flatten the steep Victorian gable into the shallow hipped roofs found atop millions of suburban ranches. The architectural historian Vincent Scully writes in
The Shingle Style Today
that when he set out to build a house for himself in New Haven in 1950, “the model of reality in which I was imprisoned”—he had just completed his dissertation—“made it unthinkable to employ anything other than a flat roof…”

A dozen years later Robert Venturi single-handedly cracked open this model of reality and freed all the architects who’d been trapped inside it. He built a house for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, that featured a gigantic, emphatic, in-your-face gable. The Vanna Venturi house, which was completed in 1964, proved to be the opening shot in architecture’s postmodern revolution—“the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century,” Scully has called it. Venturi has written that in 1964, even though there were a few single-slope shed roofs creeping back into architecture, the very act of designing a façade “where two slopes met to form a pediment contravened a taboo.” At the time, his big front gable was “both too familiar and too old-fashioned, too rare and too outrageous.”

What a revealing way to put it! For had Venturi’s gable been
only
“too familiar and too old-fashioned,” it would not have qualified as modern architecture. Instead of catching the eye of the Vincent Scullys of the world, the Vanna Venturi house would probably have been dismissed as revivalism—as something reactionary and nostalgic—or, worse, simply overlooked as a naïve vernacular building; after all, there had to have been a hundred thousand other pitched roofs erected in 1964. To count as modern architecture, Venturi’s building had to be “rare and outrageous,” too, and that it most certainly was.

For as anyone with eyes could see, there was something very peculiar about this particular gable. To begin with, it was on the long side of the house, which made it seem way too big—as if it had been exaggerated for effect, which of course it had. Then, right up at the top where the two slopes were supposed to meet, there was this odd space, a kind of gap tooth through which you could make out an oversized chimney rising several feet back from the façade. The gap made it appear as though there were nothing behind the façade; it flattened the gable out and made the whole house look more like a cardboard model of a house than a real, three-dimensional building. Venturi wanted to use a gable (what better ammunition for his assault on modernism?), but not one that could ever be mistaken for an “old-fashioned” gable. So he gave his gable a sharp ironic twist, exaggerating it and hollowing it out until it looked more like a comment on a gable than the thing itself. As Venturi himself puts it, “the pediment used in this fashion becomes a sign, a kind of representation…”

Venturi’s use of the word “sign” to describe his roof, rather than, say, “symbol,” is significant. Arguably his house in Chestnut Hill invented a whole new voice in which buildings might speak, and the shift from architectural symbols to signs is a key to that transformation. In using the word “sign,” Venturi is drawing on the vocabulary of semiology, which holds that all cultural activities can be profitably read as systems of signs that are structured like languages. Semiologists, and structuralists after them, borrowed their terms from the turn-of-the-century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose theories have by now reached far beyond linguistics to influence literary studies, the social sciences, art criticism, and even, thanks in no small part to Robert Venturi, modern architecture.

The relationship of a linguistic sign to the thing it signifies, Saussure maintained, is accidental; signs get their meanings not from the things in the world they refer to, but from the system of signs of which they are a part. That is why a certain combination of letters
—ng
is an often-cited example—can mean something in one language while remaining completely opaque in another. It follows that the choice of any sign is completely arbitrary, purely a social convention. In
Learning from Las Vegas
, Venturi’s influential study of architectural meaning, a book that is steeped in semiology, he offers his own example of the “arbitrariness of the signifier”: In the system of Chinese roads signs, green means “stop,” and red means “go.” Venturi encouraged architects to think of gables and columns and arches as signs too, elements as conventional as the letter combination
ng
or a green stop sign on a Chinese road.

In the years since Venturi built his mother’s house and published his two seminal manifestos, it has become the conventional wisdom, at least among architecture’s avant-garde, that architecture is a kind of language and that all its various elements—the gables and arches and columns, the axes and patterns of fenestration and materials—are best understood as conventions having less to do with the nature of the world or the human body or even the facts of construction than with the sign system, or language, of architecture itself. This was something radically new. Even modernists had paid pitched roofs and all the other symbols they detested the compliment of taking them seriously, treating them as if they actually had some weight in the world beyond architecture. Also quite new was the divorce Venturi was proposing between the imagery of a building and its underlying structure, a relationship upon which the modernists had sought to ground a whole aesthetic. By redefining a work of architecture as a “decorated shed”—an indifferent structure with signs on it—Venturi had driven a wedge between the meaning and the making of buildings.

The Vanna Venturi house was the first work of architecture built on the foundation of the new linguistic metaphor. Like the letter combination
ng
, the various elements of Venturi’s house—its gable and windows, the arch over its entranceway—are meant to be understood chiefly in terms of the language of architecture. In fact Venturi wants to make sure we look no further: he deliberately designed the house to resemble a model so that it would be, in his words, “not real so much as denotative.” The weightless, cardboard look, which has become a hallmark of postmodern architecture, is a way of announcing that the concrete Here of this building is less important than the abstract There of its signification; for Venturi and the countless postmodernists who followed his revolutionary example, the scrim of representation matters more than the reality behind it.

Thus the thin, abstract gable on the Vanna Venturi house has less to do with the world in which it rains and snows than with the increasingly hermetic world of architecture, which is in fact its true mise-en-scène. The space the building occupies is as much the space of images and information—of “discourse”—as it is the space of experience and place and the weather. Though its roof may well keep the rain off Mrs. Venturi’s head, her son is anxious that we regard it primarily as a communications device, a sign referring us to, and commenting upon, other roofs in architecture—the pediments of the Greek temple; the long, dramatic gable on McKim, Mead, and White’s shingle-style Low house in Bristol, Rhode Island; and, of course, every flattop in the modernist canon.

If this sounds like a lot of inside baseball, it is. In fact the Venturi house was completely opaque to me until I’d waded out into the ocean of commentary that has been written about it. And once I’d done my homework, I understood that reading is in fact an essential part of the “experience” of this house. (Just my luck!) Indeed, the Vanna Venturi house is the mother of all literary architecture, of every word-bound building I’d hurt my head on in
Progressive Architecture
. But was it also, my reading made me wonder, the mother of my building as well?

At the same time I’d been scaling the intellectually slippery slope of Robert Venturi’s famous roof in Chestnut Hill, back in Cornwall Joe and I were spending our Saturdays perched literally on top of my own, nailing down strips of lath in preparation for shingling. We’d made the lath out of two-by-fours cut lengthwise in half, then oiled them with wood preservative, since they were liable to come into contact with moist shingles; the oil raised the sweeping grain of the fir and made what had served as our foot- and hand-holds treacherously slick. My roof is exactly twice as steep as Venturi’s (the ratio of its rise to run is 1:1, compared to his 1:2), and yet it was much easier to get a hold on, since whatever sense of precariousness I felt up there that summer owed more to gravity and the oiled lath (the wood preservative had the consistency of chicken fat) than cerebration. Not that there wasn’t a fair amount of that, too. For in the speculative interludes provided by the pleasantly undemanding work of shingling, I found myself occupied with the question of just what, if anything, my anonymous gable roof owed to Venturi’s famous roof, since that was the one that had rehabilitated gables in the eyes of the profession. Did my not-so-primitive hut fit under the larger roof of postmodernism Venturi had helped to erect?

When Charlie stopped by one afternoon late in August, I was up on the roof working by myself, nailing down the last couple of straps in preparation for shingling. After showing off the progress Joe and I had made since his last site inspection, I asked him whether or not he considered my building to be postmodern. I understood this was not a polite question. No architect ever likes to be pigeonholed, or to acknowledge a debt to another architect, at least to one not yet dead. I also knew that the postmodern label covered a lot of architecture Charlie couldn’t stand.

“My knee-jerk reaction is, No, your building isn’t at all postmodern.” “Knee-jerk” suggested a more considered reaction might be on deck, so I persisted. But wasn’t there something postmodern about his use of classical proportions? And didn’t the pitch of the roof, along with the corner columns and the cornice, give the building a passing resemblance to a Greek temple—exactly the sort of reference a postmodernist might make?

“Well, in that sense, yes, I
guess…
Oh, I don’t know—” Charlie hates to find himself in even the most shallow theoretical waters. But after flailing around for a moment, he realized the only way back to shore was to start swimming. “Okay, look. To the extent that postmodernism made it okay to use historical elements again, I suppose you could say this is a postmodern building. And I guess I
do
think of it as a kind of temple. But it’s not like I went and arbitrarily stuck a classical temple top on an office building out on Route 128!” He was referring to a Robert A.M. Stern building near Boston.

“So then is it a question of attitude?”

“Of conviction, yes. Look, an architect can employ a historical reference in an ironic or mannerist way, which is what I think of postmodernists as doing, or you use it because you think there’s still something great about it, that it still has some value in a particular context. Those straps are a perfect example.”

As we were talking, I was applying a second coat of chicken fat to the lath with an old paintbrush. Charlie’s plans had called for the straps, which were spaced about five inches apart, to extend several inches beyond the first and last rafter, creating a reveal that had the effect of adding dentils to the façade of the building—another classical detail. Named for the teeth they resemble, dentils are the small square blocks that appear in series beneath the roofs of Greek temples, either directly above the cornice or along the slope of the pediment.

Charlie explained that the dentil is one of several classical ornaments that the Greeks derived from the timber framing on which they modeled their architecture; dentils were inspired by the exposed tips of the lath used to support the roofing material—which was precisely what the ones on my building were going to do.

“Now, a card-carrying postmodernist might use dentils too, but he’d do it in such a way that they were clearly mannerist or iconographic. They’d be purely and obviously decorative, for starters—pasted on, not structural. And then he’d either use lots and lots of really tiny dentils, or a handful of gigantic ones, to make absolutely clear the reference was playful or ironic. He’d probably want to paint them, too, for the added emphasis.