The artist is present: Difficulty, estrangement and installation in Venturi and Scott Brown

Abstract

The work of Robert Venturi y Denise Scott Brown is based upon delocalization and meaning displacement. In a constant migration of concepts and interpretations carried out in successive approaches to the architectural object. It should not be restricted to being understood as a work anchored to historical reflection or, alternatively, to dirty realism and Pop applied to architecture. If both the critical revision of the postmodern episode in architecture, carried out during the last decade, and the recent updating of their iconographic and urban investigations (supported by the particular reassertion of Denise Scott Brown), have reclaimed interest in these architects, a third path remains to be explored, inquiring into the artistic affiliation of V&SB and a set of working mechanisms displaced from art to architecture as possible design techniques. Faced with the apparent limitation of continuing to consider them guarantors of stable values in architecture or simple registers of popular urban realities, this text explores some underlying procedures in their work, aimed at maintaining the capacity of architecture as an inquisitive, destabilizing and ultimately artistic activity. Estrangement, difficulty, the transformation of architecture into installation or the defence of a hyper-subjective authorship, all above a disciplinary condition, are procedure that allow for an operational reading from a contemporary standpoint.