- Title
- Learning from Aalto: fabulations of Utzon and Venturi
- Creator
- Roberts, John
- Relation
- 29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia & New Zealand (SAHANZ). Proceedings of the 29th Annual SAHANZ Conference (Launceston, Tas. 05-08 July, 2012) p. 897-910
- Relation
- http://www.sahanz.net/conferences
- Publisher
- SAHANZ
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Rafael Moneo observed in 2004 that Jørn Utzon and Robert Venturi were completely ‘opposite’ kinds of architects; yet both figures independently held the work and thinking of Alvar Aalto in high esteem. Utzon’s work seems aligned with Aalto’s sense of natural forms and patterns; Venturi adopts different Aalto strategies, especially inflection to context, inside-outside contradiction and poché. Venturi found Aalto’s work ‘the most moving, the most relevant, the richest source to learn from in terms of its art and technique’. Utzon found Aalto reassuring: ‘I knew his ideas, his buildings and what his work meant for our society.’ Venturi designed with knowledge of Rome, American vernacular, and literary criticism; Utzon drew on hunting experiences, working with Aalto, and international travels. To Utzon, Aalto offered the assurances of a Goethean philosophy, accepting the natural world’s forms and variations as a sourcebook for architectural ideas. To Venturi, Aalto’s plans, symbols and strategies offered license to transcend ‘serene’ Modernism in pursuit of an architecture that could be complex, historicist, everyday, and aware of national and regional vernacular. Notions of nature and culture thus suggest themselves as ‘complementary’ framings of architecture, through which to gauge the extent of Aalto-like instincts in Utzon, and at the same time, Aalto-like contrivance and accommodation in Venturi’s work. This paper regards Moneo’s ‘cordial observations’ as a ‘fabulation’ about Venturi and Utzon. It asks whether the differences between Venturi and Utzon, as diagnosed by Moneo, are particularly clear: is there a measure of common ground in the methods of the two architects? This paper investigates certain differences between the work and philosophies of Utzon and Venturi in terms of ‘learning from Aalto’.
- Subject
- Alvar Aalto; Goethean; architecture; natural forms
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1309327
- Identifier
- uon:21841
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781862956582
- Language
- eng
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