MOTHER’S HOUSE 25 YEARS LATER
By Robert Venturi
First published in
Mother’s House: the Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill © 1992

It is hard to remember, or at least sense, how things were twenty-five years ago. What seemed extraordinary then seems ordinary now or vice versa. This kind of misreckoning occurs especially in matters of taste where we see yesterday in the context of today and through the eyes of today; within our current sensibility the remote past looks old and the recent past, old-fashioned. Have you ever noticed how outrageously short (or long) ladies' skirts look in old photographs and then wondered how you did not go around thinking at the time how strange skirts looked? And if you are too young to remember twenty-five years ago, understanding the recent past is particularly difficult, curiously more difficult than in the case of the distant past. This certainly applies to architecture where not only yesterday's extraordinary may have become today's ordinary, but yesterday's outrage today's cliché. I recall driving past Guild House recently with an acquaintance who expressed wonder at what all the fuss had been about-at how this building's explicitly ordinary vocabulary and its scale-augmenting central motif, now on almost every skyscraper designed in the last decade-had seemed outrageous when it was built.

Now that it is twenty-five years old, the architecture of my mother's house is accepted and its originality tends to be forgotten. This means it has been influential, though not always to good effect, of course. Many of its elements have become trademarks of so-called postmodernism.

You can see this house all over the world in different contexts and combinations, sometimes forty stories up capping high-rise buildings. And if the building now seems a little obvious and is condescended to, I remember how it was originally ignored or scorned. We tend now to forget how sure of themselves the modernists were in their almost religious fervor. (An exception to these kinds of reactions was Ellen Perry Berkeley's understanding critique, published in Progressive Architecture when the house was built.)

So the early bird went too far and hasn't gone far enough. But more important, I remember how hard this building was for me to arrive at. It hurts while you are going against the grain; four years of a lot of agony and very little ecstasy.

I originally described it as a small building with big scale. When I wrote about it in Complexity and Contradiction I stressed its mannerism — its complexities and contradictions. Now I refer as well to its symbolism. That I saw and explained the house differently then from now is not a bad thing; it means its architecture has dimensions and makes sense from several perspectives.

Some ordinary/extraordinary elements of the building are:

1.	The window as a hole in the wall. In modem architecture, the ideal was not a hole in the wall, which negated the integrity of the wall, but an interruption of wall, an absence of wall, which promoted flowing space and abrogated enclosed space. In late modern architecture, if a window was actually a hole in the wall, it was camouflaged by spandrels above and below or by wide piers at the sides; in the late work of Louis Kahn, there were open holes in the wall but never conventional windows.
2.	The window as symbol. The vertical and horizontal muntins of most windows in the house produced panes that reminded you of traditional or conventional windows. This was particularly outrageous in the 1960s, and it took a lot of doing to insert the horizontal muntin in the aluminum frame sliding doors to make them look like windows. This squarish window with four panes is everywhere now; it is an important theme in the work of Aldo Rossi. But it is hard to conceive how outrageous its use as a symbol seemed at first to most architects and critics.
3.	The pediment. Like the window, this was unusual then and is typical now. A sloped roof was okay in those days as long as it was a shed roof. But the main facade where two slopes met to form a pediment contravened a taboo. The pediment was again both too familiar and too old-fashioned, too rare and too outrageous. And because pediments are quintessentially classical, it raised a symbolic issue too.
4.	Yet this pediment, being on the long facade, is also anticlassical. This is one place where this house is mannerist. The pediment used in this fashion becomes a sign, a kind of representation of a classical composition.
5.	Dados. Decorative moldings were out in the 1960s. In my mother's house the dado molding on the facade further promoted classical references and, because it was placed unusually high, it created a generous scale for a small building. The chair-rail molding inside (also unusually high) was never used then either.
6.	Scale. This quality of little building and big scale was further enhanced by the superimposition of the big entrance opening over the normal-sized door beyond.
7.	Arches that are symbolic and not structural. Arches in modem architecture could only be manifestations of structural vaults behind. In this house there is an arched lunette window in the back and a curved molding over the entrance opening in the front. The lunette is a device often used in neoclassical architecture to enhance the scale of a two-story house by making it look one story high, and the arch molding at the front symbolizes entrance. Again, the classical symbolism was taboo: arches as structural expression, yes; arches as symbolic meaning, no.
8.	Distorted symmetry. Some symmetry had returned to functionalist modernism by the early 1960s in the work of Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, but distorting the symmetry was out. You couldn't have it both ways: if an order was right it should not have to be compromised. Aalto's work was the exception in the 1960s.
9.	Redundancy. The arch molding in front was overlaid on a flush concrete beam to contrast with this element's literal structural quality. Besides being a stuck-on decorative pastiche, the molding was outrageous for its expressive redundancy. In those days, structural efficiency and expressive minimalism, yes; ambiguous meaning and complexity of expression, no. But I loved the Porta Pia.
10.	Enclosure. Although the early International Style had acknowledged enclosed interior space with windows or holes puncturing exterior walls as in Mies van der Rohe's Afrikaner Strasse housing or even Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, other directions had prevailed by the late modem 1960s, following, for example, Mies's directed and flowing space of the Barcelona Pavilion or Corb's vast lobbies made up of walls and absences of walls. Enclosure was out, corners were taboo. My mother's house returned to enclosed interior space with windows.
11.	Shelter. The house is a shelter as well as an enclosure. The flat roofs of modern architecture, and particularly of the parapeted Villa Savoye, kept the rain out but didn't suggest shelter. In my mother's house, the pedimented roof symbolized shelter as well as classicism.
12.	Color. I made the house green in 1967. Although trim could be colored in those days, surface material had to be natural to express the nature of the material and structure. Green was out.
13.	Furniture. I designed the house so my mother's old furniture (c. 1925, plus some antiques) would look good in it. In those days interiors were expected to be purely modern. Although you could scatter some very old antiques about (and the Italians were masters at this), eclecticism was essentially out.
14.	Sign and symbol. Orthodox modem architects, without admitting it, employed symbolism; they denounced historical symbolism but promoted the "progressive" symbols of industry. Their adaptation of industrial elements, frequently without regard for context, was mainly in the details; the buildings, as wholes, didn't look like factories. In contrast, my mother's house, while it employed certain historical/classical details, stressed the symbolic significance of the building as a whole. In its sheltering manner, with its gable roof, central door, ordinary windows and chimney, it looked like an elemental house, like a child's drawing of a house. It was also a sign, because the gable was on the long facade and because the parapet caused the facade to seem detached from the house. This made the representational quality of the house more explicit.
15.	Originality. In those days a house had to be original to be good. This house was original, but not in the modem sense of expressing the new.
16.	Ideology. The house did not promote ideology. My architectural approach was not pure. The house is both not modem and modem: although it has comers, it also doesn't have comers; it has a steel frame strip window and there is an absence of wall, not a hole in the wall, between the dining area and the porch. Its inconsistency makes it hard to categorize. It is not postmoderm. The inside feels Corbusian; the steel column and what it supports seem like an International Style reference.
17.	Classical and elemental qualities. To me, the most unusual characteristics of this building now are its classicism and its elemental quality. It is classical in that it is explicitly symmetrical in its plan and major elevations. The symmetry builds up toward the center through a hierarchical arrangement of elements and an increase of scale. The symmetry is not incidental as in, for instance, some of Mies van der Rohe's buildings, which are made up of repetitive modular elements. Of course the classicism is mannerist because of the inconsistency of its symmetry. (Our next building, Guild House, created an hierarchical center and a contrast of scales on the front elevation, using connected balconies capped by a lunette window — a compositional device now characteristic of many postmodern high-rise buildings.) The same house is also elemental in that it can be read as an archetype-the child's image of house.
18.	Distorted symmetry. Some symmetry had returned to functionalist modernism by the early 1960s in the work of Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, but distorting the symmetry was out. You couldn't have it both ways: if an order was right it should not have to be compromised. Aalto's work was the exception in the 1960s.

It took several years of struggle to evolve this house… and the struggle involved discarding a series of good ideas, or having to postpone employing them for future work, which is always difficult for a young architect. Its final design returned to a degree ironically close to my earlier Beach House design in its form if not its symbolic or referential content; that is, the Beach House was maybe the first shingle style revival building, the latter, the first so-called postmodern building. But I have lived off this building, which took so long to be born ever since, and so have others, I think, consciously or unconsciously.

Thomas and Agatha Hughes have been the possessors of the house since 1973, and I want to thank them for their care and understanding in living in their house and maintaining it. Philadelphia, 1991