Lecture
Thursday 4 December 2008, 18:30
Auditorium SG, EPFL
As part of the exhibition Jean-Marc Lamunière, architect
Architecture, Communication and Urban Form.
Notes on Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates
The Architecture of the „Philadelphia School“ is synonymous above all with the fame of two architects: Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. During his tenures at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s, Jean-Marc Lamunière stood in close contact with both, and seen from afar, this Philadelphia experience looks like an intriguing clue to the beginnings of a post-modern consciousness among Swiss architects in the 1970s.
Though as a designer of buildings Lamunière can more easily be associated with Kahn than with Venturi, his commitment towards finding a common ground for the language of architecture and the language of the everyday brings him close to the latter’s endeavours, and more specifically perhaps to those of Venturi’s partner and wife, Denise Scott Brown. The lecture will explore the Venturis’ view on this issue as it is mirrored both in their research on Las Vegas and Levittown as well as in their built work. Lamunière shares with the Venturis a profound curiosity for the city as system and process, and for architecture as a means of revealing, accentuating and at best nobilitating this complex socio-cultural reality, even though his typological (rather than sociological) take on design leads to results that may seem incompatible with the Venturian „Pop“ sensibility.
Stanislaus von Moos
Art Historian, * 1940 in Lucerne, Switzerland. Has published monographs on Le Corbusier (1968ff.), Italian Renaissance Architecture (Turm und Bollwerk, 1976), the Architecture of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (1st volume 1987; 2nd volume 1999) and the History of Industrial Design in Switzerland (Industrieästhetik, ARS HELVETICA, vol.XI, 1992). More recently his publications include Le Corbusier. Album La Roche (ed., 1998), Fernand Léger: “La Ville” (1999) and Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier (ed., together with Arthur Rüegg). He has been the founder and first editor of the Swiss architectural magazine archithese (1971-1980) and has as taught at Harvard University, the University of Berne, the Technische Hogeschool, Delft et.al.. From 1983 to 20056 he has been professor of Modern Art at the University of Zurich. In 1997 he was Jean Labatut Visiting Professor at Princeton University. Presently he teaches at the Accademia di architettura, Mendrisio.