Study topic

The main goal of this research is to identify what is specific in the way the American architect Robert Venturi uses figuration, here understood as an artistic process of representation which is opposed to that of abstraction, in both his theories and designs, as well as to find out why and how this concept is brought into play in his projects. It obviously presupposes that figuration actually is a determinant aspect of his architecture, and therefore this study first seeks to confirm that such a relationship exists and is meaningful. What constitutes the raison d'etre of the study is a sheer interest in the subject of figuration itself, considered by the author as a reservoir of architectural potentialities yet to be exploited. So researching the work of Robert Venturi in this manner can be seen as a pretext for studying the notion of figuration in architecture; and inversely, the study of figuration might be perceived as a way to narrow down and specify that of Venturi's work, too vast to be studied without such a purpose.

Because buildings need to respond to functional and technical criteria in order to exist, the discipline of architecture is widely considered as a sort of abstract art. But just as most buildings are not necessarily architectures, the practice of this discipline involves more often than not the input of external concrete images into the definition of a building design. The study thus seeks to identify these images and to relate them to their respective ideological contexts in architectural history. The interest in figuration is also coming from an observation of the alternation that has taken place between abstraction and figuration through time in artistic and architectural trends. As figuration today tends to impose itself as a domineering tendency in contemporary art, architecture is more likely than not to follow this direction in the near future.

The selection of an American architect as the subject of a monographic study in the context of Japanese academia can raise questions regarding its purpose, but this is precisely because this architect has developed theoretical research on the subject of Japanese architectural and visual cultures, and on their relationship to foreign influences that this study is relevant. And while there is no a priori requirement for a research topic to be necessarily related to the specific location where it is undertaken, this study nonetheless grasps the occasion to connect, present, and analyze the remarks, findings, and projects that Venturi has made in and about Japan whenever they are relevant to the study of the relationship between his work and the notion of figuration as a form-giver.

Study material and methodology

This study mainly relies on an original interview of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown conducted by myself at their house in Philadelphia on September 7, 2009. As figuration was the specific subject of conversation during our meeting, the text of the interview is constantly referred to in order to back up the findings of the study, to confirm the hypotheses that each part makes regarding the use of figuration, without replacing the study itself. Therefore it superimposes itself onto the study without changing its overall structure. To start with, the interview was useful in determining whether or not Venturi's work was consciously related to figuration, which was more of an assumption at the beginning of this study. It is then used to identify the theoretical basis of his dogmatic approach, as well as the figurative images used in his projects.

The research structure is divided into two main parts: one that deals with the theory of Robert Venturi, and the other with his design methods. So the methodology at a global scale in this study is that of a comparative analysis of theory to practice, with one part that focuses on the semantic field of figuration and the other on the formal field of this notion. Each part follows thus its own method: the first part consists of a literary analysis of Venturi's main publications and of the original interview in order to identify three things: 1) the type of terminology used regarding the issue of figuration, which led to an etymological study; 2) the origins of Venturi's theory within other figuration-related theories; and 3) the explicit uses of figuration which Venturi made in the form of analytical drawings.

Then the second part consists of case studies of Venturi's projects, where a decomposition of their various components has been performed, using on one hand the principles of Gestalt concerning the opposition figure/ground in order to extract the figurative basis of these designs and on the other the opposition between corporeal form and spatial form of Paul Frankl in order to distinguish the optical appearance of the building from its functional component.

The criteria used to select the projects included mainly the explicitness of their figurative component, as well as size and time, in order to have the widest array from which to identify any evolution. Whether project descriptions by Venturi himself was available or not has also been determinant when choosing these projects. Then the research consisted in trying to identify patterns among projects and to elaborate representative diagrams that aimed to express the main characteristics of the use of figuration in Venturi's architecture.

Main Chapters

In order to grasp the general meaning of the term "figuration" itself, what it includes and what it excludes, the second chapter starts with a study of the specific terminology related to this notion, and a disambiguation between the different terms involved. It then considers the work of various thinkers, art historians, philosophers, and architects, who have in one way or another theorized about this topic. The research then tries to decipher the various forms of expression of figuration in architecture. It identifies an intention to both express and conceal figurative images in architectural form through arithmetics and proportions from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier. The study also observes the shift from this reference to human form (anthropometry) to that of Nature and that of the machine in Neoclassical and Modern architecture, while considering the socio-cultural backgrounds at stake in these ideological transformations.

A third chapter then looks at how figuration is used in the theory of Robert Venturi, as this very idea can be either accepted or rejected depending on the circumstance. This chapter also attempts to relocate his theoretical approach through a synthesis of his main publications, as well as to identify the external theoretical basis upon which his theory has been derived. A general theoretical diagram of such relationships highlights the facts that the originality of Venturi's theoretical stance lies in a mix of influences, rather than in blunt ideology.

It is understood that Venturi has been particularly skillful at literarily justifying his own designs rather than letting them speak for themselves, and therefore, in the fourth chapter focusing on the analysis of his design methods, it is intended to consider his theories as not necessarily valid when looking at his projects, so as to be able to generate independent observations and conclusions. The entirety of his built and unbuilt production has been considered and a series of case studies, selected for their capacity to best represent the different uses of figuration in his architecture, has been conducted so as to identify common design patterns.

The fifth chapter attempts to draw conclusions from the former analysis and to present them in an intelligible way. The way the legacy of Venturi has been interpreted by other architects, his influence and "counterinfluence", has also been researched.

Main conclusions

1. Origins of Venturi's Theory in Neoclassicism

The study concludes that Venturi uses figuration as both a negative and positive tool. It is used as a negative tool in his theory to criticize a certain type of architecture (with the duck, the glove, etc.), by associating popular imagery to otherwise abstract-looking buildings, thus instrumentalizing figuration itself, and as a positive tool in his own projects (as a means of decoration and communication). It is shown that it is precisely by proposing a distortion of an abstract type of architecture into a figurative one that Venturi and Scott Brown aimed to criticize the symbolic distortion that modern architects have accomplished. From a theoretical point of view, the advocacy of the "decorated shed" model over that of the "duck" is interpreted as a legacy of eighteenth century Architecture parlante in its attempt to communicate the functional nature of an edifice through visual devices, and as a reaction against Laugier's theory of inclusion of ornamentation and structure within the same building system, which has been most influential in modernism.

2. Instrumentalization of Figuration

The third chapter exposes the fact that figuration has been instrumentalized in the theory of Robert Venturi, in the sense that it has been used as a tool to serve a different purpose than the advocacy of figuration itself, in order to formulate a criticism of functionalism in architecture. What is at stake in the criticism of the duck is indeed not the fact that the building uses figuration as a means of expression (since many of Venturi's designs use figuration), but the fact that it attempts to depict something else than a building through its form. Further, the analysis of Venturi's main writings shows that Venturi systematically had recourse to figuration when analyzing the main characteristics of a given building type, which can be seen as a unique character of this architect. This particular method has been interpreted as a desire to fight the excess of abstraction that he aims to criticize in modernism, not with more abstract writings, but with properly figurative means.

3. Figuration and Aesthetics of Flatness

In the analysis of Venturi's projects, flatness is analyzed as a deliberate yet meaningful aesthetic choice. As opposed to traditional painting, where a two-dimensional support is used to express volumetry, in Venturi's architecture, the figuration of volumetric objects (or subjects) is reversely used to express the two-dimensionality of the support. In other words, the perception of the flatness of the billboard is magnified by the intentionally chosen figurative images, and this perception of flatness would be much weaker if these billboards displayed abstract shapes. This reverse representational process is interpreted as a desire to visually clarify the idea of the ejection of the figurative component of the building toward its exterior, so as to locate architecture in time rather than space.

4. Similarities and Differences Between the Four Types of Figuration Found in Venturi's Architecture

Through the analysis of Venturi's projects, the fourth chapter finds that there are only four types of use of figuration in Venturi's entire oeuvre: decorated sheds, architectural correlations, urban homotheties and urban metaphors. In decorated sheds: figuration is used to emphasize the flatness of the building facade (as mentioned above), in architectural correlations: it is used to establish a relation with architecture itself through analogies with archetypes, in urban homotheties: figuration is used to represent the very city within which the project takes place, and in the urban metaphors: an analogy with the space of the city is used as a circulation diagram that governs the overall structure of the building. The study also shows that several of these four types can exceptionally coexist within the same project (for example, the hotel in Nikko is both an architectural correlation and an urban metaphor).

5. Relocating Venturi within Architectural Theory and Design

5.1. Systems of Signs as Theoretical Strategy

It is arguable that the models of the decorated shed and that of the duck are probably not so different in terms of systems of signs. If one considers their relationship to the signifier/signified opposition, one can notice that the drawing of the decorated shed focuses on the signifier part of the building, while the drawing of the duck is all about the signified. This comparison fails to compare apples to apples, in the sense that the signified "duck" and the signifier "decorated shed" belong to different semantic fields. Therefore one can observe that this set of drawings has performed a semantic distortion, in order to emphasize the difference between these two types rather than their similarity, which eventually can be seen as an intentional strategy in the theory of Venturi and Scott Brown to defend an architecture that breaks with the aesthetic conventions of modernism.

5.2. Venturi's Theory as a Form of Functionalism

The third chapter shows that the functionalist ideals that sustained modernism in architecture have been not only criticized but also emulated by Venturi and Scott Brown. When they pointed that when the functional elements of modern architecture work symbolically, they usually do not work functionally, these architects endeavored to surpass functionalism in terms of functionality. So that one can interpret the decorated shed model, and therefore most of their architecture, as another kind of functionalism, which, in its appearance, is also similar to functionalism, since it also exudes a machine-like functionality.

5.3. A Theoretical Shift from Anti-dogmatic to Dogmatic

As the third chapter also shows, there has been a sharp shift from an anti-dogmatic approach in Venturi's first book to a resolutely dogmatic one in his second book. What was initially dismissed was the reductive aspect of the formulas of modernism in architecture, but what was eventually defended by him in the decorated shed model is paradoxically an extremely reductive formula, which has none of the complexity and contradiction formerly advocated. The "Less is more" slogan of Mies Van der Rohe, which was openly countered by Venturi's early theory, ultimately suited the decorated shed model.

5.4. The Problematic Location of the Ornament

Finally, one can notice that if Venturi's theory has been built around a desire to restore the value of the ornament in architecture after its eradication in modernism, his conception of what is an ornament is questionable. Ornaments in classical architecture are used to make a connection between architectural elements and to identify these elements as such. As opposed to this, what the decorated shed has proposed is in fact a dislocation of the figurative component of ornamentation and its functionalization as a communication device, two processes that are more relevant to modernist zoning techniques than to meticulously crafted architecture.

この論文は、ロバート・ヴェンチューリ(以下RV)の理論とデザインにおいて、フィギュレーション(以下Fig)、すなわち具象形態が果たした役割を明らかにし、一般化している抽象的形態の建築と比較し、具象形態に基づく建築の理論とデザインがもちうる可能性について基本的な知見を得ることを目的としている。

本論文は、五つの章で構成される。

第1章では、研究の目的と背景、研究方法と資料、論文の構成、既往研究について説明している。建築のデザインでは普遍化した近代建築の抽象的表現が大勢となってきたが、現実の建築が多様な具象的形態に支えられているように、Figに基づくデザイン理論は建築のデザイン方法を拡張しうるものであり、その研究の進展が待たれていること、RVは一貫して建築のコミュニケーション機能に着目、Figが表象のプロセスであるとの理解にたって言説と作品を展開してきたこと等を示した上で、研究目的として、1)RVのFigに基づくデザインの理論と方法を解明すること、2)建築デザイン一般においてFigそのものがもちうる可能性を示すこと、3)RVの理論が日本の建築文化にも影響を受け展開したことを示すこと、4)RVが受けた影響関係を探ることの四点が説明される。論文は大きくは、RVの言説分析と作品分析の二つからなるとされる。はじめに芸術と建築におけるFigの理論を概観し、ついでRVの著作と作品におけるFigの様態を分析、理論的背景の中でRVの位置づけを行い、最期に結論として全体を総括する。RVの言説分析は、主要著作およびRVとデニス・スコット・ブラウンへのインタビューに基づくこと、また、作品分析は、一定の規模をもちFigの使用が明確で年代が偏らない作品を選択するとともに、全作品についてもFigの適用を概観するとされる。章末で関連研究の内容が確認される。

第2章では、シンボリズム、サインと比較しながらFigの定義を確認した上で、ウィトルウィウスからコルビジェまで続くアントロポメトリ的伝統の他、フランス革命建築、ロシア構成主義などの芸術と建築の言説に見られるFigの多様な様態が検討される。最期に建築におけるFigを整理し、アナロジカル(類比的)、レシプロカル(相互的)、オキュペーショナル(身体的)の三つの型が存在することが説明される。

第3章では、RVの略歴を確認、T.S.エリオット、W.エンプソンらの影響が説明され、ついでRVの四主要著作と二論文、インタビュー結果に基づきRVの言説におけるFigの用法を分析、1)ダックとデコレーテッド・シェッド、2)ウィトルウィウス的人間像とその変形、3)グローブとミトン、4)傘と着物という四つの特徴的な用法があること、Figが近代建築の抽象的デザインに対する批判の道具であったこと、日本建築をFigによって理解したこと等が示される。最後に、前章の検討も踏まえ、RVの理論が18世紀の<語る建築>と<ロココ>、アメリカの<ヴァナキュラー建築>に影響されたこと、他にゲシュタルト理論、連想理論との関係が検証される。

第4章では、RVの17の建築作品・案をとりあげ、Figの用法を分析している。分析は記号の二面性と建築形態に着目し行い、それぞれの作品が<具象的イメージ>、<正投影像>、<建築の構造体>などの要素からなる一体的な記号を形成していること、Figの用法としては、1)デコレーテッド・シェッド、2)建築的相関性、3)都市的同型性、4)都市的メタファーという四つの型が存在することが示される。最後にRVの全作品についてFigの有無が検討され、RVの活動の全期を通し、多くの作品においてFigの使用が認められることが指摘される。

第5章では、結論として、1)RVのFigの起源がネオクラシシズムの<語る建築>にあること、2)Figは抽象的でシンボリックな近代建築を批判し、機能的な性格を伝えるコミュニケーションの建築を説くための道具であったこと、3)三次元イメージを表象するFigには平面性を強調する<平面の美学>が生まれていること、4)作品に見るFigの四型はデコレーテッド・シェッドの展開型であり、前二型が垂直的なファサードに、後二型が平面に関係し、各々異なるイメージに対応していること等が指摘される。最期にRVのFigを建築論・デザイン論の中で位置づけ、その核心をなすデコレーテッド・シェッドが、1)近代建築批判と自説擁護のため組み立てられた戦略的な記号システムであったこと、2)機能性において機能主義を越えようとした新たな機能主義であったこと、3)近代建築の抽象的、還元的なドグマに対抗した初期の建築論から、建築を記号に還元する新たなドグマへと変質したものであったこと、4)装飾をコミュニケーションの装置として機能的に捉え直すものであったことの四点が総括として示される。

以上のように、本論文は、ロバート・ヴェンチューリの理論とデザインを具象形態とその表象機能から捉え直し、これまで明確でなかった建築における具象形態の役割を実証的に解明、建築の理論とデザインの両面において新しい展開をもたらしうる基本的な知見を示し、建築意匠分野の研究において大きな寄与をなしたものと判断できる。

よって本論文は博士(工学)の学位請求論文として合格と認められる。