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page149from Building Ideas
satisfy both demands by disconnecting them
from each other, hence the functional “shed” and its expressive “decoration”.
This strategy involved a kind of honesty in its separation of the two functions
and has led to a series of buildings characterized by their surface
articulation – Venturi accepts that the architect often controls only the
building’s skin, so he treats it as a screen for the display of surface pattern.
The more recent buildings at Princeton, such as Wu Hall from the early 1980s,
and the ISI Building in Philadelphia, from 1978-79, show the implications of
this approach to the decoration of surface. Another building which plays with
the concept of the “empty” signifier is the Benjamin Franklin Museum which
stands on the site of his former house. Instead of rebuilding the house from
historical records, an outline of its form has been created in white-painted
steel. This is an extreme example of a building that tries to deny its own
substance,
3 Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown – Wu
Hall, Princeton University, 1980-83.(Neil Jackson)
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