Emotional, Loving, Intuitive, Imaginative, Shrewd, Cautious and Sympathetic, Moody, Unable to let go
With a hard shell and soft skin, the Cancer is interested in ambiguity. Robert Venturi is not concerned with the "either/or" of modernism but rather the "both/and". Unlike many of his postwar contemporaries, Venturi's work is not invested with abstraction but with architecture that stems from a sense of belonging. Rather than the isolated modernist work of "genius", Venturi's compositions modestly inflect/reflect the surrounding domestic and commercial environment. Venturi's sense of irony is not caustic but rather celebratory, coupled with a sense of wit and an earnest and unabashed affection for the popular realm of American life.
Venturi is interested in realism. His architecture is informed by the actuality of the American architectural condition after World War II. Venturi often uses the colour and materials found within the area in which his buildings are situated: brick, wood veneer and shingles along with the pastel pallet of 1950s' suburban America. Venturi is interested in the poetic assembly of images, icons and forms that constitute physical and spatial memory, for instance his acknowledgment of the plaster Madonna that sits in the birdbath next door to his Lieb House in New Jersey. Venturi's architecture evinces the Cancerian fixation on house and hearth. In his very early Vanna Venturi House, a home for his mother, a "mannerist" staircase leading upwards to the bedroom wraps around the fireplace. Venturi's Guild House, built for retired people, calls attention to the importance of TV in postwar America's domestic life. Inded, the Guild House rooftop is surmounted by a symbolic, "gold", fake TV antenna.
Venturi is one of the first American architects to reveal an influence of American art within his work, with deep sympathetic affiliation to the photographs of Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg's pop art. Like the signs of LA and New Jersey highway culture, he sees architecture as a populist language of interconnected moving signage to be viewed through the car window. Venturi possesses the Cancer's interest in historic memory, which is also evident in the work of fellow Cancerian Walter Benjamin. At the Franklin Court in Philadelphia, Venturi uses a LeWitt-like open frame to explore historical memory in relation to the usually invisible grid of the city plan. The steel frame creates, in Venturi's words, a "ghost structure" that both outlines the invisible presence of Benjamin Franklin's demolished 18th-century house as well as the surrounding 20th-century Philadelphia cityscape seen through its open form. The Cancer's interest in history results in an attraction to antique furniture. Venturi designed his own chairs and was very involved with the design of the Knoll furniture showroom, where in place of the modern all-white interior he reintroduced the 19th-century top and bottom section of the wall with wainscoting. He also used coloured paint to demarcate this distinction. Unlike the Modern Movement, Venturi did not reject the 19th-century, having been largely influenced by the houses of the late British architect Edwin Lutyens along with Vincent Scully's 19th-century American shingle house. Venturi retains close ties to the Philadelphia environs where he was raised. His modest office, located in a small town in the suburbs of Greater Philadelphia, is situated on the second and third floors of an old factory building. A window display case on the ground floor presents current projects to the neighbourhood community.
As one of the most influential conceptual artists of his time, Dan Graham first emerged in the 1960s alongside the Minimalists. His work crosses multiple mediums including performance, film and video, exploring shifts in individual and group consciousness and the limits of public and private space. This has evolved into the installations and pavilions for which Graham is most internationally famous. All his projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life.
Jessica Russell studied and practiced art in Melbourne, Australia, where she also worked in film and television before relocating to New York where she currently studies architecture at The Cooper Union.