Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Essay

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture - Essay Example Accordingly, we will have to see everything logical as a violation of these rules. This chapter is, an interesting parallel, with Robert Venturi - who, it turns out, also was speaking in "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" about rules of the absurd exactly - and about the need to respect them. Venturi contemplates the "complex" and "contradictory" ways architecture relates to people, cultural contexts, and its own history. The "Both-And" is the mainstream of architecture away from modernism. In this chapter, "Contradictory Levels: The Phenomenon of "Both-And" in Architecture", he called for an architectural tension arising from perceptual ambiguity - an ambiguity engendered by what he termed a "both/and" style. The both/and concept requires an excess of both form and meaning in order to create a complex, contradictory architecture: "It can include elements that are both good and awkward, big and little, closed and open, continuous and articulated, round and square, structu ral and spatial." In this chapter, he prefers "both-and" to "either-or," black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once.