October Event Recap
On Thursday, October 19, 2006, The American Institute of Architects Eastern PA Chapter convened at the Allentown Art Museum for a captivating PowerPoint lecture presentation by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown on their firm’s expansion and modernization plans for the Allentown Art Museum, including an overview of their theories and design projects.

We kicked off the evening with a reception in the lobby including butlered hors d’oeuvres, an open bar sponsored by Fenner & Esler Insurance, and an open Allentown Art Museum Exhibit titled, “Wearing Propaganda”.  Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown personally met and conversed with our chapter’s members at the reception, and marveled at the signs and symbols embodied in the exhibit of Japanese kimonos and American World War II wearing propaganda in the exhibits on the second floor of the museum, which were open during the reception.

We moved to the lower level auditorium for an elegant catered dinner followed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s lecture titled, “Thinking about the Allentown Art Museum.”

In their lecture, Venturi and Scott-Brown made an argument supporting the museum building type as a loft for displaying art, not as architecture in competition with the artwork itself.  They praised Philip Johnson’s 1929 Museum of Modern Art and scorned Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Daniel Liebeskind’s Denver Art Museum as Abstract Expressionist Sculpture competing with the artwork itself.  In the words of Robert Venturi, “Form Accommodates Functions” [plural], manifesting Venturi and Scott-Brown’s delight in loft-type museum buildings which relinquish attention to the art.  Venturi and Scott-Brown also endorsed the loft building type for other building types, which could possess more than one life as different functions.  Venturi and Scott Brown delighted at the second life which the First Presbyterian Church now possesses as the south wing of the Allentown Art Museum.

Venturi and Scott-Brown discussed and presented their complete theories of architecture from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture to Learning from Las Vegas to their present writings in Architecture as Signs and Systems: for a Mannerist Time.  They presented their own art gallery projects including but not limited to the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, additions to the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Seattle Art Museum.  Their project architect, John Hunter, presented conceptual studies for the Allentown Art Museum’s expansion and modernization plans.  Denise Scott-Brown concluded the evening’s lecture with a presentation on the firm’s urban design work and theories.

The evening was a great success.  It formed the highlight AIA Eastern PA Chapter meeting for the year, and the experience enriched every architect who attended.