Contradictions and complexities: Jane Jacobs's and Robert Venturi's complexity theories

Journal of Architectural Education

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 49-60

  Laurence, Peter L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049474819     PISSN: 10464883     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1531-314X.2006.00033.x     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Lewis Mumford, "Mother Jacobs's Home Remedies," New Yorker (December 1, 1962), 149.
2. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p.17;
3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). Jacobs referred to the "Great Blight of Dullness" often enough to include it in her Index, p. 452. Page numbers reference the in-print editions of both books.
4. "Vitality" was a familiar word in both texts. Jacobs, for example, wrote of promoting "Social and Economic Vitality in Cities," Death and Life, p. 4;
5. Compare Jacobs on "Intricately Interconnected" cities, p. 439;
6. Venturi on "The Urbanistic Whole," p. 104.
7. Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, p. 16.
8. Jacobs, Death and Life, p. 372. Emphasis in the original.
9. Peter Blake, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture," Architectural Forum 126 (June 1967), 57.
10. Hugh de Cronin Hastings (aka Ivor de Wolfe), "Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy Founded on the True Rock of Sir Uvedale Price," The Architectural Review 106 (December 1949), 362.
11. Hastings, "Townscape," 362.
12. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p. 36-37.
13. Robert Venturi, "Townscape: The Campidoglio: A Case Study," The Architectural Review 113 (May 1953), 333-334.
14. Venturi, "Townscape: The Campidoglio," 333.
15. Hastings, "Townscape," 361.
16. Douglas Haskell, "Googie Architecture," House and Home 1 (February 1952), 86-88;
17. Haskell, "Architecture and Popular Taste," Architectural Forum 109 (August 1958), 104-9.
18. Compare Jacobs, Death and Life, p. 224.
19. Blake, Complexity and Contradiction, p. 57.
20. Blake, God's Own Junkyard, p. 7.
21. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 46.
22. The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report, 1958 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1958), p. 291.
23. See Jane Jacobs, "Flowers Come to Town," Vogue (February 15, 1937), pp. 113-14. Jacobs's essays about Manhattan's diamond, leather, and fur districts were also purchased by Vogue.
24. Jane Jacobs, "Philadelphia's Redevelopment: A Progress Report," Architectural Forum 103 (July 1955), 118. This article was not bylined and is formerly unattributed.
25. Compare Warren Weaver, "Science and Complexity," Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1958 (New York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1958), pp. 7-15.
26. Compare Warren Weaver, "Science and Complexity," The Scientists Speak (New York: Boni & Gaer, 1947), pp. 1-13.
27. A notable resurfacing of nonlinear dynamics research and inquiry is Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve, 1997), relevant here for De Landa's acknowledgment of Jane Jacobs, as well as systems theory scientist Arthur Iberall, in developing his thesis.
28. Christopher Alexander (1965), "A City is Not a Tree (Part 2)," Architectural Forum 122 (May 1965), 58.
29. Compare Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, pp. 16, 132 n. 13.
30. Herbert A. Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106 (December 1962), 467.
31. Compare Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap. 6.
32. Neville Ward, "Play on Possum," The Architectural Review 116 (October 1954), 215.
33. Ward, "Play on Possum," p. 218.
34. Compare Taylor, The Moment of Complexity, p. 40.
35. Robert Stern, New Directions in American Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969), p. 53. The Copley Square project was not included in Stern's 40 Under 40 exhibition.