The Mother’s House by Robert Venturi is seen as a significant house as it is often claimed as being the first postmodernist building. However, Venturi disputes this as he sees himself as an extension of the Modernist’s ideas, attempting to combine function and liveability.
Venturi trained under Louis Kahn, who developed the notion of ‘program’ and ‘core’ spaces. This is evident in the house with the living room being the core space, and the secondary or program rooms feeding off it. As you approach the house your attention is drawn to the chimney with all the visual lines leading to this point. The chimney/stair amalgamation is at the centre of the core and is what encapsulates the entire idea of the house; that is the complex relationship of tension and embracement you create when you force contradictory parts together. As shown in the two longitudinal section poches, the stair and chimney are two elements which compete for central position; however they must share the space and as such must accommodate and adapt to each other the entire way through the house.
The relationship of tension and embracement became the concept behind my parti and poches, and I have attempted to represent this with two disparate parts clashing together and yet having to embrace each other to create a whole. I used the colour red to symbolise the emotion of the anger of the tension and also of embracement.
This concept is indicative of the many contradictions found within the design of the house, that of program/core, big/small, simple/complex, public/private zoning, interior/exterior, screens/enclosure, light/dark, additive/subtractive, symmetry/asymmetry and modern/classical. Venturi is demonstrating “Less is a bore” and includes all these paradoxes into one multifaceted house. However the concept is best demonstrated with the positive/negative stair and chimney relationship that is at the heart of the house.
What is particular about the complicated contradictions of the house is that they do not impede the functionality of the house but rather enable the users to function better within it. Thus by designing architecture which has a sense of emotion and elements which relate to one another, Venturi has created a building which is less mechanistic than the previous Modernists and one which is more suited to the human experience.
