Giamarelos, S; (2017) Death of a Mascot, Unsung Hero of Postmodernity. LOBBY (6) pp. 76-81.

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Abstract

Architectural history consists of deaths and murders, a relentless succession of ‘this will kill that’. It is a story that goes back to the late Middle Ages, when Archdeacon Frollo, the fictional character in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, posited that “the book will kill the edifice”. The invention of typography eventually turned architecture into a bare skeletal polyhedron. Surrendering its main symbolic function to the printed page, architectural form degenerated to “the cold and inexorable lines of geometry”. Five centuries later, Robert Venturi described cathedrals like Frollo’s Notre Dame as billboards with a building attached. The postmodern architect’s notion of ‘the decorated shed’ registered the divide long prophesised by the medieval Archdeacon: the symbolic and the structural were two distinct functions of architecture. This is why Venturi in turn revelled in the gargantuan neon signs of the Las Vegas Strip. Rich in a symbolism separated from their architecture, they showed the way forward for a modernism that was only producing ‘dead ducks’ at the time. Effectively stripped of this external symbolism, these modernist structures were only self-referential monuments to a dated industrialism and vacant space. However, the story of the relation of the shed to the sign was not as straightforward as Venturi originally thought. Rather tellingly, it involved yet another murder long hidden in the shadows of architectural historiography.

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