Sign language: Pop Art, vernacular architecture, and the American landscape (Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown)

This dissertation investigates the work of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and the dialogue they establish between architecture and art. From their early examinations of American commercial environments, most notably their studies of Las Vegas in the late 1960s, the architects have understood the changing methods of representation and the significant shifts in scale, which reoriented urban space to the experience of the highway and presupposed the car as a primary means of perception in the contemporary city. Pervasive in their writing on postwar architecture is their acknowledgment that Pop artists shared their interest in vernacular landscapes. Particular artists, while matching Venturi and Scott Brown's attention to an aesthetics of the everyday, also directed the architects' conception of contemporary architectural symbolism and specifically influenced their representational strategies in several projects.; Venturi and Scott Brown's exhibition Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City organized in 1976 at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution presented America's vernacular landscape, bringing together lessons from courses they had taught on Las Vegas and Levittown. In these studios and in the exhibition proposals, the architects specifically engaged with Pop artists whose work informed the visual format of their curatorial efforts and shaped the objectives of later architectural projects. Through a comprehensive analysis of Edward Ruscha's and Claes Oldenburg's investigations of, and incursions into, the urban context, my study examines the ways that their art, as well as that of others associated with the Pop style such as Edward Kieholz and Andy Warhol, paralleled, and even anticipated, Venturi and Scott Brown's conceptualization of city spaces. Looking at several built projects, such as the Allen Memorial Art Museum, the Basco Building, and the Best Products Showroom, this dissertation considers Ruscha's representations of urban strips, Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures and monuments, as well as his and Coosje van Bruggen's architectural designs executed in collaboration with Philip Johnson and Frank Gehry, all of which exist in dialogue with Venturi and Scott Brown's theorization of urban vernacular architecture.