Conventional Element

Definition

Venturi's term for the standard, anonymously designed, often "positively banal or vulgar" products of building and commercial display — "the vast accumulation of standard, anonymously designed products connected with architecture and construction, and also to commercial display elements which are positively banal or vulgar in themselves and are seldom associated with architecture" (p. 42, quoted in source-notes/meninato-2018-spatial-seductions). The argument of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966, ch. "The Conventional Element") is that such elements cannot be abolished ("The main justification for honky-tonk elements in architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have"), and that the architect's real work is context: "The architect's main work is the organization of a unique whole through conventional parts and the judicious introduction of new parts when the old won't do." Via Gestalt psychology — context contributes meaning to a part, change of context changes meaning — "Through unconventional organization of conventional parts, he is able to create new meanings within the whole. If he uses convention unconventionally, if he organizes familiar things in an unfamiliar way, he is changing their contexts… Familiar things seen in an unfamiliar context become perceptually new as well as old."

The doctrine has an economic and a critical edge: technical innovation is beyond the architect's reach ("the budgets, techniques, and programs for his buildings must relate more to 1866 than 1966"), so "the architect selects as much as creates"; and the ironic acceptance of "significant old clichés, valid banalities, in new contexts" becomes an oblique comment on "society's inverted scale of values." Pop Art is the demonstrated method ("the Pop painter gives uncommon meaning to common elements by changing their context or increasing their scale"), and Le Corbusier the modern exception (objets trouvés at Ronchamp). The concept is the 1966 foundation of the later ugly-and-ordinary programme and its commercial-vernacular subject matter.

Key Thinkers

• venturi-robert — the concept's author (1966); convention used unconventionally as the architect's "limited view" against the visionary view.
• le-corbusier — the modern exception Venturi cites: juxtaposed objets trouvés (the Thonet chair, cast-iron radiators), the banal statue of the Virgin at Ronchamp "vividly enhanced by its new setting."
• Pop painters — the method's source in the other medium: uncommon meaning from common elements by context-change and scale-change.

Related Concepts

• ugly-and-ordinary — the aesthetic programme this chapter founds.
• commercial-vernacular — the townscape register of the conventional element (Main Street, road town, honky-tonk).
• readymade — the artistic twin: the commonplace recontextualized into art.
• vestigial-element — the element whose convention is temporal (old meaning carried into new use).
• standardization — the industrial counterpart: "standardization in an unstandard way" against standardization without circumstantial accommodation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture* (Venturi 1966) — the concept's chapter (pp. 48–57): honky-tonk as given; order built up and "broken from strength"; renovation as valid phenomenon ("much of the richness of the Italian urban scene at eye level"); "Our buildings must survive the cigarette machine"; Wright's unique elements vs. Gropius's factory vocabulary vs. Mies's catalogues frames vs. Le Corbusier's objets trouvés; Pop Art and planning method ("by a twist of context, gain a maximum of effect through a minimum of means").
• Spatial Seductions (Meninato 2018) — quotes the chapter's central passage (p. 42) and reads it as "a full reconsideration of the value of ordinary, disposable, and conventional objects," affinity with Kienholz's garbage maxim; the readymade lineage.

Open Questions

• Venturi's defence of honky-tonk is explicitly short-term ("Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary"). Does the doctrine generate anything beyond accommodation — can conventional elements be used unconventionally without the architect's irony becoming the scene's new banality?
• The chapter equates the conventional with the American commercial landscape of 1966. What counts as the conventional element now — platform retail fit-outs, LED signage — and does "more signs more contained" still describe the fix?