Vestigial Element

Definition

Venturi's term for the element that carries a double meaning from its past: "Conventional elements in architecture represent one stage in an evolutionary development, and they contain in their changed use and expression some of their past meaning as well as their new meaning. What can be called the vestigial element parallels the double-functioning element. It is distinct from a superfluous element because it contains a double meaning. This is the result of a more or less ambiguous combination of the old meaning, called up by associations, with a new meaning created by the modified or new function, structural or programmatic, and the new context" (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966, pp. 40–47). Its value is semantic: "The vestigial element discourages clarity of meaning; it promotes richness of meaning instead. It is a basis for change and growth in the city" — remodeling with old buildings given new programmatic and symbolic uses (palazzi become museums or embassies), old street patterns given new scales of movement (fortification walls become boulevards; a section of Broadway "is a piazza and a symbol rather than an artery to upper New York state").

The concept has a negative boundary that keeps it analytical rather than sentimental: the meaningless vestige. "The ghost of Dock Street in Philadelphia's Society Hill, however, is a meaningless vestige rather than a working element resulting from a valid transition between the old and the new." The Le Corbusier case at Ronchamp (the nineteenth-century statue of the Virgin retained from the former church) is the modern instance of the banal object "vividly enhanced by its new setting."

Key Thinkers

• venturi-robert — the concept's author (1966); the vestigial element as the temporal register of the conventional and double-functioning elements.
• le-corbusier — the Ronchamp Virgin as the modern vestige put to work.

Related Concepts

• conventional-element — the standard part whose changed context the vestige often is.
• spolia — the material re-use of fragments; the vestigial element's ancient practice ("Spolium architecture… column capitals used as bases" is Venturi's own historical anchor).
• palimpsest — the city-scale writing-over the vestige records.
• aged-buildings — Jacobs's economic-functional case for the old building; the vestige's cousin with a rent argument instead of a meaning argument.
• adaptive-reuse — the contemporary practice discipline of the vestigial element's programme.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture* (Venturi 1966) — the definition and catalogue (pp. 40–48): palazzi as museums; walls as boulevards; Broadway as piazza; Dock Street as the meaningless vestige; the Ronchamp Virgin; the promise of return "in Michelangelo's architecture and in what might be called Pop architecture."

Open Questions

• The old-meaning/new-meaning combination is "more or less ambiguous" — but what distinguishes the working vestige from Dock Street's ghost? Function, legibility of association, or position in a valid transition? Venturi gives examples, not a test.
• Does the concept survive its own success — after fifty years of adaptive reuse, is "old meaning called up by association" now a designed commodity rather than an emergent richness?