However, for the Venturis this imageability was more commercial than technological, and it was advanced not to update modern design but to displace it here, then, Pop began to be recouped in terms of the postmodern. (2) Twelve years later, in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Venturi and Scott Brown advocated a Pop architecture that would return this imageability to the built environment from which it arose. Accordingly, in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham imagined a Pop architecture as a radical updating of modern design under the changed conditions of a “Second Machine Age” in which “imageability” became the primary criterion. (1) The consumerist superficiality of signs and seriality of objects also had to affect architecture and urbanism as well as painting and sculpture. Common to both groups, however, was the sense that consumerism had changed not only the look of things but the nature of appearance as such, and all Pop found its principal subject there: in the heightened visuality of semblance, in the charged iconicity of people and products (of people as products and vice versa) that a mass media of corporate images had produced. For the Americans, on the other hand, the commercial landscape was almost second nature, to be treated with a show of cool. In the early ’50s Britain remained in a state of economic austerity that made the consumerist world appear exotic to British Pop artists. Morphed several times since, this space is still very much with us, and so a Pop dimension persists in contemporary architecture as well. More generally, the primary precondition of Pop was the new configuration of cultural space entailed by consumer capitalism, in which structure, surface, and sign often appear mixed. As elaborated by American artists a decade later, the Pop idea was again brought into architectural discussions, especially by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, where it served as a bridge to postmodern design (e.g., the historical pastiche of Michael Graves, Robert A.M. The very idea of Pop was floated in the early 1950s by the Independent Group (IG) in London, a motley collection of young artists and art critics, including Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway, who were guided by young architects and architectural historians, above all Alison and Peter Smithson and Reyner Banham. He has participated as an expert panelist for the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, and he is a Peer Professional for the GSA’s Design Excellence Program.Pop is readily associated with art, music, and fashion, less so with architecture yet it was bound up with architectural debates from first to last. A member of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the National Association of Minority Architects, he served previously as the organization’s chapter president and as a regional vice president. He is a member of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and he serves currently on the board of the Washington Architectural Foundation, the Institute’s non-profit affiliate. His professional experience includes work as a designer with Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Rafael Viñoly Architects, and Gensler. Lamond-Riggs Neighborhood Library, the Northern Virginia Science Center, and the Contemplative Site at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia.Ĭook holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His current work includes such projects as the new D.C. Elizabeths campus, and the renovation of the South African Embassy. Daniel/Shaw Neighborhood Library, the East Gateway Pavilion at the St. His previous work as an associate partner and design principal with Davis Brody Bond includes many prominent institutional projects in Washington, including the collaboration with Adjaye Associates, the Freelon Group, and SmithGroup for the design of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as the Watha T. Cook, AIA, is an architect based in Washington, D.C., where he is currently a design principal at HGA Architects & Engineers.
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