In memory of Bob Venturi, I went to visit the Fire Station he (and Denise ? only Venturi and Rauch are credited) designed in a not very salubrious part of New Haven (I had forgotten that you only have to move one block away from the University and you are in a much less good neighbourhood). They had won the competition for a new Mathematics Building in 1969 to the consternation of the architectural establishment – ‘won from among 468 contestants by the iconoclast who had shocked the country as the apostle of the “ugly and ordinary”‘. I would have photographed the Fire Station, but a big truck drove up in front of it at the critical moment, so I am borrowing someone else’s image of it.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 