Mikveh PMP 2346
The Philadelphia School Deterritorialized
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The tower is a sign to be seen from the expressway yet to be interesting from close up. Its precedents are the campanile and the commercial sign by the highway. From the highway you see the bold silhouette of the concrete cylinder, and through the openings in the cylinder you see a structural diagonal diaphragm with an appliqué of black and white marble whose op-scaled stripes are like those of the tower at Siena. Inscribed in concrete on the back of the diaphragm sloping toward the viewer is the Twenty-third Psalm, which is seen through a sheet of water. At night the tower is lighted internally to be read from a distance and it becomes a base for a tall beacon of light.
Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972), p. 114.
2001.03.15
QA001: more on
The Parliament Building of West Pakistan will be used in comparison to Princeton Memorial Park tower...
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2001.03.19
ideas
Comparing the PMP tower plan and the innuendo plan from the Campo Marzio--diaphragm architecture?
2001.03.22
PMP display
...begin combining the tower data with other collection data. For example, scale plan and elevation comparisons, model collisions, image play, scale and rotation changes, etc.
2001.11.13 11:14
Re: sketching
... the tower of Princeton Memorial Park (1966, unexecuted), perhaps Venturi and Rauch's most Kahnian building...
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2003.02.04 11:50
Re: Robert Venturi
I'm beginning to see a lot of Venturi et al architecture and design as 'mod'. Not Modern, not Post-Modern, not (just) Pop--specifically mod.
The Princeton Memorial Park tower is very mod, as is the Mr. and Mrs. Gooding House of a decade later.
Venturi, like Stirling, is a mod colorist (for sure), a distinct rarity within 20th century architectural history.
2004.02.19 12:05
Re: they aren't....
Tower for Princeton Memorial Park... ...there was also to be the text of Psalm 23(?) inscribed on the underside of the slanted slab. This text was also to be screened by a sheet of falling water.
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2004.07.22 16:26
Re: Virtual Synagogue in Berlin's Fasanenstrasse
...an analytical rendition of Kahn's Mikveh Israel Synagogue (Philadelphia, 1961-70, unexecuted) where the cylinders of light are replace with reduced versions of Venturi & Rauch's Tower for Princeton Memorial Park (New Jersey, 1966, unexecuted).
Gordon [Matta-Clark] sees the PMP Tower design as Venturi & Rauch's consummate homage to Kahn, specifically to the Mikveh Israel Synagogue.
While Gordon studied architecture at Cornell (BA 1968), he well remembers Perspecta 9/10 where Mikveh Israel is featured, as well as the then forthcoming excerpt from Complexity and Contradiction--"Is it a building split in two or two buildings coming together."
And who could forget the "Avant-Garde Anachronist" article on Louis Kahn in Time June 1966--"Carving in Light" indeed.
And remember how everyone was eating up the Progressive Architecture Award Citations January 1967.
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