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not an easy book

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In God's Own Junkyard Peter Blake has compared the chaos of commercial Main Street with the orderliness of the University of Virginia. Besides the irrelevancy of the comparison, is not Main Street almost all right? Indeed, is not the commercial strip of a Route 66 almost all right? As I have said, our question is: what slight twist of context will make them all right? Perhaps more signs more contained.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), pp. 101-2.

Illustrations in God's Own Junkyard of Times Square and roadtown are compared with illustrations of New England villages and arcadian countrysides. But the pictures in this book that are supposed to be bad are often good. The seemingly chaotic juxtapositions of honky-tonk elements express an intriguing kind of vitality and validity, and they produce an unexpected approach to unity as well.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), p.102.

Spring Green, Wisconsin. Photo: Ezra Stoller.

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