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Van Eyck is of particular interest because his conviction was that human existence is by its very nature liminal, which makes the job of architects primarily the articulation of in-betweens, settings ready to safely receive ambivalence, as the principal locus of life. By so identifying the in-between, van Eyck opened up an avenue along which he could distil Le Corbusier’s multifaceted genius into a method capable of playing a continuing role in moving modern architecture beyond the stumbling blocks of the post-World War II era that bedevil it to this day.

The development of van Eyck’s theory and practice was informed by anthropology, characterized especially by a fascination with twinphenomena, a physical condition of existence most clearly presented by thresholds, or liminality. Thresholds, however, were not the exclusive focus of van Eyck’s work; he remained ever-aware that there is a this side and a that side of any threshold – the liminal space between may condition existence but it is not the only thing.47

For van Eyck, the multiple oppositions he considered represented an array of interdependent phenomena. He did not conceptualize two very different events, objects or conditions as necessarily antagonistic. For example, simplicity and com- plexity intermingle equally in van Eyck’s thinking and buildings, reaching across interlinking in-betweens, rather than facing off in a conventionally opposed either/or condition.48_{Another younger architect, Venturi was also preoccupied with both/and}

van Eyck, he did so in a very different way. Even when Venturi invoked van Eyck, he pitched his ideas in a somewhat different, decidedly formalist, direction.

For Venturi ‘both and’, as he explained it in his Gentle Manifesto (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966), suggests an architecture of inclusion that does not possess the conceptual complexity or social richness of van Eyck’s ideas of twinphenomena.49_{Venturi’s formal inclusiveness ultimately operates}

as a seductive hook heralding rejection of reasoned principles in favour of irony and undisciplined pleasure, mostly in the shape of self-conscious stylistic eclecticism.50

Whereas Venturi’s approach emphasized visual perception (while his work was socially submissive), van Eyck was concerned with bodily and emotional experience as well as with the potential for an architecture of referential content.51

Although both architects called for attentiveness to the interrelationship between parts and wholes, Venturi’s architecture trades on melodramatic representation cleverly spun through a conception of architectural expression as autonomous. Van Eyck certainly included visual perception as a component of architectural delight but considered it as one among the other senses, not the primary one. To get a sense of the divergences between Venturi and van Eyck’s thinking, compare the following passages, the first by Venturi, the second by van Eyck:

But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less. . . . Where simplicity cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore.52

I am again concerned with twinphenomena; with unity and diversity, part and whole, small and large, many and few, simplicity and complexity, change and constancy, order and chaos, individual and collective; with why they are ignobly halved and the halves hollowed out . . . Now the object of the reciprocal images contained in the statement make a bunch

of places of each house and each city; make of each house a small city and of each city a large house . . . It seems to me that these reciprocal

images furthermore upset the existing architect–urbanist hierarchy. It is what I wanted them to do – gladly [original italics].53

Van Eyck emphatically embraced the complexity of the concepts he was attempting to express. Venturi, on the other hand, wanted to make it look simple. While the labyrinthine quality of van Eyck’s prose may frustrate, Venturi seduces with the imme- diate pleasures of easy comprehension. Van Eyck was not only aware of his tendency toward linguistic complexity, but believed it necessary for doing justice to the dense web of associations he was attempting to describe. To his mind, such description required a language complex enough to bring the reader into the labyrinth of experi- ence he was weaving and presenting, which he imagined was analogous to life in a responsive built realm:

To proceed from the idea of dwelling, in the sense of ‘living’ in a house, in order to arrive at the idea of living, in the sense of ‘dwelling’ in a city,

implies proceeding simultaneously from the idea of living, in the sense of ‘dwelling’ in a city, in order to arrive at the idea of dwelling, in the sense of ‘living’ in a house. That is as simple and as involved as it actually is!54

What van Eyck saw as simple and involved, principally the notion of both/and interrelationships, Venturi attempted to codify into a system reducible to a collection of formal, or compositional, techniques.

5.8 Plan of Sculpture Pavilion, Sonsbeek Exhibition, Arnheim, 1965–1966. Architect: Aldo van Eyck Courtesy of Hannie van Eyck 5.9 Drawing, I am a monument. Robert Venturi Source: Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Venturi imagined that his revolutionary innovation could revitalize moribund modernist architecture. He argued that visual disjunction might be renewal enough, promising to imbue buildings with a high level of visual interest, which in itself would be a vast improvement over the aridness of orthodox modern architecture, or so it seemed at the time. In this way, Venturi advanced visual interest alone as adequate for establishing results indicative of valid reform. This novel approach, dependent as it was on visual surprise, remains a false promise. The apparently evolutionary transformations of modern architecture that it proposed occur only on a surface level – existing structure, supposedly challenged, is actually maintained.

Ironically, Venturi’s project to freshen up architecture actually results in conventionalized buildings with appliqué, which are unable to do much in the way of actually proposing means for reforming the reductive tendencies of a modularized and industrialized construction industry. Through developers, the building industry dictates frames determined by real estate value that architects wrap in novel ways to make into identifiable images. It is a vision of architecture that promotes a prevailing condition under which architects can do little more than jacket positive beauty (constructed frames) with arbitrary beauty (decorative wrappers free of content). Nothing, it should be noted, could be further from van Eyck’s convictions.