Realismo, táctica y espectáculo. Crítica de lo cotidiano en la suburbia de Venturi y Scott Brown
Other Titles: 
Realism, tactics and spectacle. Criticism of everyday life in the suburbia of Venturi and Scott Brown
Keywords: 
Suburbia
Venturi
Scott Brown
vida cotidiana
tácticas
Suburbia
Venturi
Scott Brown
Everyday Life
Tactics
Issue Date: 
2017
Publisher: 
Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra
ISSN: 
1138-5596
Citation: 
Franco, D. (David). "Realismo, táctica y espectáculo. Crítica de lo cotidiano en la suburbia de Venturi y Scott Brown". Ra. Revista de Arquitectura. 19, 2017, 79 - 86
Abstract
El principal objetivo de este artículo es el de examinar, desde una nueva perspectiva, las ideas que durante los años setenta propusieron Robert Venturi y Denise Scott-Brown en defensa de la suburbia americana. Para ello se traslada la reflexión desde el ámbito de lo simbólico –en que lo enmarcaban sus autores– al de la vida cotidiana, dentro del cual el artículo se centra en la polarización de las prácticas de lo cotidiano –propuesta por Michel De Certeau– entre tácticas y estrategias, así como en las ramificaciones socio-políticas de las mismas.
The main purpose of this text is to address the ideas that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown proposed in defense of the American Suburb throughout the 1970s, from a new critical perspective that can make them relevant for a contemporary reader. To achieve this particular approach, I would like to shift the area of reflection from the notion of the “ symbolic”, which Venturi and Scott Brown placed at the center of their theoretical project, to the ideas of the “ quotidian” and “ everyday life” as they were theorized by thinkers like Henri Lefebvre or Michel De Certeau during the second half of the Twentieth century. Within the general theory of the everyday, the article concentrates on how the complementary notions of tactics and strategies, proposed in Michel De Certeau’s ‘ The Practice of Everyday Life”, apply to the ideas about suburbia proposed by Venturi and Scott Brown. On one hand, it seems clear that within the urban and architectural narratives of ‘ Learning from Las Vegas’, there is an implicit admission of the economic and social logic of modern American capitalism. However, on the other hand, despite the fact the book defends the aesthetic viability of the great privatization drive of the mid-century American city, it also shows a consistent positioning against the status quo and in favor of the less favored classes. This interpretative tension reproduces the two opposing notion of strategy and tactic proposed by De Certeau. The acquiescence with the spatial results of capitalism as a dominant economic and cultural system, makes the ideas proposed by Venturi and Scott Brown parts of a wider strategy. However, those same ideas appear as tactics insofar as they claim the architectures of capitalism to be unexpected residues that oppose to the spaces of the culturally dominant paradigm of the modern utopia. If we acknowledge these residues as fragments without a totalizing ideology, hence the byproduct of everyday practices in suburban America, then the defense of their legitimacy becomes a a form of resistance. In this article I question whether such taste of resistance, which was undoubtedly premeditated by Venturi and Scott Brown and became essential for the critical success of postmodern ideology in architecture, responds to an honest analysis of Las Vegas and its social context, or if it was only the result of a rather partial –and reactionary– interpretation.

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