ABSTRACT
Peter Blake, in God’s Own Junkyard (1964), first pointed out the obvious – in America we are polluting our environment with suburban sprawl and its accompanying junkspace. In response, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas (1972) argued for architects to stop pretending junkspace does not exist and embrace it for what it is. They even compared the A&P parking lot to an Italian piazza (Figure 72). The “emperor has no clothes” declarations by Venturi (and group) have led to the academic discourse on junkspace that Robert Stern rejects as unsuitable dinner-table conversation. Despite Stern’s objections, the “ugly and ordinary” of junkspace has stuck as legitimate architectural theoretical discourse. Architects as important as Rem Koolhaas have espoused the undeniable importance of junkspace as symptomatic of our current urban malaise. His amusing diatribe of ten dense pages in Content (2004) was probably inspired by the interview with Robert Venturi that preceded the piece. In any case, the beautification of junkspace is dishonest and futile, as there is a lot more junkspace than there are architects, or paying clients, ready to take it on.
