The Building as Brillo Box (or, An Excursion to Two Philly Architectural Landmarks)

Before anyone takes me for a more devoted student of architecture than I actually am, I'll go ahead and admit if I hadn't moved to the greater Philadelphia metropolitan region in the mid '90s, I probably never would have become fully aware of the Guild House's existence.

I first saw it in some Rizzoli coffee-table book in '95 or so. A little black and white photo in a chapter on postmodernist architecture. I'd just moved to Bethlehem, about an hour north of Philly, for grad school at Lehigh, and the Guild House's nearness put a hook in my head.

That and the fact it seemed to be one genuinely weird piece of architecture.

Within a year or two of seeing it in that book, I was riding around North Philly with a couple friends on an evil-hot summer day when all of a sudden there it was, gliding by us in the rippling July sunlight: the GUILD HOUSE, austere and naked and aggressively ugly in its sea of concrete and asphalt. 

The hook settled deeper in my brain.

Seeing occasional mention of the place over the years in books and on websites (inevitable if you're studying postmodernism) strengthened my resolve to go, like, see it one day.  

Or confront it, rather, since that's what it seemed to demand. 

That day finally arrived a couple weeks ago, in summer 2012, when I set out from quaint Buckingham, Bucks County, to go dig on not only the Guild House but another Philly landmark I'd too long neglected: Lescaze and Howe's PSFS building, the 1932 international-style masterpiece at Market and 13th.

The skinny on the Guild House is it's a city-subsidized old-folks' home on Spring Garden Street (not the shady grove the street name would suggest) designed in the early '60s by American super-starchitect Robert Venturi. It was one of his first buildings, and lots of architecture scholars and critics point to it as the founding moment of postmodernist architecture in the U.S.

Here's a photo I took of it when I confronted it that day a couple weeks ago:

Andy's People

When I was growing up in the '80s and '90s, I for sure dug Warhol. If you were a hip kid back then (I wasn't), or even a hip-kid wannabe (that was me), you didn't get too much say in the matter: the spirit of Pittsburgh's oddest son so pervaded the Cooltown of Sonic Youth and the Smiths, Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis, David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, that dissing Andy would've been tantamount to admitting that your enthusiasm for all those others was pure posture.

That's not to say I had to will myself to like Warhol. From my first glimpses of the Marilyns and Elvises, Jackie O's and Brillo boxes, soup cans and electric chairs, some irony-loving lobe of my brain sat up grinning—so digging the cat was never the devotional chore just exposing myself to some other hyper-hip figures of the era proved to be. (I think I mentioned Bret Easton Ellis.)  

Eleven years of college only approbated those twinges of naked ironic pleasure, buttressing them with the more cerebral reasons we all recite now for advancing Warhol as a no-effing-around Major Figure: that he erased the silly (not to mention sanctimonious, not to mention essentialist) line between art and commerce. That he demonstrated emptying the self to be as great a trick as plumbing its depths. That he illustrated more convincingly than any other artist the extent to which we moderners have foregone reality to live in what Robert Hughes calls the Empire of Signs.

And so on.

A visit to MoMA a few months ago, though, reminded me forcefully why we keep going back to the same artworks over and over again as we age:

The bleddy things change. 

No matter how many years dead their creators.

I didn't realize till four or five weeks after that MoMA trip (the main delight of which was the Cindy Sherman retrospective) that some Warhol I'd seen had gut-punched me, had messed me up on a level that had me thinking about our tinsel-headed friend at least once a day, every day, all those weeks later. 

The craziest part was I couldn't even remember the picture that had gotten me.   

And I still can't. I just know it was something I'd seen plenty of times before—something from the early period, before Warhol eschewed painterly effects (drips, smears, lacunae, muscular brush strokes) for the increasingly hard, lurid, photographic surfaces of his most famous images.

It was something like this, maybe: