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Surely that's an inherent false dichotomy. The mere utterance of "decorated shed" implies the existence of an undecorated shed, where nothing lacks structural purpose.

>The criticism of the non-structural columns for non-functionality in the context of an art museum.

The letter reads as if the columns are criticized not for lacking structural purpose, but rather for being unnecessary obstructions. "We [will] live to regret our accepting this detail of his design." That would have to be because the columns are either ugly or a hindrance.

Because they are sheds, most sheds are undecorated. They are unremaked upon for the same reason.

But to be clear, Venturi and Scott Brown’s distinction is in the context of architectural practice. Learning from Las Vegas started as a studio in Harvard’s GSD. The radical idea was looking at actual buildings built for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways…the radical idea was valuing the study from contemporary vernacular architecture.

It seems, then, that Venturi and Scott turned out to be like the torpedo fish. That the columns should confuse and disorient the visitor as if entering a crypt.

> Columns are cultural iconography (e.g. the Parthenon vs Johnson Wax).

Flashbacks to every McMansion I ever had a client at. It's always gotta have columns. Just jammed in. No sense, no style, no awareness of the form, just "put a column there for no reason."

Columns used to represent something that was _difficult_ to build and place and often carried artwork and detail of their own. The days of them being iconographic lobby structure are long gone.

> Columns can create points that organize spatial experience.

These columns are ugly, do not match their surroundings, and are sat right in the middle of a transition that has no point in being divided. They're also sat in a pair side by side in what is possibly the worst arrangement of column I've seen yet.

> had designed a duck (very common among museum commissions) removing the columns would have been difficult or impossible [1].

This is a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style. I'm with the author, the wing's columns are gaudy and completely misplaced.

I don't understand all the ins and outs of UK Historic designations, but Wikipedia asserts the Sainsbury Wing is a listed structure. Venturi and Scott Brown got the commission over Richard Rogers perhaps in part because Charles Windsor called Rogers' design "a monstrous carbuncle."

The columns have been there for thirty years and one of the learnings in Learning from Las Vegas is designing for that kind of lifespan is a reasonable architectural practice (thirty years is a typical mortgage term in the US). I think it is particularly relevant that the columns are in an ancillary space. Foyers get reconfigured every time a building program changes (e.g. signage and graphics as shows come and go). Now that Elizabeth Windsor is dead, it is ok to change the design she dedicated.

a wing on the campus of an already existing historic building. Which itself has traditional columns. In an appropriate and iconographic style.

Or it's kitsch. Beloved kitsch, but kitsch nontheless. Villa Rotunda was centuries old when the National Museum used its domestic idiom for public purpose and Palladio had already looked back a millennium for the Villa Rotunda’s kitsch back then. The original building made the same claims as those McMansions you hate. Or the Caesar's Palace Venturi and Scott Brown wrote about.

Wright had the reverse problem. He didn’t want structural elements where nature and physics demanded them. So his stuff sort of falls apart.

The last factoid in the tour of his house was how he removed a load bearing wall from his sister’s house and did not replace it.

That whole tour was supposed to be for Wright fans but it just made me loathe him with every fiber of my core. Can you tell I’m an applied sciences person?

There are lots of reasons to dislike Wright and though his house has historical significance, it is not among the works I find interesting enough to recommend…for me, his houses don’t resonate because they reflect lifestyles I dont identify with.

His more public work is another matter. I was struck by the color of the sky against the blue roof the first time I passed Marin County Civic Center from the highway. And Florida Southern in Lakeland is spectacularly good.

> contrary not just to the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown but to the aesthetics of the last 150 years.

I have a half-developed theory that the reason NIMBY and excessive use of listed building conservation are so popular is that most people don't like the aesthetics of postwar architecture. They not unreasonably assume that anything new will be ugly and/or user-hostile and campaign against it.

(London managed the extreme of user-hostile architecture, a building that could set random onlookers on fire https://londonist.com/london/history/walkie-talkie-death-ray )

I also think the "decorated shed" category is unnecessarily dismissive of good decoration. St. Pancras station, famously saved by John Betjeman, count as a "decorated shed" by this categorization.

Thanks for this, I've never thought about it that way before. I've never liked cosmetic structural-looking parts, but I've never thought about the fact that had the architect been instructed to have no cosmetic parts, they might have been included as structural parts anyway, making them impossible to remove!

The point made isn't that the architect should have build a duck, it's that the decor they picked for the shed was inadvisable.

They weren't criticized for simply existing without purpose. They were criticized for blocking the view of multiple points of interest and confusing navigation.