Venturi Storefront
| Venturi Storefront | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Collection | Redacted Remilio Babies |
| Category | Background |
| References | Best Products "Indeterminate Facade" showroom, Houston, Texas (SITE, 1975) |
| Count | 95 |
| Rarity | 0.95% |
Venturi Storefront is a background trait in the Redacted Remilio Babies NFT collection, depicting the "Indeterminate Facade" Best Products showroom in Houston, Texas, designed by the architecture and environmental arts organization SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) in 1975. Despite the trait's name, the building is not a work of Robert Venturi.
Background
Best Products was an American retail chain that between 1971 and 1984 commissioned a series of radical facade designs for its showrooms from SITE, an architecture and environmental arts organization founded by James Wines. The resulting buildings — featuring facades that appeared to be crumbling, peeling, or fragmenting away from the structure — became some of the most discussed works of postmodern architecture and were widely reproduced in architectural publications.
The Houston showroom, known as the "Indeterminate Facade," featured intentionally crumbling brickwork along its roofline, designed to appear as though the building was in a state of permanent, arrested decay. Although SITE founder James Wines never considered himself a Postmodernist architect, his designs for BEST, completed between 1972 and 1984, came to symbolize the essence of Postmodernism. The showrooms were praised as meaningful societal criticism or vilified for ignoring a humanist discourse in favor of rhetorical games. Most of the SITE Best showrooms have since been demolished or altered beyond recognition.
The trait's name likely conflates SITE's Best showrooms with Robert Venturi, who did design a separate Best Products showroom facade in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, and whose theoretical writing on postmodern commercial architecture — particularly Learning from Las Vegas (1972), co-authored with Denise Scott Brown — is closely associated with the aesthetic world the Best showrooms occupied.