Guild House

Guild House was Venturi's second built commission and his first public statement: a six-storey home for elderly residents built by a Quaker charity in a working-class neighbourhood of North Philadelphia. Rather than disguise its ordinariness, Venturi advertised it — an oversized gold-anodised aluminium sculpture of a TV aerial (removed after the client objected to its cost) was meant to crown the roof, and the words GUILD HOUSE still run in giant lettering across the white base of the facade, at the scale of a supermarket sign rather than a cornice. Above it, plain brick punctuated by ordinary double-hung windows is broken only by a single applied arch, its curve left visibly separate from the balconies and iron balustrades set inside it — quotation, not integration. Built for a limited budget between 1960 and 1963 with Cope and Lippincott as associate architects, the building's polished black granite entrance column and its self-consciously "ugly and ordinary" materials were, at the time, read by most critics as a joke; Venturi meant them as an argument. It was added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in 2004.