The Guild House, a residential building in Philadelphia, was the first major work by American architect Robert Venturi. Guild House was commissioned by the Friends Neighborhood Guild, as low-income housing for the elderly and built in 1960–63. Along with the Vanna Venturi House, it is considered to be one of the earliest expressions of Postmodern architecture and helped establish Venturi as one of the leading architects of the 20th century. Guild House represented a conscious rejection of Modernist ideals and was widely cited in the subsequent development of the Postmodern movement.
Exterior
Guild House is a six-story building with a symmetrical facade that steps outward to a monumental, classically ordered entrance pavilion. The facade is anchored by a thick column of polished black granite and crowned with a large arched window opening onto the building's upstairs common area. A large block-letter sign above the entrance spells the name of the building, while the roof was originally crowned with an oversize, nonfunctional television antenna serving as both an abstract sculptural element and a literal representation of the inhabitants' chief pastime.
Philosophy
The building's architecture combines historical forms with "banal" 20th-century commercialism. Venturi later explained his "decorated shed" philosophy:
"The symbolism of the decoration happens to be ugly and ordinary with a dash of ironic heroic and original, and the shed is straight ugly and ordinary, though in its brick and windows it is symbolic too"
Interior
The building contains 91 apartment units. The stepped organization of the facade allowed most of the units to have south, east, or west-facing windows, giving the inhabitants sunlight and a view of the street below.
