Mannerism as a Critical Tool. Projecting the VSBA Method into the Future

Giorgio Vasari used the term ‘maniera’ to describe the peculiar style of an author. But along with style, the maniera bears with it all the author’s manias, obsessions and prejudices. Roberto Longhi described 16th century mannerists as usually moody, temperamental, often introverted. The adjectives of biographers were almost always the same: wild, strange, suspicious, melancholic, lonely. The term mannerism was coined in the 17th century in a denigrating form and is still used to identify the maniera of those artists who refer to a school, the typical pupils who grew up in a prominent master’s workshop. But the imitation of the masters is not passive copying but creative interpreting, which paves the way to variation, to exaggeration but also to in-depth analysis and overturning, and even to what today we would call deconstruction. Robert Venturi conceived mannerism as a kind of impatience with regulatory apparatuses and conventions, a tendency towards challenging the rules of the game, practiced by those who know those rules all too well. Prominent architects and intellectuals, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have proclaimed their belief in mannerism as a method. In order to pursue an in-depth analysis in the folds of authorship, their work will be scrutinized as an exemplary case of the manifestation, acme and overcoming of mannerism, from Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) to Architecture as Signs and Systems. For a Mannerist Time (2004) going through Learning from Las Vegas (1972). VSBA believed that mannerism had an evolutionary character and that it could also point to a specific direction for the age of multiculturalism, where complexities and contradictions are no longer just a matter of form. After unfolding mannerism as a method, it will be possible to project this supra-historical category into the future and use it as a critical tool.