The Next Best Thing

Faced with the loss of its decorated shed, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates finds new use for old cladding.

by Abby Bussel  photographs by Tom Bernard

June 2006 The decorated shed isn’t what it used to be, its visage now as banal as its skin and bones. The promiscuous repetition of the big-box store has homogenized the commercial strip. Today’s “ugly and ordinary” is harder to love.
To make matters worse, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s seminal Best Products Catalog Showroom (1978) is a shadow of its former self. Its joyfully flowered panels—inspired by the wallpaper in the architects’ own bedroom—are gone. The original steel-and-concrete structure is now wrapped in a reflective-glass skin. It’s still a generic loft, but it is no longer a decorated shed. And the world is poorer for it. 
The situation, however, is not entirely dire. This month—as a group of doctors and dentists unpack their equipment in the former showroom building at the Oxford Valley Mall in Langhorne, Pennsylvania—about a quarter of the porcelain-enameled steel panels will have been relocated. Having learned of Best’s significance from the architect they’d hired to remodel the building, the new owners contacted Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA) and arranged to donate panels to several arts institutions through the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives, where the firm’s prolific production is being cataloged.
VSBA principal James Kolker supervised the disassembly process. Most of the cladding was in very good condition, he notes, especially on the upper portion of the façade, which “says a lot about the durability of the panels.” Of the 287 that were saved, small groupings of the panels now reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Denver Art Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; eight are on view at the latter through the autumn.
And in another satisfying turn of events, the big flowers will not only be on public display as works of art but will decorate a new shed on the grounds of the Acadia Summer Arts Program in Mount Desert Island, Maine, where VSBA has previously built a shed in the form of a Greek temple and a library/studio in the shape of a giant “A.” The firm has designed a two-story, 1,200-square-foot volume clad in western red cedar that will house maintenance vehicles in the off-season and operate as an artists’ studio in the summer. The flowered panels of Langhorne will be replanted this summer onto freestanding walls (fastened to a lightweight steel support structure with a modified clip system, similar to the original one) that will be installed just outside the little garage/studio.
That the Best panels have traveled north to live among the A-frames, capes, cabins, and lobster shacks of the “Maine Strip,” as VSBA refers to it, is a full-circle moment in the realm of poetic justice.