Guild House (Philadelphia)

Guild House
South elevation, 2011
General information
Architectural style	Postmodern
Address	711 Spring Garden St.
Town or city	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Country	United States
Coordinates	39°57′42″N 75°09′03″W / 39.9618°N 75.1507°W / 39.9618; -75.1507Coordinates: 39°57′42″N 75°09′03″W / 39.9618°N 75.1507°W / 39.9618; -75.1507
Construction started	1960
Completed	1963
Technical details
Floor count	6
Design and construction
Architecture firm	Venturi and Rauch with Cope and Lippincott
Philadelphia Register of Historic Places
Designated	2004

Guild House is a residential building in Philadelphia which is an important and influential work of 20th-century architecture and was the first major work by Robert Venturi. 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.

The building, which houses apartments for low-income senior citizens, was commissioned by a local Quaker organization, Friends Rehabilitation Program, Inc. and completed in 1963. Employing a combination of nondescript commercial architecture and ironic historical references, Guild House represented a conscious rejection of Modernist ideals and was widely cited in the subsequent development of the Postmodern movement.

Guild House was commissioned by the (Quaker) Friends Neighborhood Guild, a subsidiary of Friends Rehabilitation Program, Inc., as low-income housing for the elderly and built in 1960–63. It was designed by Venturi and Rauch in collaboration with Cope and Lippincott, another Philadelphia firm. In 2004, the building was added to the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places despite being barely 40 years old at the time.

The building's architecture combines historical forms with "banal" 20th-century commercialism, hiding a "slyly intellectual agenda" behind its "apparent ordinariness". As Venturi wrote, "Economy dictated not 'advanced' architectural elements, but 'conventional' ones. We did not resist this." The architects used red clay brick and "inelegant" double-hung windows to recall existing public housing projects and express "kinship with neighboring inner-city structures", along with a subtle use of ironic ornamental details "intended in some way to express the lives of the elderly."

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. The ground floor entrance is highlighted with white glazed brick, while a "perfunctory"string course in the middle of the fifth floor terminates the facade. According to Venturi, the combination of the latter two elements "sets up a new and larger scale of three stories, juxtaposed on the other smaller scale of six stories demarked by the layer of windows." 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.