Robert Charles Venturi, Jr.

(born June 25, 1925) is an American architect, founding

principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major architectural figures in
the twentieth century. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped to shape the
way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the American
built environment. Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings and teaching have also contributed to
the expansion of discourse about architecture.

Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991; the prize was awarded to him alone,
despite a request to include his equal partner Denise Scott Brown. A group of women architects
attempted to get her name added retroactively to the prize, but the Pritzker Prize jury declined to do
so.[1][2][3] Venturi is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore", a postmodern antidote to
Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more". Venturi lives in Philadelphia with
Denise Scott Brown.
Venturi taught later at the Yale School of Architecture and was a visiting lecturer with Scott Brown in
2003 at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.
A controversial critic of the blithely functionalist and symbolically vacuous architecture of corporate
modernism during the 1950s, Venturi has been considered a counterrevolutionary. He published his
"gentle manifesto, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" in 1966, described in the
introduction by Vincent Scully to be "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture
since Le Corbusier's 'Vers Une Architecture', of 1923." Derived from course lectures at the University
of Pennsylvania, Venturi received a grant from the Graham Foundation in 1965 to aid in its
completion. The book demonstrated, through countless examples, an approach to understanding
architectural composition and complexity, and the resulting richness and interest. Drawing from both
vernacular and high-style sources, Venturi introduced new lessons from the buildings of architects
both familiar (Michelangelo, Alvar Aalto) and then forgotten (Frank Furness, Edwin Lutyens). He
made a case for "the difficult whole" rather than the diagrammatic forms popular at the time, and
included examplesboth built and unrealizedof his own work to demonstrate the possible
application of the techniques illustrated within. The book has been translated and published in 18
languages.

Immediately hailed as a theorist and designer with radical ideas, Venturi went to teach a series of
studios at the Yale School of Architecture in the mid-1960s. The most famous of these was a studio in
1968 in which Venturi and Scott Brown, together with Steven Izenour, led a team of students to
document and analyze the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the least likely subject for a serious research
project imaginable. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour published the folio, A Significance for
A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas later revised in 1977 as Learning from Las Vegas: the
Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form using the student work as a foil for new theory. This
second manifesto was an even more stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural
tastes. The book coined the terms "Duck" and "Decorated Shed"--descriptions of the two predominant
ways of embodying iconography in buildings. The work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown adopted
the latter strategy, producing formally simple "decorated sheds" with rich, complex and often shocking
ornamental flourishes. Though he and his wife co-authored several additional books at the end of the
century, these two have proved most influential.
The architecture of Robert Venturi, although perhaps not as familiar today as his books, helped
redirect American architecture away from a widely practiced, often banal, modernism in the 1960s to
a more exploratory design approach that openly drew lessons from architectural history and
responded to the everyday context of the American city.[8] Venturi's buildings typically juxtapose
architectural systems, elements and aims, to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent in a project or
site. This "inclusive" approach contrasted with the typical modernist effort to resolve and unify all
factors in a complete and rigidly structuredand possibly less functional and more simplisticwork
of art. The diverse range of buildings of Venturi's early career offered surprising alternatives to then
current architectural practice, with "impure" forms (such as the North Penn Visiting Nurses
Headquarters), apparently casual asymmetries (as at the Vanna Venturi House), and pop-style
supergraphics and geometries (for instance, the Lieb House).



Chapel at the Episcopal Academy, Newtown Square, PA. (2010)
Venturi created the firm Venturi and Short with William Short in 1960. After John Rauch replaced
Short as partner in 1964, the firm's name changed to Venturi and Rauch. Venturi married Denise
Scott Brown on July 23, 1967 in Santa Monica, California, and in 1969, Scott Brown joined the firm as
partner in charge of planning. In 1980, The firm's name became Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, and
after Rauch's resignation in 1989, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. The firm, based in
Philadelphia, was awarded the Architecture Firm Award by the American Institute of Architects in
1985. Recent work has included many commissions from academic institutions, including campus
planning and university buildings, and civic buildings in London, Toulouse and Japan.

Venturi's architecture has had world-wide influence, beginning in the late 1960s with the
dissemination of the broken-gable roof of the Vanna Venturi House and the segmentally arched
window and interrupted string courses of Guild House. The playful variations on vernacular house
types seen in the Trubeck and Wislocki Houses offered a new way to embrace, but transform, familiar
forms. The facade patterning of the Oberlin Art Museum and the laboratory buildings demonstrated a
treatment of the vertical surfaces of buildings that is both decorative and abstract, drawing from
vernacular and historic architecture while still being modern. Venturi's work arguably provided a key
influence at important times in the careers of architects Robert A. M. Stern, Philip Johnson, Michael
Graves, Graham Gund and James Stirling, among others.

Venturi is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the American Institute of Architects, The
American Academy of Arts and Letters and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British
Architects.
Selected works:
Vanna Venturi House; Philadelphia (1964) won the AIA Twenty-five Year Award and was
recognized as a "Masterwork of Modern American Architecture" by the United States Postal
Service in May 2005.
Guild House; Philadelphia (1964)
Fire Station #4; Columbus, Indiana (1968)
Trubek and Wislocki Houses; Nantucket, Massachusetts (1971)
Brant House; Greenwich, Connecticut (1972)
Dixwell Fire Station, New Haven, CT (1974)
Allen Memorial Art Museum modern addition, Oberlin College; Oberlin, Ohio (1976)
BASCO Showroom; Philadelphia (1976)
Franklin Court; Philadelphia (1976)
Best Products Catalog Showroom; Langhorne, Pennsylvania (1978)
Coxe-Hayden House and Studio; Block Island, Rhode Island (1981)
Gordon Wu Hall; Princeton University, New Jersey (1983)
House in New Castle, Delaware (1983)
Lewis Thomas Laboratory, Princeton University, New Jersey (1986)
House in East Hampton, Long Island, New York (1990)
Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Medical Research Laboratories, UCLA; Los Angeles, California
(1991)
Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London; United Kingdom (1991)
Seattle Art Museum; Seattle, Washington (1991)
Children's Museum; Houston, Texas (1992)
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; California (1996)
Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri Resort; Nikko National Park, Japan (1997)
Gonda (Goldschmied) Neurosciences and Genetics Research Center, UCLA; Los Angeles,
California (1998)
Provincial Capitol Building; Toulouse, France (1999)
Frist Campus Center, Princeton University; New Jersey (2000)
Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College; Hanover, New Hampshire (2002)
Dumbarton Oaks Library, Harvard University; Washington, D.C. (2005)
Their Design Strategies:
Although they are well known as theoreticians, Robert Venturie and Denise Scott Brown argue that
theory should not dominate design process. In fact Robert Venturi argues strongly that the "the artist
is not someone who designs in order to prove his or her theory and certainly not to suit an ideology"
.... "Any building that tries merely to express a theory or any building that starts with a theory and
works very deductively is very dry, so we say that we work inductively."
They both feel that designers should be prepared to learn more by copying from the masters, and
complain that in recent years, students have been taught not to copy. Paradoxically, Denise Scott
Brown points out that they copy ideologies. Robert Venturi says that "it is better to be good than to be
original."
Venturi says "You have to have something basic that you either build on or evolve from or revolt
against. You have to have something there in the first place and the only way to get it is to copy, in a
good sense of the word."
They acknowledge the central importance of drawing in their design process. They consider it
essential for designers to have what Denise Scott Brown refers to as "a facility between hand and
mind". Sometimes the hand does something that the eye then re-interprets and you get an idea from
it.
According to them "People who can draw very well and who control line weight well in hand technique
are the ones who use the computer imaginatively".
Robert Venturi believes that even when talking "you suddenly see something else out of the corner of
your eye and you think of something you wouldn't have done otherwise." He believes that ideas come
quickly and easily while on other projects "the idea only comes after great struggle and agony."
Less Is a Bore - 1966
Robert Venturi Book
In the middle of the 1960s, few critics were questioning the received orthodoxy of modernist theory.
But Robert Venturis 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, served as an early
manifesto against strict black and white modernism.
Calling for more richness and ambiguity, Venturi proposed that architects should consider "black
and white and sometimes gray." Rebutting Mies, he declared, Blatant simplification means bland
architecture. Less is a bore."
In the coming years, Venturi would gain allies, but not before modernisms champions and defenders
put up a strong fight.
Charles Jencks argues that postmodern architecture "contrast(s) with the older notion of
classical rules in being understood as relative rather than absolute, responses to a world of
fragmentation, pluralism and inflation rather than formulae to be applied indiscriminately." (330)
1. The most obvious new convention concerns beauty and composition. Instead of Renaissance
harmony and Modernist integration, we have dissonant beauty or disharmonious harmony. In a new
pluralist society an oversimplified unity is either false or unchallenging. The juxtaposition of tastes and
world views is more real than modernism was prepared to allow. This also comes from contemporary
science's conviction that the universe is dynamic and changing. Classical forms have mirrored a
universe that was static and in harmony. The Renaissance gave us architecture that was well
proportioned, on Greek lines, and mirrored the microcosm and the macrocosm. Now, we don't have
any one theory of the microcosm that is "true".
2. Pluralism is also important. Stylistic variety is important, and the celebration of difference is always
apparent. Different "languages" of art and architecture are mixed together. It is not just a matter of
whim, but is tied to specific functions and symbolic intentions. Ambiguity is often valued it is up to
the reader to supply the "unifying text".
3. Postmodern architects try to achieve an urbane urbanism. New buildings should both fit into and
extend the urban context, reuse such constants as the street, arcade and piazza, yet acknowledge
too the new technologies and means of transportation. Elements of the city must be balanced public
to private, working to living, monument to infill, short blocks to city grid. This will end up looking more
like the 18th century European city, where you have small blocks and mixed-use planning, rather than
the modern overcentralised city.
4. Anthropomorphism is another important trait. Many postmodern architects incorporate ornaments
and mouldings suggestive of the human body. There might be a hidden or suggested face, for
instance, or a full figure.
5. Another theme is the continuum between the past and the present. Recall that for modernism there
is a positive break with the past. In postmodern architecture there is parody, nostalgia, and pastiche.
It is almost like a half-remembered dream bits of classical reference. The technical term is
"anamnesis" suggested recollection, or unforgetting.
6. There is a kind of return to painting in postmodernism, although it is a return that does not simply
replicate the modernist search for form. There is a return to content. There is no sense that we are
looking for the pure "spiritual" form, but rather we are playing with the images of the past, without the
narrative of the past.
7. Postmodernism uses double-coding, irony, ambiguity, and contradiction. The unexpected is
incorporated. Opposites are juxtaposed.
8. When several codes are used coherently they produce another quality, multivalence. A univalent
work or building attempts to refer only to itself. A multivalent building reaches out to the rest of its
environment and makes different associations. This ensures that a work will have multiple
resonances, and different readings.
9. This multivalence comes only with the displacement of conventions and the reinterpretation of
tradition. A classical form may be pressed into new service, and look strange to begin with but
actually make sense once you understand the references.
10. Postmodernists also try to elaborate new rhetorical figures.
11. Postmodernism finally has a return to an absent centre. It has always been linked with other
"posts": post-western, post-Christian. It suggests a culture that has a sense of departure, but no clear
sense of direction. We don't have any grand narratives anymore, but we are led back to ourselves
and our "petit recit" through the work of the postmodernists. And, just as post-industrial incorporates
the industrial as well (it is not a repudiation or abandonment), so the post-modern incorporates the
modern as well.