Robert Venturi
American Architect
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Summary of Robert Venturi
Robert Venturi was one of the most influential figures in late 20th-century architecture. He initiated an assault of Mies van der Rohe's minimalist - "less is more" - International Style, arguing instead for an architecture that celebrated history, stylistic diversity, and even irreverent humour. Venturi's famous retort - "less is a bore" - came to symbolize the very spirit of the Postmodern era (not just in architecture, but in art and design more widely) and laid the foundations for the late-20th century's highly influential Deconstructivist movement. Indeed, if pioneering Modernists van der Rohe and Le Corbusier were the most influential architects of the first half of the twentieth century, then Venturi can lay legitimate claim to an equivalent status in its second half. Venturi also enjoyed a highly distinguished teaching and writing career, and authored/co-authored two of the most provocative and influential design books of the second half of the 20th century. His argument that a Las Vagas hotdog kiosk could be taken as seriously as a cathedral sent shockwaves throughout an industry crying out for new directions.
Accomplishments
- Venturi authored two books that rethought Modernist orthodoxies in architecture. Complexity and Contradiction (1966), and, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (1972) made the case for a design practice that drew on all eras of architectural history while at the same time imploring practitioners to embrace the "everyday landscape" and the "vulgar and disdained". Venturi's celebration of the "tawdry" Las Vegas strip helped bring definition to what is now recognized as the age of Postmodernism.
- Venturi's groundbreaking work, Vanna Venturi House, completed in 1964, saw him lay down a marker for the future of architecture. A simple one story residence (designed for his recently widowed mother), the façade represents Venturi's love of classical Roman architecture while the rear is more in keeping with the modernist teachings of Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto. The structure is today widely recognized as the first Postmodern structure, and the first evidence of Venturi's complex and contradictory style.
- Throughout his long career, Venturi encompassed a range of styles drawn from the history of architecture. Unlike many leading architects, he did not develop a trademark style. Venturi preferred to design his works in accordance with the buildings' function and its immediate surroundings. His Guild House seniors' apartment block (1965), for example, announce its function through oversized frontage ("GUILD HOUSE"), and a playful decorative aluminum antenna on the roof to reflect the residents' chief pastime (of watching television). By basing his design on the proportions of a classical Renaissance palace, moreover, Venturi's expressed his willingness to embrace and celebrate the nuances and contradictions that would liberate architecture from the minimalist limitations of Modernism.
- In the late 1980s, Venturi, with his wife and professional partner, Denise Scott Brown, expanded his portfolio when he ventured into chair design for the Knoll furniture company. The Venturi Collection brought a flamboyant decorative vision to a range of historical chair designs including Queen Anne, Chippendale, Art Nouveau, Gothic Revival and Art Deco. The chairs have since become icons of late 20th century Postmodern design, with The Queen Anne chair now part of the permanent collections of top museums.
The Life of Robert Venturi
Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, said of Venturi, "[He] opened millions of eyes and whole new ways of thinking about the richness of our architectural environment, and whose diverse work with Denise Scott Brown contains a mix of wit and humanity that continues to transcend labels and time".
Progression of Art
Vanna Venturi House
The Vanna Venturi House - "my mother's house" as he preferred to call it - took Venturi over six years to design and signaled his departure from the Modernist model. The project began after Venturi's father's death in 1959 and his mother, Vanna, wanted a smaller home and asked her 34 year-old son to design one for a plot in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. Venturi, who was yet to complete a building, was teaching architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Vanna's brief could hardly be more simple: a one-story home without a garage. The Vanna Venturi House, completed five years later, would gain iconic status, largely on the strength of its facade. Venturi's wife, Denise Scott Brown, noted later that the house was inspired by Michelangelo's Porta Pia in Rome, highlighting the disconnection between the front and back of the building. She remarked, "If you look carefully at this teeny, little house, which is just one room wide, it has all the aspirations of a Michelangelo. You get the Queen Anne front and the Mary Anne behind. Or you could say Michelangelo and Suburbia on the front, and Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto at the back. I love it for that tension".
The house was influenced by classical elements and 1960s Pop Art, and featuring a prominent gable, a recessed porch, and an off-center chimney (showcasing Venturi's playful sense of "architectural mischief"). The gable has a vertical opening in its center and is placed on the long side of the building, distorting its scale. There is no matching gable at the back, and the arch above the door serves no functional purpose. Originally painted taupe gray, the house was later repainted pale green to better blend with its suburban surroundings. Inside, the house features five rooms arranged around a central hearth and staircase, reflecting city planning ideologies taught at the University of Pennsylvania. The living room is central, with the dining space and kitchen on one side, the master bedroom and utility room on the other, and an attic bedroom above. Venturi had a great love for old colonial houses and their central fireplaces. The fireplace in the Vanna Venturi House, at the foot of a wrapped around staircase, provided heating for the whole the house.
Architect and author Frederic Schwartz described the house as "both straightforward and idiosyncratic", and that its simple facade conceals an intellectual complexity. Italian architect Aldo Rossi praised the building for "liberating architecture in America and elsewhere", while American architect Peter Eisenman called it "the first American building to propose an ideological break with Modern abstraction at the same time that it is rooted in this tradition". Although the house was credited to Venturi and John Rauch, the latter's role, which involves overseeing the strategy, construction, finances, and contracts, is often underappreciated in reviews of the house. Venturi once commented that Rauch was "a very good architect and one of the best design critics I have ever known" and referred to him affectionately as his "Rauch of Gibraltar" (a pun on the "Rock of Gibraltar" a symbol of strength, stability, and endurance).
Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia
The Guild House
Venturi was commissioned by the Friends Neighborhood Guild to design a block as part of its housing project for low-income seniors. The 91 apartment Guild House signifies Venturi's departure from the formulaic International Style by adapting his design to reflect the apartment building's function and surroundings. Architectural critic Saumya Verma writes, "The stepped facade respects the line of the street, although the building is retracted on the sides. Dark red bricks are applied to match the smog-smudged ones of the neighborhood. A column of black granite greets the visitor in the middle of the entrance portal, contrasting with the stripe of the white glaze coating. The stripe divides the building into three uneven stories - the basement, the principal story, and the attic, contradicting the scale of the six equal floors on which it is imposed. Thus, it contradicts the machine-like divisions of modernism, and instead, suggests the proportions of a Renaissance palace".
These formal aspects anticipate Venturi's famous philosophy of the "decorated shed" (introduced in his 1972 book, Learning From Las Vegas) where ornamental and symbolic elements are applied to a basic structural form. Here, for example, the building literally spells out "GUILD HOUSE" in large letters above the entryway. The central arched window (on the sixth floor), meanwhile, resembling a fanlight, appears oversized and was crowned, not with a keystone, but with a television antenna. Venturi's use of a gold anodized aluminum antenna sculpture as a purely decorative feature, underscored his playful approach to design. The antenna, intended to symbolize the residents' main leisure activity (and later removed having been misinterpreted as a "cynical joke" by Venturi), was emblematic of Venturi's departure from Modernist austerity and his eagerness to celebrate the nuances and contradictions in architecture.
The Guild House underwent renovation in 2009 (under Venturi's direction). Heating, fire prevention and security facilities were modernized, but Venturi also created a new wellness area in the basement comprising of fitness and recreational equipment, and additional lounge and laundry spaces. Venturi remarked, "I remember passing it many years later when someone who was sitting next to me looked at it and said, I don't get what all the business was about this building. And I took that as a compliment". Verma concludes that "even with its reputation of being ugly and ordinary [...] It remains a widely cited structure and a steppingstone to the Postmodern movement".
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Illustration from Learning From Las Vegas
Venturi was author of two tomes that, between them, altered the very fundamentals of contemporary practice in architecture. Complexity and Contradiction (1966), and Learning From Las Vegas (1972), which he co-authored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, have become known collectively as Venturi's "gentle manifesto". Venturi used the books to argue for a design approach that drew on all aspects of architectural history. Toward the end of Complexity and Contradiction, moreover, he called for architects to look towards the "everyday landscape, vulgar and disdained" as a way of inspiring "architecture as an urbanistic whole". His ideas would reach their apotheosis six years later with the publication of Learning From Las Vegas. Venturi set out his stall in the book's introduction: "Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect, not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way". The book was to become a landmark text in 20th century urban studies. Indeed, Learning From Las Vegas inspired the next generation of architectural practitioners and sparked impassioned discussions on the virtues of modernist and postmodernist approaches to architectural design and planning.
In 1969, Venturi and Scott Brown led a Yale University architecture studio study of Las Vegas. The group undertook an exhaustive analysis of the architectural form and character of what was thought at that time to be a messy and tasteless "sin city". Having studied signage, building facades and casino interiors, Venturi had the temerity to place it in an architectural pantheon that dated back to ancient Rome. Venturi argued that, until the era of Modernism, iconography, symbolism and ornamentation were routine features of building design, and that Las Vegas was merely a stylistic extension of what had been passed down through the centuries. The book remains perhaps best known for the introduction of the two categories of building styles: one called a "Duck"; the other a "Decorated Shed". The "duck" represents a building that uses its form and volume to express its program and meaning (a hotdog shaped kiosk that dispenses hot dogs, for example) . A "decorated shed", on the other hand, relies on signage and imagery to convey its function. In an afront to minimalist modernist principals, these Las Vegas buildings and structures celebrated ornamentation, visual references, and symbolism.
In addition to the text, the book features many photographs taken by Scott Brown. As the Urban Design Library describes, "There are striking grids of photographs illustrating apple-to-apple comparisons of different typologies, such as casinos: their panoramas, fronts, sides, parts, entrances and parking arrangements; or petrol stations and the variance in their brand expression. The graphics too are radical and instructive. They tell many stories: from the distribution of rent-a-car spaces to the footprint of hotels to illumination levels at night. Intricate monochromatic analytical maps are drawn with a care that likely would have impressed Nolli [the architect and surveyor known for his copper plated maps of Rome, Nuova Topografia di Roma, 1748] himself. They are works of art in their own right, and in choosing to portray such a lowbrow place with such care, they elevate the very place itself". By championing the ugly and the ordinary, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, compelled architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of the "common people". Architecture professor Aaron Betsky states that such is the influence of the books we have reached "the point now that we cannot think of architecture since 1966 without reference to Robert Venturi. [He] did not just beget (or at least act as godfather to) Postmodernism, he changed the whole way we look at and think about how to make modern architecture".
Best Products Showroom
In 1960, Venturi established the Venturi and Short firm with William Short, an American architect who helped lay the foundations for its success. In 1964, John Rauch replaced Short as partner, and the firm was renamed Venturi and Rauch. Rauch brought a more pragmatic approach to project management, construction, and client relations, complementing Venturi's more creative design innovations. Indeed, Rauch was instrumental in helping the firm secure hundreds of contracts for notable institutional designs across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Denise Scott Brown joined the Venturi and Rauch firm as the partner in charge of planning in 1969. (Venturi's firm was rebranded as Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown, later, in 1980, and Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates following Rauch's resignation in 1989.)
In 1978 Best Products, the catalog showroom retail chain, commissioned Venturi and Rauch to design the façade for its showroom in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. Venturi and Scott Brown frequently described themselves as Pop architects, and their joint design was inspired by Andy Warhol's flower paintings, and the wallpaper in their own bedroom. The end result was a pattern of large abstracted red and white flowers, spread across panels of porcelain steel. The showroom itself was located in an area of huge parking lots next to a vast shopping mall. Given that the showroom was situated within a clutch of such uniform structures, and with no outfacing windows, Venturi brought a conspicuous presence to a building in an inconspicuous location. The design, which covered only the building's front, conformed to the idea, first expressed by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour in in their groundbreaking volume, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), of the "decorated shed". They used the term to describe mundane structures, covered in large, eye-catching decoration and typography, in order to announce to all the building's interior function.
Langhorne, Pennsylvania
House in New Castle County
Venturi designed this house, in collaboration with John Rauch and Denise Scott Brown, for a family of three living in northern Delaware. It reflects his advocacy for "messy vitality over obvious unity" and the championship of an architecture that embraces contradiction rather than a unified form. Venturi has noted that the design is influenced by classic eighteenth-century barns, although these traditional buildings served more as inspiration than precise templates. In reality, the bulbous columns are thin, non-load-bearing wooden planes. Symbolic rather than structural, they maintain their associative power even when stripped of their functional role, turning the facade into a stage set for dramatizing domesticity and local architectural heritage. The front of the house features a floating arched screen that awkwardly rises from the lower edge of the gable, reminiscent of a highway billboard. Venturi suggested that this feature had roots in Austrian Baroque architecture and is also akin to a garden gate such as those found on Victorian houses. Additionally, given the owners' interest in bird watching, the screen may have served as a blind, concealing the large observation windows behind it.
The rear facade is even more intricate, dominated by another prominent arched screen framed by the gabled roof's edges. Supported by what appear to be Doric columns, these almost flat cut-outs carry minimal weight and enclose the recessed porch. The right column grows from the adjoining wall, while the left column is humorously split by an aluminum drainpipe. This classical, yet slightly cartoonish design, gives the house a grand, yet whimsical appearance.
In photographs dating from the time of its completion, the spacious interiors of the New Castle County House appear simple and comfortable, adorned with wood decorations inspired by various 19th-century design traditions. The painted arches in the vaulted music room, quirky chandeliers, and perforated wall patterns exhibit a straightforward, craftsman-like quality, as if hand-cut or jig sawed. Conspicuously two-dimensional, their fanciful silhouettes evoke Victorian and Shaker styles, contributing to the house's charming and eclectic character. Venturi's statement of "Less is a bore" is fully evident in the house's design, which includes a jumble of large and small windows, varying rooflines, and the unexpected decorative elements.
Delaware, USA
The Venturi Collection: Queen Anne Chair
In the early 1980s, Venturi and Scott Brown expanded their portfolio when they created a collection of chairs for the iconic furniture designers, Knoll. In so doing they joined the distinguished list of designers including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, Anni Albers, Harry Bertoia, and Marcel Lajos Breuer (all of whom had been commissioned by Knoll). The couple's goal was modernist in principle: to make quality furniture items, using low cost materials that allowed for mass production. However, with their typical feel for humor and flamboyance, they bucked the modernist ideal with their highly decorative styling founded on historical furniture designs as diverse as Queen Anne, Chippendale, Art Nouveau, Gothic Revival and Art Deco. In his original pitch to Knoll, Venturi stated, "What I propose is a series of chairs, tables, and bureaus that adapt a series of historical styles involving wit, variety, and industrial process, and consisting of a flat profile in a decorative shape".
The Queen Anne chair was based on the furniture style developed during the reign of the British monarch (between 1702 and 1714). Architecture critic Byron Wilson wrote "The most distinctive pattern added to the designs was the grandmother print. Venturi and Scott Brown combined the repeat of a tablecloth belonging to American architect Frederic Schwartz's grandmother with a flecked black and white motif commonly found on the front of school notebooks". The Queen Anne turned out to be Scott Brown's personal favorite of the collection because, as she put it, "a bulge in the shape of the seat back helped relieve her back pain". However, the fact that it was marketed by Knoll as part of "The Venturi Collection" did not go unnoticed.
Wilson writes, "Knoll stopped producing the chairs in 1990, but they quickly became collectible items. The Queen Anne now features in the permanent collections of institutions including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art and recently featured in the latter's Designing Modern Women Exhibition, which explored how women shaped 20th-century design". But, as Wilson points out, "At the time [of the collection's launch] all of the credit for the chairs was given to Venturi and, despite Scott Brown's requests, Knoll still doesn't recognise her contribution to the project - a recurring issue for the architect". Wilson adds that, in 2013, Scott Brown "asked to be retrospectively acknowledged for her role in her husband's work, which earned him the 1991 Pritzker Prize. A petition supporting her bid was signed by Zaha Hadid, Farshid Moussavi and Hani Rashid - and Venturi himself backed the campaign - but it was rejected by the jury for the prestigious architecture award". In 2016, the Venturi and Scott Brown were jointly awarded the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal Award, the first ever given to a collaborative pair, and the first to a living female architect. (Venturi had refused to accept it alone.)
Manufactured by Knoll International, Inc. American, founded 1938 - East Greenville, Pennsylvania
National Gallery: Sainsbury Wing
Opened in 1991, the Sainsbury Wing (named after the three Sainsbury brothers who funded it) of London's National Gallery features a sophisticated balance of modern and classical elements. Its facade integrates with the existing 1838 building (designed by William Wilkins) through the sourcing of the same Portland limestone, and the aligned cornice heights. At the same time, the Sainsbury Wing introduces new rhythms and harmonies with large square-cut openings and small metal columns, creating an engaging dialogue between old and new. The Sainsbury Wing was conceived of during the tumultuous period that followed Prince (now King) Charles's blunt dismissal of the original design, proposed by Ahrends, Burton, and Koralek (ABK), as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend". Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown (VRSB's) design was then selected through an international competition aimed at reconciling modernist and traditionalist viewpoints.
The Sainsbury Wing aligns historical and geographical sensitivities, with modern functionality and aesthetic innovation. The interior spaces accommodate galleries for early Renaissance art, a lecture theater, and public amenities, while the grand staircase, inspired by Italian palazzi, provides a dramatic procession from the ground floor to the upper galleries. The National Gallery says of the extension: "From the outset, the Sainsbury Wing had been planned as a space where the Gallery could breathe new life into the display of its outstanding collection of early Renaissance paintings. The public could now view the earliest paintings in the collection in a broadly chronological sequence in which pictures from southern and northern Europe were no longer separated but were placed in adjoining rooms. These paintings, mostly religious and devotional pictures or early portraiture, could now be enjoyed in a series of galleries whose interiors are reminiscent of the Italian churches in which many of them would originally have been housed".
In 2019, the Sainsbury Wing received the AIA Twenty-Five Year Award, which recognized its lasting architectural excellence and significance. Architect Charles Holland commented, "[the wing is] only now really being seriously reappraised for its generous relationship to Trafalgar Square [...] the subtle radicalism of its facades, and the wit of its planning. I see it as a love letter to London, with its nods to Lutyens and Soane [two of England's greatest architects] and the clubland classicism of Pall Mall". Mindful of its historical and architectural significance, the Gallery's administration commenced with plans to renovate the wing in 2022. The proposed changes, by Selldorf Architects, aimed to make the entrance space easier to navigate (after the Sainsbury Wing brough a spike in visitor numbers), bring in more natural light to the main foyer, and improve views out onto Trafalgar Square. Critics, including architects and preservationists, voiced strong opposition to the renovation, arguing that the modifications would undermine the wing's unique design and compromise the original's integrity. Selldorf Architects, which revised its plan in response to these criticisms, saw the renovated wing opened to the public in May 2025.
Trafalgar Square, London
Biography of Robert Venturi
Childhood
Robert Venturi was born on June 25, 1925, in Philadelphia. His father, Robert Venturi Senior, was a fruit produce merchant; his mother, Vanna Venturi, was a decorator and homemaker. Vanna collected furniture reproductions and Venturi often drew different chair designs based on his mother's collection. Venturi was raised as a Quaker, a Religious Society of Friends who believe in pacifism, social equality, simplicity, and silent worship.
His early education took place at the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia, where he first demonstrated an aptitude for art and design. Encouraged by his teachers, Venturi developed a keen interest in architecture. His visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and other historical buildings in the city also helped nurture his interests. The architecture of these buildings, with their emphasis on classical form and ornamentation, left a lasting impression on Venturi and helped shape his appreciation for complexity in design.
Early Training and Work
In 1943, Venturi enrolled at Princeton University. He studied under Jean Labatut, a leading French architect, who taught Venturi that buildings should be built both in the minds of the architect and in the minds of the people on the street. Venturi's keen interest in architectural history, meanwhile, was cultivated under the tutorage of Donald Drew Egbert. He graduated with highest honors in 1947 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa (a scholastic distinction in an American college or university) and received the D'Amato Prize in Architecture (presented by Princeton). Venturi gained valuable work experience at Louis Kahn's Philadelphia practice while studying for his M.F.A. (also at Princeston). The architecture school's emphasis on the ornamental Beaux Arts would have a lasting influence on Venturi's own practice and theory. After graduation in 1950, Venturi joined the practice of Oscar Stonorov and Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
In 1954, Venturi was the recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize Fellowship. Over the following two years, he continued his studies at the American Academy in Rome where he developed a love for the city's Baroque and Mannerist monuments. He also took inspiration from classical columns, arches and pediments, especially those attributed to Michelangelo and Borromini. In 1956, he returned to the US and lectured in in architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania (UAP) under Kahn (who was the newly appointed Professor of Architecture). Kahn, considered one America's greatest 20th century architects, was known for combining Modernism with the weight and dignity of ancient monuments. Venturi took on board Kahn's ideas on the relationship between form and function, but he did not buy into the "form follows function" dictum which was advocated for in America by the so-called "father of skyscrapers", Louis Sullivan, and subsequently embraced by Kahn. Venturi pushed, rather, for a more pluralistic approach to architecture; one that could also embrace complexity and contradiction.
Mature Period
In 1958, Venturi set up his own practice, Venturi, Cope, and Lippincott. In the early 1960s, Venturi met Denise Scott Brown, a planner and architect who also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Their shared interests in architecture and urban planning quickly led to a close professional and personal relationship. In 1964, Venturi formed a new practice with architect John Rauch, and, in 1966, published what became known as his "gentle manifesto", Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. He wrote in the (somewhat immodest) introduction that his book was "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers Une Architecture of 1923". His central argument was straightforward: "Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once".
Although Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was filled with historical architectural examples, it was not offered to the reader in the manner of a linear timeline. Venturi placed examples from vastly different periods and cultures side by side - such as a seventeenth-century wooden synagogue in Poland and an outdoor theater by Alvar Aalto, or an Egyptian temple and a Spanish church in Peru - to illustrate that complexity and contradiction have always been inherent in architecture. The book's most biting critique of the International Style was the author's refusal to be bound by it. Indeed, while Mies van der Rohe proclaimed "less is more" Venturi countered with "less is a bore".
In 1966 Venturi served as the Charlotte Davenport Professor of Architecture at the Yale University (a position he held for four years). Venturi and Scott Brown married in 1967. The following year, Venturi, Scott Brown, and UAP alumni and Yale masters student, Steven Izenour, organized a field trip to Las Vegas with a group of eleven students connected with the Yale School of Architecture. The team aimed to analyze the architectural and urban design elements of the Las Vegas Strip. Venturi, who had previously criticized the American highway strip as a "honky-tonk [of] chaos and blight", came to view it with a little more empathy and critical insight. He thought that the omnipotent Las Vegas advertising billboard - with its signage abstracted and enlarged for improved visibility from a fast-moving vehicle - was not too far removed from the Mannerist façade. In 1969, Izenour became a principal in the new firm, Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates (VSBA).
Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour published their findings in Learning from Las Vegas in 1972. The book challenged the minimalist International Style by advocating for the importance of "ordinary" and "ugly" commercial architecture. They categorized buildings as either "Ducks" or "Decorated Sheds". Ducks communicated through their iconic, sculptural shape, like the Parthenon or a hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog. Decorated Sheds were simple, functional boxes that conveyed meaning through applied decoration or detached signage. Approaching Las Vegas with the detached objectivity of an anthropologist proved innovative. Yet despite Learning from Las Vegas's brilliance as a sociological and semiotic analysis of American visual culture, its application in architecture led to unintended consequences. Some of Venturi's followers bypassed the historical depth of the analysis, in favor of the superficial commercial architecture characterized by kitschy cutouts, bright colors, and exaggerated historical references. The book, which was published in 18 languages, nevertheless became a milestone in the development of Postmodern architecture.
In 1977, Scott Brown was made a third partner in Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown (VSBA). Later that year, Venturi unveiled his Eclectic House Series, a collection of sketches of imaginary residential dwellings "with a program for a minimal vacation bungalow, living - dining, bedroom, and bath". VSBA described the project as "a theoretical exercise on the idea of the decorated front and the ordinary or 'Mary-Anne' [elaborate ornamentation] behind". Thus, while the interiors for each unit should remain basic and consistent, the façades represented the company's "radical embrace of history. From ancient Egypt through contemporary commercial architecture, with stops in the Gothic, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau periods, among others, the drawings chart architectural history as imagined in the design of dwellings". The following year, Venturi was made a Fellow at the American Institute of Architecture.
It was around this time, too, that Frank Gehry completed his Gehry Residence (1978), in Santa Monica, California. Rather that use the industrial steel, glass and concrete preferences of the International Style, the Canadian rebuilt his Californian home using hardware-store materials such as corrugated aluminum, unfinished plywood, and chain-link fencing. The asymmetrical Gehry Residence is now identified as the first Deconstructivist building since it gave notice of a new postmodern movement that, while not so indebted to the architectural canon, carried forward many of the irregular stylistic principles that Venturi had promoted.
Late Period
By the 1980s, VSBA was securing significant commissions, including projects for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton campuses. Venturi even referred to William G. Bowen, then president of Princeton, as "my Medici". His use of decorative facades, often with playful brick patterns, helped these colleges bridge the gap between their historic architecture, such as Princeton's Gothic dormitories, and the Modernist, "boxy" forms prevalent in the 20th century. In 1984 Venturi and Scott Brown designed a chair collection for the prestige furniture design company, Knoll. He summed up the project in an interview with the New York Times as follows: "We're not designing the perfect chair or chairs, but a method that can involve many variations. It is the way General Motors can get so many variations from the standard Buick, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile models. Standardisation in our case gives us richness and variety, not the universal chair".
In 1989, Venturi received (amongst his numerous awards) the American Institute of Architecture's Twenty-five year award for Vanna Venturi House (1964), a house built for his mother, that has had an "enduring significance that has withstood the test of time". In 1990, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1991, accepted the United States Presidential Award. On the international stage, meanwhile, Venturi and Scott Brown gained kudos for their addition to the National Gallery in London, which was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, and was celebrated for its eccentricity. The design featured Corinthian columns placed at irregular intervals, reminiscent of a jazz musician improvising on classical themes. Other notable projects included the Seattle Art Museum, also opened in 1991 (and later expanded by Allied Works Architecture), and a government complex in Toulouse, France, both of which used exaggerated classical elements as surface decoration.
Venturi was awarded architecture's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize in 1991. The fact that the award did not recognize Scott Brown was greeted with disappointment by many within the industry. In the later years, VSBA continued to develop their ideas across various projects, including furniture and product designs, houses, institutional commissions, and urban planning programs. Venturi, who retired in 2012, passed away in 2018, aged 93, from complications with Alzheimer's disease.
The Legacy of Robert Venturi
Venturi was a giant amongst 20th century architects. He defied the minimalist austerity of Modernism through a fluid design philosophy that celebrated the architectural canon and which took account of the history, location, and preferences of the local public, when designing his buildings. Throughout his professional life, Venturi railed against architectural narrow-mindedness and the autocracy of committee-judged "good taste". He became a seminal figure in shaping understandings of Postmodernism. In fact, Venturi respected many of the basic tenets of Modernism stating that "the modern movement was almost all right". Nevertheless, the Pritzker Architecture Prize stated (on making him a Pritzker Laureate) that Venturi had "been credited with saving modern architecture from itself [by making] it possible to accept the casual and the improvised in the built environment".
Venturi proved himself equally as a designer and eloquent and provocative writer and speaker. Curator Jane Pavitt recalled a conversation she had had with Venturi and his wife, and long term collaborator, Denise Scott Brown, before they were due to speak at the 2011 V&A exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990. The couple agreed to attend with the aim of "putting the record straight" on their position on Postmodernism. Pavitt writes, "Their postmodernism, they said, was critical, substantive, socially engaged and deeply serious, not to be confused with overtly commercial, excessive and self-indulgent 'PoMo' [Postmodernism]. Theirs had been a strategy to look at the ordinary and every day with fresh eyes and find a new kind of beauty in it, and to acquire a newly sharpened aesthetic judgement through this process. It was not simply (or at all) to indulge in irony and kitsch. 'We are also modernists, engaged in the traditional modern project of updating modern tenets to allow for change' [said Scott Brown]. To paraphrase Venturi, theirs was an architecture of 'both/and, rather than either/or'".