He "Built Only Half a Dozen Houses in His Life" — and Became the Dissenter Modernism Could Not Ignore

But "thoroughgoing rebel" may be a misreading of Venturi.

The American architect Robert Venturi died at home on September 18, 2018, local time, at the age of 93.

In a statement to The Architect's Newspaper, Venturi's family said: "Robert Venturi passed away peacefully at home from illness, with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown and his son Jim Venturi by his side. The family will spend the coming weeks arranging a memorial service to celebrate his life."

Venturi had formally retired six years earlier. Over a career of more than sixty years, the 1991 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2016 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal — awarded jointly to him and his wife — were enough to place him among the most revered figures in architecture.

But like Le Corbusier, he was never quite an architect whose buildings spoke entirely for themselves. Next to signature works like the Vanna Venturi House and the Seattle Art Museum, many prefer to think of him as one of the 20th century's most important theorists of postmodernism.

Learning From Las Vegas, which he wrote with his wife Scott Brown and their students, and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which he wrote alone, are also seen as the books that launched the postmodernist movement and broke modernism's hold over 20th-century architecture.

In the free, rebellious 1960s, "do your own thing" became a fashionable phrase, anti-establishment values spread among young Americans, and everyone was scrambling to be a hippie.

The mood reached architecture too. After the two world wars, modernist architecture became the world's mainstream, and Venturi appeared as a dissenter, mockingly rewriting the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe's dictum "less is more" as "less is a bore." It felt like a fresh force slamming into the Bauhaus's domineering rigidity, and it made people remember him.

Later critics even argued that Venturi's actual buildings fell well short of his theories, and that his designs rarely reflected what he wrote. The architecture critic and writer Tom Wolfe called Venturi a "pedant" who "built only half a dozen houses in his whole life."

The Vanna Venturi House

Venturi was born in Philadelphia, took a master's degree at Princeton University, and won a fellowship from the American Academy of Architecture.

He had worked at the firms of Oscar Stonorov, Eero Saarinen, and others. After designing and building a private house for his mother, Venturi opened his own firm in 1964.

The Vanna Venturi House is also the best known and finest work of his career.

In 1959, Robert Venturi's father died, and his mother, Vanna Venturi, decided to use the money he left to build a house.

It went up in the early 1960s, when modernist architecture was at the height of its popularity in the United States and the streets were lined with rows of Mies van der Rohe-style glass boxes.

Like any client, his mother made demands of her son: the form should be fairly simple, but not cold and rigid like the fashionable modern buildings of the day, which would not suit the antique furniture she had collected for years.

Encouraged and constrained by her requirements, the house shows Venturi taking a bold swing at postmodernist design at every turn. "This is my mother's house. It has many levels, it uses the signs it needs to convey a message, and it embodies an understanding of architecture as shelter," Venturi said.

The house uses a broken pediment. A shadowed gap sits at the very center of the gable, as if splitting the building in two, while the decorative arc above the entrance seems intent on tying the two halves back together — a deliberately contradictory move. This gable structure, borrowed from ancient Greek tradition but carrying no real load here, combined with the asymmetrical doors and windows on either side, creates a seesaw kind of balance.

To spare his mother, then nearly 70, the trouble of stairs, Venturi put almost every functional space on the ground floor. At the center of the house is a spacious living room, with the bedroom and bathroom to the left and the dining room, kitchen, and backyard to the right.

The ground-floor plan looks asymmetrical and unharmonious at first glance, but it is really the compromise he made to resolve the clash between the central staircase and the fireplace.

The Vanna Venturi House has two especially contradictory features. The first is that the entrance is both large and small: the door opening is wide, but the recessed porch behind it is shallow. The second is that the rear of the second floor is both open and closed, an open semicircular floor-to-ceiling window set against a tall, blank parapet.

Robert Venturi called it "a small house at a large scale." A large scale, he said, makes symmetry easier to achieve on the facade, and large-scale symmetry visually softens the asymmetrical details; a large scale in the plan also cuts down on partition walls, making the space more flexible and the cost more reasonable.

Soon after the house was finished, he wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Introducing the project, Venturi wrote: "This building recognizes complexity and contradiction: it is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little; some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another…"

The building is covered in traditional elements that look familiar and spaces that look evenly distributed, yet it is riddled with details out of proportion and outside convention — a true portrait of the book's title.

The Vanna Venturi House came to be regarded as the first "postmodernist building."

"Thoroughgoing rebel" may be a misreading of Venturi

What established Venturi's identity as a "rebel" was the publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966.

In the book he wrote: "Where simplicity cannot work, simpleness results. Blatant simplification means bland architecture. Less is a bore."

Taking the Doric temple as his example, he tried to show that any simple beauty deep and strong enough to satisfy the human spirit is born of inner complexity. Nor did the book hide his fondness for the Baroque, and for Rococo in particular.

The simplicity of the Doric temple, he argued, comes from the inner contradiction and standoff between its famous, exquisitely precise geometric curves and its orders — real complexity producing apparent simplicity. When later temples lost that complexity, their simplicity turned bland.

Putting this view forward made Venturi the point man against the modernist mainstream of 20th-century American architecture.

At the time, modernist architects championed function-driven, minimal design, treated history and tradition as baggage, and insisted on stripping regional character out of architecture.

Their opponents argued that modernism tried to remake the individual through architectural reform, turning architects and planners into authorities who dictated how people should live. Modern buildings designed for utility alone were too cold and inhuman, and once they were cut off from culture and history, mass production made buildings and cities look alike.

But these dissenters were clearly the weaker voice. In that era, few architects dared to stand up and design something else for America.

Venturi believed ordinary people did not understand the language of modernist architecture, while the buildings they did like tended to be plain and lively in form, carrying a bit of "superficial" ornament and historical allusion — friendlier, more comfortable, and better able to move the average person.

As he urged in Learning From Las Vegas, architects should learn from a place as seemingly vulgar as Las Vegas: its jumble of building types, its colorful streets, its riot of shop signs, its blocks of fast-food joints. All of it reflects popular taste.

The architect Sean Griffiths, in an essay remembering Venturi written this week, noted: "These are mainstream views today, but in the 1960s and '70s they were deeply provocative, and even in the mid-1990s, praising the work of Venturi and Scott Brown in public was still seen as a provocative stance."

Many treat Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as the manifesto of the postmodernist movement, but Tom Wolfe argued that Venturi did not appear as a rebel at all — instead "hopping nimbly about on top of the compound wall" — and asked, "Since when is a manifesto mild?"

In Wolfe's description, Venturi was the classical architect-intellectual of a new era: "young, slender, well-spoken, cool, given to irony, courteous, cultivated, measured, deeply learned, and thoroughly at home in modern architecture."

The examples cited in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture also show that Venturi's attitude toward modern architecture was not one of blanket criticism.

Louis Kahn, for one, carried real weight with him and was the architect who influenced him most; Venturi often quoted lines of Kahn's such as "architecture must have both good spaces and bad spaces." He also called Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto "the greatest architects of the 20th century," saying they had "achieved complexity within the whole by resisting oversimplification." Only the work of Mies van der Rohe did he hold up, again and again, as a negative example.

You can call this Venturi's cleverness, or you can call it his careful manners, but from first to last he never challenged the foundations of modern architectural theory itself. He argued only for ambiguity over clarity, opposed "black and white" thinking, and stressed richness in architecture.

His theory said buildings should suit popular taste. His own buildings were slow to win the public over.

Venturi wrote at length about ideas like "make buildings friendly and easy to understand" and "set them within the richness of real life."

But when Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture came out, the only work he had to his name besides the Vanna Venturi House was an apartment building for the elderly built for a Philadelphia Quaker congregation — one that bore some resemblance to Bruno Taut's red-facade workers' housing in Berlin.

Beneath a seemingly balanced, symmetrical exterior, Venturi tried to bring out a sense of contradiction: a "vulgar" oversized sign, an abrupt column at the entrance, an arched window on the upper floor. He also used details to criticize the false harmony of modern society. The television antenna he put on the roof, which served no purpose, was a metaphor for television ruling the lives of the elderly.

He always liked to run small experiments and small breaks along the lines of classical architecture, planting asymmetrical details inside a broadly symmetrical structure. The Vanna Venturi House is a typical example, and so is Fire Station No. 4 in Columbus, Indiana.

In the late 1960s, Venturi was invited to design a fire station for Columbus. His intent was plain: equipment rooms on one side, living quarters on the other, and in the middle a raised, oversized hose-drying tower topped with a gold "4."

White glazed brick covers most of the building's front facade, switching to red at the edges; doors and windows are placed where they are needed, producing an asymmetrical structure and a look all its own.

Postmodernist architecture, though, was born in an age of rebellion. It reflected critically on modernism, argued for respecting popular taste, and tried to win back a place for history in architectural design. Yet this approach, often laced with irony and humor, was repeatedly dismissed as superficial, exaggerated and clownish, and lacking in taste — and so it fell out of fashion after the 1980s.

Venturi and his wife also worked on a number of museum projects, among them the Sainsbury Wing extension to Britain's National Gallery, the rebuilding of the Seattle Art Museum, the Children's Museum of Houston, and the expansion of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Of these, the Sainsbury Wing extension is regarded as a highly accomplished piece of postmodernist architecture. It occupies the last remaining public space on Trafalgar Square, west of the National Gallery's main building. Its form combines modernism, contemporary construction, and English classicism, mixing steel, stone, and glass while weaving in symbolism and historical reference.

In the very year the Sainsbury Wing was completed, Venturi won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

They broke architecture's established rules for handing out prizes

Venturi met his wife, Denise Scott Brown, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, when both were teaching there. After he opened his own firm in 1964, the two ran it together from 1967 to 2012. Built work, academic research, writing — including the famous Learning From Las Vegas — the two of them did all of it jointly.

When Venturi won the Pritzker Prize in 1991, the couple had been working together for more than 20 years, yet Scott Brown was not even nominated. She wholeheartedly encouraged Venturi to accept architecture's highest honor, but she did not attend the ceremony that year.

The episode caused considerable controversy afterward. In 2013, some 1,720 architects, Zaha Hadid among them, signed a joint petition calling for the 1991 Pritzker Architecture Prize to be awarded to Scott Brown as well. It failed.

The petition did, however, push the American Institute of Architects to rethink how it judged the Gold Medal, and the following year it formally recognized joint recipients.

Not until 2016 were the two architects awarded the AIA Gold Medal together, their names carved side by side on the honor wall in the lobby of AIA headquarters in Washington — the first time since the medal was created in 1907 that it had gone to two people at once.

In his nomination letter for the Gold Medal that year, the master architect Frank Gehry wrote: "Blending historical communication with Pop Art, Robert and Denise's ideas had already, by the 1960s, profoundly shaped how every designer in our field thought about changing the world."

"Whether in their deeply rooted home city of Philadelphia or in Las Vegas, which shaped their design thinking so profoundly, the distinctive complexity, conflict, and contradiction of Venturi and Scott Brown's architecture opened up an entirely new vision within the currents of modern architecture."

Today their firm is led by Daniel McCoubrey, and several of its projects have recently run into trouble. The facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego now faces demolition or renovation, and their Abrams House in Pittsburgh was demolished on August 1 this year.

Image sources: Dezeen, The Architect's Newspaper, Archdaily