Venturi, Robert 1925-

VENTURI, ROBERT 1925-

Architect

Early Life and Education

Robert Venturi was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 25 June 1925. Though his father owned a wholesale fruit company, Venturi dreamed of becoming an architect from boyhood. He graduated with a B.A. in architecture from Princeton University in 1947, where he went on to earn a master of fine arts degree in 1950. He won Rome Prize Fellowships in 1954 and 1956, providing the means for Venturi to continue his studies at the American Academy in Rome.

Early Career

Venturi returned to Philadelphia and began his career with the firm of Louis I. Kahn. Kahn's firm departed from the dominant modernist architectural approaches exemplified in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Kahn encouraged his designers, including Venturi, to develop their own individual styles. Venturi moved on to several partnerships before forming forming Venturi and Rauch in 1964. He had joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1957, an association that continued until 1965. In 1966 he was appointed the Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Professor of Architecture at Yale University.

Manifesto

In 1966 Venturi created controversy in the architectural community with the publication of his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The work was Venturi's manifesto on the making of architecture, in which he rejected the legacies of Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, who stressed carefully ordered, simple, and functional design stripped of traditional influences. His treatment of the ideas of the giants of modernist architecture was impertinent, as when he transformed Mies van der Rohe's well-known slogan "Less is more" into "Less is a bore." Invoking examples of Renaissance, baroque, and mannerist architecture, Venturi argued for design that utilized elements of ambiguity, redundancy, and inconsistency.

Learning from Las Vegas

Venturi continued his un-orthodox approach to the field with a study of common-place urban architecture in the Las Vegas commercial strip, conducted with his wife and business associate, Denise Scott-Brown. As a result, they published a controversial and influential article in the March 1968 issue of Architectural Forum, titled "A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas." The article led to a research project, carried out in collaboration with students of Yale, to study the phenomenon of "urban sprawl."

Ugly and Ordinary

Venturi compared the projects of Venturi and Rauch to the work of pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, in that they draw from, among other influences, the ordinary architecture of urban environments to produce the "extraordinary." When the jury of the 1968 Brighton Beach housing com-petition rejected a design submitted by Venturi and Rauch as "ugly and ordinary," Venturi and co-authors Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour in their book Learning from Las Vegas (1972) ironically adopted the phrase to characterize the firm's work. Their championing of the open-ended, pluralist "U&O" architecture over the autonomous "H&O" (heroic and original) type prevailing at the time would greatly influence the development of postmodern architecture.

Source:

Christopher Mead, ed., The Architecture of Robert Venturi (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).