Robert Venturi

Beginning in the 1960s American architect Robert Venturi (born 1925) spearheaded the "Post-Modern" revolt against the simplicity and pure functionalism of modernist architecture. In both his buildings and his writings he championed an architecture rich in symbolism and history, complexity and contradiction.

The son of a fruit grocer, Robert Venturi was born in Philadelphia, PA, on June 25, 1925. In 1943 he graduated from the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia. He entered Princeton University and received a bachelor of arts (summa cum laude) in 1947 and master of fine arts in 1950.

At Princeton, Venturi received a traditional architectural education under the direction of Jean Labatut, a French architect trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. From Labatut, Venturi learned not only how buildings are created in the mind of the architect, but how they are perceived by the person on the street. Venturi also studied architectural history with noted scholar Donald Drew Egbert. Later, Venturi's keen knowledge of architectural history would provide a vital source of inspiration.

Between 1950 and 1954 Venturi worked successively in the architectural offices of Oscar Stonorov and Eero Saarinen. Then, in 1954, he won the Prix de Rome. This award enabled him to spend two years at the American Academy in Rome where, in the company of Louis Kahn, he came to admire the city's Mannerist and Baroque buildings. In the work of Michelangelo and Borromini in particular, Venturi picked up some ideas about freely using a traditional architectural vocabulary of columns, arches, and pediments to create structures of great originality.

Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1956, Venturi entered the office of Louis Kahn. In 1958, he began his own architectural practice as a member of the firm of Venturi, Cope and Lippincott. In 1961 he entered into a brief partnership with William Short. Then in 1964 he and Philadelphia architect John Rauch established a firm. The Zambian-born designer Denise Scott Brown, who married Venturi in 1967, became a third partner in Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown in 1977.

A Seminal Book on Architecture

Between 1951 and 1965, while Venturi was establishing his practice, he taught courses on architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania. These courses formed the basis of his watershed book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Hailed as "the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture of 1923, " Venturi's book encouraged architects to turn away from the rigid "form follows function" doctrines of modernists like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe and to look instead to the rich architecture of the past—to the works of Michelangelo, Hawksmoor, Soane, Lutyens, Aalto; to ancient and medieval buildings, and to architecture that reflected local and popular culture. To Mies' famous maxim "Less is more, " Venturi countered "Less is a bore, " and wrote: "I like elements that are hybrid rather than 'pure, ' compromising rather than 'clean, ' distorted, rather than 'straightforward, ' ambiguous, rather than 'articulated, ' perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as 'interesting,' …I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit meaning as well as the explicit function."

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture became a rallying point for young architects around the world who had become disillusioned with the stylistic limitations of the International Style. In effect, the book provided a manifesto for the Post-Modern movement in architecture.

The ideas in Complexity and Contradiction were given concrete form in Venturi's earliest buildings, including his first major work, the Guild House, an apartment building for the elderly in Philadelphia (1960-1963). In the Guild House, Venturi created a sense of artistic tension, or contradiction, by mixing high-art aesthetics with motifs drawn from popular culture. Constructed of brick walls pierced by double hung windows, the Guild House looks at first glance like an ordinary six-story Philadelphia apartment building. But a closer examination reveals a peculiar main entrance, seemingly far too small for the building, yet marked by a massive black granite column, a huge frame of white glazed brick (reminiscent of a 1930s movie house), and a sign rendered with giant supermarket-style lettering. Although later removed, a gold television antenna was prominently displayed on top of the building directly over the entrance; Venturi claimed it was "a symbol of the aged, who spend so much time looking at TV." Despite the purposeful banality of these motifs, they were skillfully composed within a symmetrical facade and were intended to be understood as high-art objects. Contemporary "Pop" artists such as Andy Warhol had an unmistakable influence on this sort of design.

Perhaps Venturi's best known building is the house he designed for his mother, Vanna Venturi, in Chestnut Hill, PA. (1962). Here again the aim was to create a building that would not only be functional but also capable of producing a sense of artistic tension. To do this, the architect mixed contradictory features: the exterior shape of the house is simple, yet the interior plan is complex; and while the overall facade is symmetrically conceived, symmetry is broken by unbalanced windows and an off-center chimney. Moreover, although the scale of the house is quite small, many of the details (doors, chair rails, fireplace mantels) are huge.

A Second Controversial Book

Venturi's willful playfulness with features derived from traditional architecture and his attacks against orthodox modernism did not win him many commissions during the 1960s. He continued to teach, however, and between 1966 and 1970 served as the Charlotte Davenport Professor of Architecture at Yale. Out of his teachings at Yale came his 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas (co-authored by Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown). This work, too, stunned the architectural world. It treated the gaudy, sign-filled Vegas strip not as an architectural aberration, but as a vernacular art form worthy of serious study. Venturi felt that the "Decorated Shed" and other types of roadside buildings offered design lessons that could not be ignored, and he argued that architects needed to respond to the reality and symbolism of the popularly built environment with buildings corresponding to that environment.

In the early 1970s Venturi's practice began to thrive, and after that the architect turned his attention more towards design than teaching and writing. Always refreshingly different, Venturi's buildings continued to reveal an interest in the vernacular and the historical. His Trubek and Wislocki houses in Nantucket, MA (1970) have the same pitched roofs and shingle-clad walls as the many nearby 19th-century Shingle-style houses. The curved facade of the Brant House in Greenwich, CT (1971-1973) reflects the influence of 1930s Art Deco. The Tucker House in Katonah, NY (1974), is reminiscent of some turn-of-the-century English arts and crafts work. Eighteenth-century Polish synagogues provided the inspiration for the wooden vaults in the Brant-Johnson House in Vail, CO (1975). Giant 1960s wallpaper-style flowers decorate the front of the Best Products buildings in Oxford Valley, PA (1977). Gothic touches can be seen in the "Treehouse" in the Philadelphia Children's Zoo (1981-1984).

In 1986 Venturi was selected to design an extension to the British National Gallery of Art's neoclassical building on Trafalgar Square, London. He chose a classically modern stone-faced structure. Venturi's firm also designed the Biology building at Princeton University (1983), a new Parliament House in Canberra, Australia (1979), the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, TX (1983), the Westway Riverfront Project in New York City (1979-1985), and several large exhibitions at museums in Washington, New York, Philadelphia and other cities.

Further Reading

The extensive literature on and by Venturi from 1960 to 1982 is listed in Pettena and Vogliazzo, eds., Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown (1981). Another bibliographic listing on VRSB, with three scholarly essays and many fine photographs, is available in the December 1981 issue of Architecture + Urbanism (extra edition). Besides Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi also published, with Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953-1984 (1984). See also C. Mead, The Architecture of Robert Venturi (1989); A. Sanmartin, ed., Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown (1986), and S. von Moos, Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown: Buildings and Projects (1987). □

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).

VENTURI, ROBERT 1925-

postmodern architect

Eclectic

The theories of Robert Venturi helped launch the postmodern movement in American architecture. Venturi, through his books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas(1971), did more than any other author text to advance a shift away from the simple austerity of modern architecture. More than his buildings, Venturi's writings epitomized the rejection of modernism for a more eclectic, historical, and vernacular style of architecture. His attention to everyday life, ordinary buildings, and popular designs unsettled the architectural establishment in the 1970s while inspiring a new generation of designers.

Early Life

Robert Venturi, the son of a wholesale fruit grocer, was born in 1925 in Philadelphia. From the age of four Venturi knew he wanted to be an architect. He nourished his love of architectural history at Princeton University. Venturi's studies in the history of architecture led him to appreciate the work of earlier architects rejected by the modernist movement. As the recipient of the prestigious Prix de Rome prize in 1954, Venturi spent time in Italy, where he further developed his fascination with historical styles, drawing particularly from Michelangelo and the Italian mannerists. On returning from Rome, Venturi took a position at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1964 Venturi joined with John Rauch and Denise Scott Brown to form the firm Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown; they soon became one of the leading design firms in the United States.

Washington Plaza

In 1978 the firm unveiled its design for the Western Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Heralded as the most "creative urban square proposed for any city in the United States," by The New York Times architecture critic, the design was called witty and stately all at once. Funded by the $5.5 million Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, the plaza was to sit between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets and have a view of the Capitol on one end and the White House on the other. In classic Venturi style, the design for the plaza was unusual. The plaza was to become a miniature walk-on map in marble and granite of the city's original design by Pierre Charles L'Enfant. The development corporation ultimately decided that Venturi's plan was too radical for Washington and so built a simpler version of his original design.

Eclectic Designs

In 1985 Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown won the Architectural Firm Award of the American Institute of Architects. Their work has been the basis for the current eclectic attitudes of the postmodern movement and continues to challenge architectural theory and practice around the world.

Robert Venturi 1925-, American architect, b. Philadelphia. In his writings, Venturi inveighed against the banality of modern architecture in the postwar period. He argued instead for a more inclusive, contextual approach to design that heralded the postmodern era in architecture. Among his early large works is Guild House in Philadelphia (1962-66), whose entrance is distinguished by a bold, billboardlike sign. A more restrained historicizing mode has characterized his later public works, such as Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton Univ. (1982-84), the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London (1991), the somewhat flamboyant but not overwhelming Seattle Art Museum (1991), and the expanded Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1996). Venturi is also an important theorist whose writings include the influential Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966); Learning from Las Vegas (1972), written with Stephen Izenour and Denise Scott-Brown (Venturi's wife and architectural partner); and A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953-1984 (1984). He was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1991.

Bibliography: See C. Mead, ed., The Architecture of Robert Venturi (1989); S. von Moos, Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates: Buildings and Projects, 1986-1998 (1999).

Venturi, Robert (1925– ) US architect. He argued that architectural modernism was banal. Venturi's stress on the importance of ‘vernacular’ or contextual architecture heralded post-modernism. His publications include Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), whose consumer architecture is contrasted with the post-modern approach. His buildings include Gordon Wu Hall, Princeton University, USA (1984), and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, London, UK (1991).

Venturi, Robert. See POSTMODERNISM.