VENTURI, Robert

(b. 25 June 1925 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), prominent architect who in the 1960s helped formulate the postmodern revolt against the simplicity and functionalism of modern architecture, instead emphasizing buildings rich in symbolism and history.

The only child of the Italian immigrants Robert Charles Venturi, a fruit produce merchant, and Vanna (Lanzetta) Venturi, a housewife, Venturi credits his father with his early exposure to and appreciation of architecture. By the time he was four years old, Venturi knew that he wanted to be an architect. His parents' pacifism led them to convert to the Quaker religion, and Venturi spent much of his childhood attending Quaker meetings. He attended private schools and graduated from the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania.

In 1943 Venturi entered Princeton University in New Jersey to study architecture. Under the direction of Jean Labatut, who had trained at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Venturi learned not only how buildings are imagined in the mind of the architect but also how the average person perceives them. Venturi also studied architectural history with the noted scholar Donald Drew Egbert, taking his course four times. As Venturi later recalled, Egbert's course steered away from the then popular philosophy that modern architecture was not just a style but an ideology. Instead, Egbert stressed architecture as evolution, suggesting that modern architecture would continue to develop and change. Venturi's keen knowledge of architectural history proved a vital inspiration for his own works. In 1947 Venturi graduated with a B.A., summa cum laude; he earned an M.F.A. from Princeton in 1950.

Between 1950 and 1954 Venturi worked as a designer in the offices of Oscar Stonorov, Louis I. Kahn, and Eero Saarinen. In 1954 he won the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to spend two years studying at the American Academy in Rome. Venturi was particularly drawn to mannerist and baroque buildings and admired the work of Michelangelo and Francesco Borromini. During his time in Rome, Venturi began to formulate ideas about reinterpreting the traditional architectural vocabulary of columns, arches, and pediments to create structures of great originality. He later referred to Rome as his "Mecca," stating that the city was "where I proved that my architectural fathers were wrong when they said that history was bunk."

Within two years of his return to Philadelphia in 1956, Venturi had established his own architectural firm of Venturi, Cope, and Lippincott. In 1961 he entered into a brief partnership with William Short and in 1964 went into business with John Rauch. The Zambian-born designer Denise Scott Brown, whom Venturi married on 23 July 1967, became the third partner in Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown in 1977. The couple had one son.

During the 1960s Venturi began teaching courses on architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. These courses formed the basis of his first book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which was published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. The book encouraged architects to turn away from the rigid "form follows function" doctrines of the modernist movement. Instead, Venturi argued, architects should look to the rich architectural traditions of the past, from the classically executed works to the vernacular architecture that reflected local and popular culture. Deriding Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe's famous maxim "less is more," Venturi wrote, "Less is a bore." He confirmed, "I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning." Venturi's book marked a watershed in American architectural history and was hailed as the most important writing on architecture since Le Corbusier's Rise of Architecture (1923). Complexity and Contradiction became a guidebook for young architects the world over who had become disillusioned with the modernist movement.

Venturi practiced what he preached. His first major work, the Guild House, constructed between 1960 and 1963 as an apartment building for the elderly in Philadelphia, combined high-art aesthetics with motifs drawn from popular culture. The six-story brick building appeared at first glance to be a quite ordinary. A closer look revealed a small main entranceway, marked by a massive black granite column, in a large frame of white glazed brick. A sign done in giant supermarket-style lettering completed the building's facade. For a time, a gold television antenna was displayed prominently on top of the building directly over the entrance as a symbol, according to Venturi, "of the aged, who spend so much time looking at TV." The inclusion of such commonplace elements, which Venturi intended to be viewed as high art, combined with the design of the Guild House, produced an unexpected symmetry.

Venturi's best-known building from the1960s was the house he designed for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. For Mother's House, which he completed in 1962, Venturi again created a building that mixed contradictory elements, including a simple exterior with a complex interior plan. The symmetry of the house was disrupted by unbalanced windows and an off-center chimney. Although Venturi conceived the scale to be small, he also incorporated oversized interior doors, chair rails, and fireplace mantels.

Unfortunately, Venturi's innovative forays and his attacks on modernist orthodoxy did not win him many commissions during the 1960s. He continued to teach and from his courses came his next book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which he coauthored with Steven Izenour and Denise Scott Brown. Venturi's argument was as audacious as it was original. The gaudy explosion of neon that characterized the Vegas strip was not an architectural abomination, he insisted, but an important vernacular art form worthy of serious study. Venturi thought that the so-called Decorated Shed and other types of roadside buildings offered lessons in design that architects could no longer ignore.

When Venturi's business began to prosper in the early 1970s, he devoted his attention more to design than to teaching and writing. Throughout the last half of the twentieth century, Venturi's buildings continued to illustrate his architectural philosophy by combining the vernacular, the historical, and the artistic. Venturi published his third book, A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953–1984, in 1985, and that same year Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown won the architectural firm award of the American Institute of Architects. In 1991 Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, one of the highest honors an architect can receive. Since that time, his work has been the subject of museum retrospectives and exhibitions. Venturi's designs continue to challenge architects to rethink their theory and practice.

Venturi's groundbreaking writings and designs of the 1960s illustrated for architects all over the world that "the commonplace and everyday built environment cannot be willed out of existence and is 'almost alright.'" Venturi's deft handling of conventional and everyday elements in his architecture, while shocking at first to many, also demonstrated that the everyday could become the extraordinary if done thoughtfully. Instead of embracing the credo of modernists, who felt it necessary to educate and elevate public taste, Venturi showed architects how to accept and improve it.

There is no biography of Venturi. Overviews of his work often contain some biographical information. See Philip and John Cook Johnson, Conversations with Architects: Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Bertrand Goldberg, Morris Lapidus, Louis Kahn, Charles Moore, Robert Venturi (1975); Diane Maddox and Roger K. Lewis, Master Builders: A Guide to Famous American Architects (1986); Christopher Mead, ed., The Architecture of Robert Venturi (1989); and David B. Brownlee, David G. Delong, and Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Associates: Architecture, Urbanism, Design (2001). In addition to Venturi's books mentioned in the text, see Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (2002).

Meg Greene