Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi
todd sheridan from New York, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0

Venturi wrote “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” (1966) and, with Denise Scott Brown, “Learning from Las Vegas”. With the Vanna Venturi House he demonstrated an architecture that allows ambiguity and everyday signs.

Robert Venturi was born in 1925 in Philadelphia, the son of a fruit merchant of Italian descent. He studied architecture at Princeton, graduating in 1947 and taking his master’s degree in 1950. He worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, who became an important model for him. From 1954 to 1956 he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, where he studied the Baroque, Mannerism and the rich, contradictory environments of Italian cities. On his return he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and opened his own practice in Philadelphia. There he met the architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, whom he married in 1967 and worked with for the rest of his life.

The Vanna Venturi House, 1962–1964, built for his mother, has a gabled façade that looks like a child’s drawing of a house, with a split gable and an asymmetrical interior. Guild House, a home for the elderly in Philadelphia, has an ordinary brick façade with a large sign. In “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”, 1966, he argued against the purity of modernism and for an architecture that admits ambiguity and historical reference. “Learning from Las Vegas”, 1972, written with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, studied commercial roadside signs and distinguished between buildings that are sculptures and buildings with applied signs. Later they designed the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London.

Venturi received the Pritzker Prize in 1991, but Denise Scott Brown was not included, which later became a prominent issue concerning the recognition of women in architecture. He died in 2018. His writings are among the most important architectural theory of the 20th century and laid the foundations of postmodernism, in which historical forms, irony and everyday signs once again found a place. Postmodernism reached Sweden in the 1980s, when architects such as Gert Wingårdh and foreign guests such as Ricardo Bofill built with classical and playful motifs, and the debate about contextual fit, ornament and the character of the city gathered pace. Venturi’s ideas about learning from the ordinary city continue to influence both architects and planners.