Vanna Venturi House
A house for the architect’s mother, with a gable split down the middle, an arch that is merely a moulding on the façade and a chimney that takes up too much space. Venturi wanted to show that architecture can be contradictory and complex. The house became the first icon of postmodernism.
Robert Venturi designed the house for his mother, Vanna Venturi, who was a widow and wanted a home of her own in the suburb of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. Work on the drawings dragged on, and Venturi produced many different designs before the house was built in 1962–1964. It was his first major work, and he used it to test ideas he was writing down at the same time in the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966. Venturi was critical of modernism’s demand for purity and simplicity and wanted to show that architecture could be ambiguous, rich and full of contradictions. The house was built with ordinary, simple materials and at a scale suited to an ordinary residential area.
From the street the house looks like a child’s drawing of a house, with a large pitched roof and a gable. But the gable is split in the middle, where a slot opens above the entrance, and an arch that is merely a moulding sits over a straight lintel. The windows are of different kinds and irregularly placed. Inside, two elements meet at the centre of the house: the chimney and the staircase. They compete for space, so that the stair becomes narrow and skewed as it passes the chimney, and at the top a stair leads nowhere. The rooms have sloping ceilings that follow the roofline. Everything is slightly distorted, and small and large scales are mixed so that the house looks bigger than it is.
The house attracted great attention among architects and became one of the most discussed buildings of the 1960s. Together with the book it became the starting point for postmodernism, which left its mark all over the world in the 1970s and 1980s. Vanna Venturi lived in the house for a number of years, and it has since had other owners who have taken good care of it. Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown continued to write and build, and in 1991 Venturi received the Pritzker Prize. Postmodernism also reached Sweden, where in the 1980s it appeared in housing blocks, offices and public buildings with classical quotations, colours and playful forms, such as Bofill’s Arch on Södermalm and several new blocks in central Stockholm.