ROBERT VENTURI

Life & Works

Introduction • Robert Charles Venturi is an American architect, founding

principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major figures in the architecture of the twentieth century.  Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991. He is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore" a postmodern antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more". Venturi studied at the Princeton University School of Architecture in New Jersey (1947–50). After further study at the American Academy in Rome (1954–56), he worked as a designer in the architectural firms of Oscar Stonorov (Philadelphia), Eero Saarinen (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.), and Louis I. Kahn (Philadelphia). After holding partnerships in several firms, he opened a longer-lasting architectural firm with John Rauch in 1964. Venturi’s wife, Denise Scott Brown, became a partner in the firm in 1967. From 1957 to 1965 Venturi was a member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture in Philadelphia.

Philosophy: Postmodernism• The Postmodernist movement began in America around the

1960s–1970s and then it spread to Europe and the rest of the world, to remain right through to the present. The aims of Postmodernism or Late-modernism begin with its reaction to Modernism; it tries to address the limitations of its predecessor. The list of aims is extended to include communicating ideas with the public often in a then humorous or witty way. Often, the communication is done by quoting extensively from past architectural styles, often many at once. In breaking away from modernism, it also strives to produce buildings that are sensitive to the context within which they are built.

• Postmodern architecture has also been described as "neo-eclectic", where reference and ornament have returned to the facade, replacing the aggressively unornamented modern styles. This eclecticism is often combined with the use of non-orthogonal angles and unusual surfaces, most famously in the State Gallery of Stuttgart by James Stirling and the Piazza d'Italia by Charles Moore and the Vanna Venturi House by Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi: His Postmodern

architecture• Robert Venturi was at the forefront of this movement. His

book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (published in 1966), was instrumental in opening readers eyes to new ways of thinking about buildings, as it drew from the entire history of architecture—both high-style and vernacular, both historic and modern—and lambasted overly simplistic Functional Modernism.

• A statement by Robert Venturi explaining the criticism of Modernism in his Book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture:

“Architects can bemoan or try to ignore them (referring to the ornamental and decorative elements in buildings) or even try to abolish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time, because architects do not have the power to replace them (nor do they know what to replace them with).”

• In Venturi’s second book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972) further developed his take on modernism. Venturi here argues that ornamental and decorative elements “accommodate existing needs for variety and communication”.  Here Venturi stresses the importance of the building communicating a meaning to the public, a value shared by postmodernists in general. This communication however is not intended to be a direct narration of the meaning. Venturi goes on to explain that it is rather intended to be a communication that could be interpreted in many ways. Each interpretation is more or less true for its moment because work of such quality will have many dimensions and layers of meaning.

Architecture Of Robert Venturi• The architecture of Robert Venturi, although perhaps not as familiar

today as his books, helped redirect American architecture away from a widely practiced, often banal, modernism in the 1960's to a more exploratory, and ultimately eclectic, design approach that openly drew lessons from historic architecture and responded to the everyday context of the American city.

Venturi's architecture has had world-wide influence, beginning in the 1960s with the dissemination of the broken-gable roof of the Vanna Venturi House and the segmentally arched window and interrupted string courses of Guild House. The playful variations on vernacular house types seen in the Trubeck and Wislocki Houses offered a new way to embrace, but transform, familiar forms.

Projects Robert Venturi had his share of Post Modern

Buildings. Being one of the front men in the post modern movement. His List goes on. A few are:

Vanna Venturi House; Philadelphia (1964) won the AIA Twenty-five Year Award and was recognized as a "Masterwork of Modern American Architecture" 

Seattle Art Museum; Seattle, Washington (1991)Guild House; Philadelphia (1964)Seattle Art Museum; Seattle, Washington (1991)Hôtel du Département de la Haute-Garonne; Toulouse,

France, (2005)Gordon Wu Hall; Princeton, New Jersey, (1983) Michael Graves, Benacerraf House addition, Princeton, New

Jersey, (1969)

Vanna Venturi House – Robert Venturi

• The Vanna Venturi House, one of the first prominent works of the postmodern architecture movement, is located in the suburban neighbourhood of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother Vanna Venturi, and constructed between 1962 -1964.

• Plans and elevations are built on a rigid axial, even Palladian, symmetry, which becomes monumental in the street faced but looser at the extremities and rear of the house, in keeping with the domestic program.

• Venturi states : “Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than "pure," compromising rather than "clear," distorted rather than "straightforward." ... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim duality.”

Vanna Venturi House – Robert Venturi

Plan – Vanna Venturi house

Section – Vanna Venturi house

Architecture Vanna Venturi house

Characteristics of the house : Many of the basic elements of the house are a reaction

against standard Modernist architectural elements: the pitched roof rather than flat roof, the emphasis on the central hearth and chimney, a closed ground floor "set firmly on the ground" rather than the Modernist columns and glass walls which open up the ground floor.

On the front elevation the broken pediment or gable and a purely ornamental applique arch reflect a return to Mannerist architecture and a rejection of Modernism.

 Thus the house is a direct break from Modern architecture, designed in order to disrupt and contradict formal Modernist aesthetics.

The site of the house is flat, with a long driveway connecting it to the street. Venturi placed the parallel walls of the house perpendicular to the main axis of the site, defined by the driveway, rather than the usual placement along the axis.

The chimney is emphasized by the centrally placed room on the second floor, but the actual chimney is small and off-centre. The effect is to magnify the scale of the small house and make the facade appear to be monumental.

The house was constructed with intentional formal architectural, historical and aesthetic contradictions. Venturi has compared the iconic front facade to "a child's drawing of a house." Yet he has also written, "This building recognizes complexities and contradictions: it is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little; some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another its order accommodates the generic elements and of the house in general, and the circumstantial elements of a house in particular."

Awards Robert Venturi being one of the great architects of

the modern era has won numerous awards for his buildings which include : The Pritzker Architecture Prize; 1991 AIA Twenty-five Year Award to the Vanna Venturi House; 1989 AIA Architecture Firm Award, to Venturi, Rauch and Scott

Brown; 1985 AIA Medal for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture;

1978 National Medal of Arts, United States Presidential Award; 1992

(with Denise Scott Brown) Vincent Scully Prize, National Building Museum; 2002

(with Denise Scott Brown) Fellow in the American Institute of Architects