In 1966 the Museum of Modern Art in New York published a book of about two hundred pages that had none of the solemnity of modernist manifestos. Its title is Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and its author is an architect from Philadelphia, Robert Venturi (1925–2018), who had just opened a practice and built very little. In the book he attacks an icon: “less is more”, the maxim attributed to Mies van der Rohe, seems to him an impoverishment. “Less is a bore”, he writes. It is a quip, but it is also a program: architecture is ambiguous, contradictory, rich in overlapping meanings, and has a duty to say so.
Venturi does not stop at polemic. The book is built as a collection of examples (Michelangelo, Borromini, Lutyens, Le Corbusier, Aalto) in which the building deliberately contains elements in conflict: a symmetrical façade with an off-axis opening, a deformed classical order, a plan that obeys two logics at once. The lesson is that the great buildings of history are never pure. The Modern Movement, with its obsession with unity and coherence, simply excluded half of architecture.
The mother's house and the Guild House
The book has a built companion. The Vanna Venturi House (Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1964), designed for his mother, is a demonstration at full scale. The façade is almost a postcard: a pediment split at the centre, a rectangular opening with no evident logic, a ribbon window that winks at modernism, a thin arch applied to the wall. Behind the façade, the plan is complex, with a staircase that collides with the central chimney. Every element is recognisable; none is where you expect it.
The Guild House (Philadelphia, 1963), housing for the elderly, plays in the same register with poor materials: brick, ordinary windows, and on the top a gilded television aerial, an everyday object turned into sculpture. Venturi understands that an old person spends hours in front of the TV and that the building must say: this is how we live here. The irony is not cynicism, it is honesty about how people really live.
Las Vegas: learning from the street
In 1968 Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown (b. 1931), an urbanist born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, took a class of Yale students into the Nevada desert. The task was to study the Las Vegas Strip as if it were Rome. The conclusion, published in 1972 with Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas, is that the American commercial city works through signs: giant billboards, signage, huge parking lots, buildings read from a car at forty miles an hour. The European architect, used to reasoning in volume and space, fails to see that the real urban language is that of signs.
From here come two categories that became famous. The duck is a building whose form itself is a sign, like the duck shop on Long Island built in the shape of a duck. The decorated shed is a banal container to which a sign is applied. Modernism, they argue, produced almost only ducks, because it wanted form to express function. But the real city is made of decorated sheds: the most honest architecture is one that accepts being a container and puts a sign where it is needed.
Authorship and the Pritzker
In 1991 Venturi received the Pritzker Prize. Scott Brown, who had co-signed with him the theory, the research and most of the practice's projects, was not named. In 2013 two Harvard students launched a petition to have her contribution recognised retroactively; the foundation declined to amend the prize. Scott Brown replied with measured words: she asked for recognition of collective work, not compensation. The case became the symbolic example of the invisibility of women in the credit lines of studio architecture, and has helped shift the way prizes are awarded to couples and teams.