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.
Two different educations
The 1966 book had a long gestation. Venturi studied at Princeton, where he was trained in a still classically oriented history of architecture, and between 1954 and 1956 spent two years at the American Academy in Rome. There he looked closely at Michelangelo's Mannerism, Borromini's Baroque, squares and façades adapted to irregular plots, and became convinced that the best architecture often grows out of contradictory situations. Back in the United States he worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, two very different masters of American modernism, before opening his own practice. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and the courses he gave there became the basis of Complexity and Contradiction.
Denise Scott Brown reached the same milieu by another route. After studying in South Africa she moved to London, to the Architectural Association, in the years when Britain was debating Brutalism and how architecture should engage with people's everyday lives. She then went to Philadelphia to study planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where among others she followed the sociologist Herbert Gans, a scholar of real life in American neighbourhoods and suburbs. From him she learned to observe without judging: before designing a city, you need to understand how people actually use it, even when their tastes do not coincide with those of architects. Scott Brown and Venturi met at the university, worked together and married in 1967.
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.
The antenna also has an instructive story. It was not connected to any television: it was a sculptural object in gold-anodised aluminium, placed there like a sign. It was removed after some years, and its disappearance says a lot about the fate of many ironic signs: they work as long as someone grasps their meaning, then become an incomprehensible or irritating detail. The mother's house, by contrast, has had the opposite fortune. It has become one of the most studied houses of the 20th century, to the point that in 2005 the United States Postal Service included it in a series of stamps devoted to masterworks of modern American architecture.
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.
The lesson of Las Vegas was not only about casinos. In the same years Scott Brown and Venturi worked for the communities of South Street in Philadelphia, a neighbourhood of shops and modest housing threatened by an urban motorway project, the Crosstown Expressway, which would have cut through the city. Instead of proposing a new grand plan, the practice documented how the neighbourhood worked, who lived there and what activities it hosted, and helped the residents argue that it was worth preserving. The motorway was not built, and South Street is now one of the liveliest streets in the city. It is the same idea as Las Vegas applied to an opposite context: looking respectfully at what exists before erasing it.
A small project from those years shows how the practice translated these ideas into architecture. At Franklin Court in Philadelphia (1976), Benjamin Franklin's house had long since disappeared and there were not enough drawings to rebuild it accurately. Instead of inventing a reconstruction, Venturi and Scott Brown traced the volume of the house with a simple steel frame, a "ghost structure" outlining it in the air, and placed the museum underground. On the ground, openings allow visitors to see the original foundations. It is a way of treating memory without falsifying it, anticipating by decades many debates on restoration and reconstruction.
After Las Vegas the same method was applied to the suburbs. In 1970, again at Yale, Venturi and Scott Brown led a studio devoted to Levittown, the most famous mass-produced single-family housing development of postwar America, scorned by architectural critics. The students photographed the changes residents had made to their identical houses: added porches, replaced windows, decorations, personalised gardens. What emerged was the picture of a community that, within a standard model, expressed its own tastes and identities. The publishing history of Learning from Las Vegas also tells us something: the first edition of 1972 was a large illustrated book with elaborate graphic design, while the revised edition of 1977, smaller and cheaper, cut some of the images and became the one read by generations of students. Anyone who wants to really understand the practice's working method today should look, if possible, for the first edition, where photographs, maps and diagrams are an integral part of the argument. Anyone who wants to really understand the practice's working method today should look, if possible, for the first edition, where photographs, maps and diagrams are an integral part of the argument.
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.
The story had a sequel. In 2016 the American Institute of Architects awarded its Gold Medal jointly to Venturi and Scott Brown, the first time in the prize's history it went to a couple: a few years earlier the institute had changed its rules precisely to allow up to two people who had worked together to be honoured. Venturi died in 2018. Scott Brown continued to write, teach and photograph cities, and in recent years has received numerous individual awards that have made her own contribution, from planning to theory, more visible.
The Sainsbury Wing: postmodernism in Trafalgar Square
The work that best sums up their maturity is in London. In 1984 Prince Charles, commenting on a first modernist design for the extension of the National Gallery, called it a "monstrous carbuncle" on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend. The remark caused a stir and the design was abandoned. The new competition was won by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and the Sainsbury Wing opened in 1991. The façade on Trafalgar Square takes up the classical pilasters of William Wilkins's 19th-century building, but spaces them ever more widely the further one moves from the old museum, until they disappear: the new building begins as a quotation and ends as a plain wall. Inside, the rooms housing early Italian Renaissance painting are lit from above and have proportions and details that recall the churches for which many of those works were painted.
It is precisely this ambiguity, quoting history without pretending to belong to it, that distinguishes Venturi and Scott Brown from many postmodern colleagues. Charles Moore, with the Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, took irony towards stage set and celebration; Michael Graves, with the Portland Building, towards a colourful, monumental classicism. Venturi and Scott Brown stayed closer to the ordinary and the everyday: brick, signs, normal windows, buildings that do not ask to be admired but to be read. That is why their writings are still so useful to anyone studying the city: they propose not a style but a way of looking.