Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi was an American architect, a Pritzker Prize laureate, and one of the founders of postmodernism.

He studied at Princeton University School of Architecture (1947–1950) and the American Academy in Rome (1954–1956). He worked in the architectural firms of O. Stonorov (Philadelphia), E. Saarinen (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan), and L. Kahn (Philadelphia). In 1964 he opened his own firm together with J. Rauch (with Venturi’s wife, D. S. Brown, becoming a co-owner in 1967). Since 1980, it has been the firm Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown. In recent decades the firm has also been active in exhibition and furniture design. From 1957 Venturi worked actively as a teacher, serving as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

His books Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1967) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), along with the works of C. Jencks, laid the theoretical foundation of postmodernism in architecture. In contemporary architectural scholarship, Robert Venturi’s works are considered no less significant and epoch-making for modern architecture than those of Le Corbusier were in their time.

The theory of “a shelter with decoration on it,” the search for contradictions in modernist architecture, the reassessment of modernist ideals, and drawing architects’ attention to pop art are among Venturi’s many innovations. He reexamines the traditions of modernism (and with them the traditions of the entire preceding culture, based on an unqualified faith in science and progress) and defines the new architecture that should follow modernism, identifying its main features: ornament, function as ornament, a new eclecticism based on direct quotation from a wide variety of sources within a single work, and an ironic reinterpretation of modernism.

Developing his theory, R. Venturi makes interesting and sometimes unexpected comparisons in order to explain his definition of architecture and show how he arrived at it. For this purpose he compares Rome and Las Vegas, abstract expressionism and pop art, Vitruvius and Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and McDonald’s, Scarlatti and the Beatles. The comparisons themselves characterize