Influences: Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi, FAIA: 1925-2018 (photo by Todd Sheridan [CC BY-SA 2.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

An earlier blog entry of mine, “Genealogy of Influence,” promised a series of posts about the architects and theorists who influenced my architectural world view. This is the latest post in the series. 

This weekend is a busy one for me, but I could not let it pass without acknowledging the death of Robert Venturi this past Tuesday at the age of 93. Venturi truly was one of the major architectural figures of the 20th century. He was a Pritzker Prize laureate and a recipient (along with his wife and professional partner Denise Scott Brown) of the AIA Gold Medal. Eulogies cite his enormous influence as an architect and theorist upon a profession that had by the 1960s and 70s become sclerotic and often out of touch with those it served. He was a pioneering postmodernist though he famously disavowed the label. He contributed greatly to the broadening of architectural discourse during a culturally transformative time. Many buildings and places today are nuanced, erudite, subtle, witty, and more in no small part because of Venturi’s own work and writings. 

My introduction to Robert Venturi came from reading his landmark treatise Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. I purchased my now thoroughly dogeared copy in 1977, immediately upon publication of its second edition by the Museum of Modern Art. It’s important to understand the zeitgeist at the time: the most celebrated architecture of the 1960’s and 1970’s generally conformed to doctrinaire Modernism though change was in the wind. Before discovering Complexity and Contradiction as a first-year student at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, I regarded “architecture” to be limited mostly to the examples of de rigueur Pacific Northwest Modernism with which—having grown up in Vancouver—I was most familiar. The book was a total revelation for me: I realized Architecture, with a capital “A,” could do much, much more than merely solve a design problem with a pleasing composition of forms. I learned Architecture also had the capacity to be a conveyor of meaning, which many historical examples and styles from all periods provided in rich abundance. My eyes had been opened to see a vastly more inclusive and complex architectural universe. 

Rather than expound too much more about how Robert Venturi fundamentally changed how we look at and talk about architecture, I’ll include the following excerpt from Complexity and Contradiction. This passage is the first, short chapter of the book. By characterizing it as a “gentle manifesto,” Venturi sought direct and ironic comparison with the more bombastic declarations of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and others from the early years of Modernism:  

Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto 

I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism. Instead, I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art. Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged, from Godel’s proof of ultimate inconsistency in mathematics to T.S. Eliot’s analysis of “difficult” poetry and Joseph Albers’ definition of the paradoxical quality of painting. 

But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable. The increasing dimension and scale of architecture in urban and regional planning add to the difficulties. I welcome the problems and exploit the uncertainties. By embracing contradiction as well as complexity, I aim for vitality as well as validity. 

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 “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as “interesting,” conventional rather than “designed,” accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality. 

I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer “both-and” to “either-or,” black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once. 

But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications for totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less. 

Vanna Venturi House (1964)

I would subsequently acquire Learning from Las Vegas (coauthored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour), which celebrated the common, the vernacular, and the use or interpretation of signs and symbols, further cementing my appreciation for the value to architects of a catholic, all-embracing, and eclectic knowledge base.

Venturi’s books and designs did prefigure a proliferation of some awfully bad, kitschy, cheap, and vulgar buildings by lesser architects during Postmodernism’s late 70s, 80s, and early 90s heyday. Critics maligned much of the work executed under its banner. The use of irony—which knowing architects could expertly employ—frequently would be unintentionally absurd in the most trivial work of others. Too many thoughtlessly quoted historic motifs at random. For his part, Venturi claimed he used history as a reference but never used it for direct inspiration. Today, it’s fashionably hip among some to look back at Postmodernism with sardonic affection for its melding of wit and picturesqueness. I suspect Robert Venturi was bemused by the interest of millennials in the more superficial traits of a movement he helped spawn rather than in its more substantive and lasting lessons. 

I learned from Robert Venturi that the ordinary can be extraordinary, and that history provides many lessons from which to draw. By his own account, he was guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past—by precedent, thoughtfully considered. Ultimately, his legacy for all architects will be how he expanded our perception of what architecture was, is, and can be.