Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi (1925-2018) was an American architect and writer, born in Philadelphia. He studied at Princeton (B.A. 1947, M.F.A. 1950), worked for Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, and spent 1954-1956 at the American Academy in Rome on the Rome Prize. With his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown he ran the Philadelphia firm later named Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1991; it was not extended to Scott Brown.

His book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), published by the Museum of Modern Art, argued for buildings with layered meanings and references to history, against the reduced forms of modernism. He answered Mies van der Rohe's "less is more" with "less is a bore." The Vanna Venturi House in Philadelphia (1964), built for his mother, has a large gable front split down the middle, with a thin applied arch over the entrance.

Learning from Las Vegas (1972), written with Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, contrasted the "duck," a building shaped like what it represents, with the "decorated shed," a plain building with signs and ornament applied to it, and favored the shed. Later works include Franklin Court in Philadelphia (1976), where steel frames outline Benjamin Franklin's demolished house, and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London (1991).