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Robert Venturi
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate 1991

Venturi graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 and received his M.F.A. there in 1950. He furthered his studies as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1954 to 1956. Shortly after his return to this country, he taught an architectural theory course at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture. In the past three decades since, he has lectured at numerous other institutions including Yale, Princeton, Harvard, UCLA, Rice and the American Academy in Rome. In his first book, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture," published in 1966 by the Museum of Modern Art, Venturi posed the question, "Is not Main Street almost all right?" He was arguing for what he called "the messy vitality" of the built environment. As he puts it, "We were calling for an architecture that promotes richness and ambiguity over unity and clarity, contradiction and redundancy over harmony and simplicity." He was challenging Modernism with the multiple solutions available from historya history defined as relating not only to the specific building site, but the history of all architecture. He wanted architecture to deal with the complexities of the city, to become more contextual. In his original preface to the book, Venturi states, "As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the pastby precedent, thoughtfully considered." He continues later, "As an artist I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find

Biography Robert Venturi has been described as one of the most original talents in contemporary architecture. He has also been credited with saving modern architecture from itself. He has done this by being eloquent verbally with his writings and visually with the forms of his buildings. Like other Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates before him, he is a writer, a teacher, an artist and philosopher, as well as an architect.

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we likewhat we are easily attracted towe can learn much of what we really are." It would be impossible to discuss Robert Venturi's writing without mentioning his famous response, "Less is a bore," to modernist Mies van der Rohe's dictum, "Less is more." This was Venturi's way "to make the point that modern architecture had become too simplistic. Venturi is an architect whose work cannot be categorized; to him, there is never a single solution. Lest anyone try to pigeonhole him as a postmodernist, he declared that he was practicing modern architecture, and paraphrased his own words earlier about Main Street, "the modern movement was almost all right." emphasizing his close affinity to the basic tenets of modernism, while still giving importance to human use, memories, comfort and entertainment. Venturi has made it possible to accept the casual and the improvised in the built environment In his first book, Venturi declared, "Architects can bemoan or try to ignore them (referring to the honky-tonk elements in buildings) or even try to abolish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time, because architects do not have the power to replace them (nor do they know what to replace them with), and because these commonplace elements accommodate existing needs for variety and communication. Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary. As an art it will acknowledge what is and what ought to be, the immediate and the speculative."
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Venturi's early professional work was in the office of Eero Saarinen, where among other projects, he worked on the design of the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center. He also worked in the offices of Louis I. Kahn and Oscar Stonorov in Philadelphia. One of his first projects to be built that captured the attention of the architectural community was a house for his mother in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1989, it received the AIA's Twenty-five Year Award as a design of "enduring significance that has withstood the test of time." Scully described it as, "Disarmingly simple after the spatial antics of late Modernism, its plan...is based on a symbolic conception rather than upon one that is purely spatially abstract." Robert Venturi's wife, Denise Scott Brown, is an architect, planner, author, educator. She has been a partner in the firm since 1969 and his collaborator in the evolution of architectural theory and design for the past 30 years. She is noted for bringing particular attention to the relationship of architecture, planning and social conditions, and is primarily responsible for planning, urban design and architectural programming. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour collaborated on another book, published in 1972, "Learning from Las Vegas," a further exploration of urban sprawl and the suburbs in relation to their architectural theories. A collection of their writings was also published in 1984, "A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953-1984."

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In one of the essays in the latter collection, Robert Venturi confessed, "Alvar Aalto's work has meant the most to me of all the work of the Modern masters. It is for me the most moving, the most relevant, the richest source to learn from in terms of its art and technique. Like all work that lives beyond its time, Aalto's can be interpreted in many ways. Each interpretation is more or less true for its moment because work of such quality has many dimensions and layers of meaning." With a characteristic Venturi human, humorous touch, he added, "But Aalto's most endearing characteristic for me as I struggle to complete this essay, is that he didn't write about architecture." In one of his essays in "A View from the Campidoglio," Venturi says, "When I was young, a sure way to distinguish great architects was through the consistency and originality of their work...This should no longer be the case. Where the Modern masters' strength lay in consistency, ours should lie in diversity."

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Vanna Venturi house

When architect Robert Venturi built this home for his mother, he shocked the world. Postmodern in style, the Vanna Venturi house flew in the face of Modernism and changed the way we think about architecture. The design of Vanna Venturi House appears deceptively simple. A light wood frame is divided by a rising chimney. The house has a sense of symmetry, yet the symmetry is often distorted. For example, the faade is balanced with five window squares on each side. The way the windows are arranged, however, is not symmetrical. Consequently, the viewer is momentarily startled and disoriented. Inside the
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house, the staircase and chimney compete for the main center space. Both unexpectedly divide to fit around each other. Combining surprise with tradition, the Vanna Venturi House includes numerous references to historic architecture. Look closely and you will see suggestions of Michaelangelo's Porta Pia in Rome, the Nymphaeum at Palladio, Alessandro Vittoria's Villa Barbaro at Maser, and Luigi Moretti's apartment house in Rome. The radical house Venturi built for his mother is frequently discussed in architecture and art history classes and has inspired the work of many other architects.

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Interior

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The building's design takes important cues from adjacent structures but also promotes an identity of its own. Its long shape and central position make Wu Hall a visual hyphen that connects the dormitories and unites them. Brick walls, limestone trim and strip windows adhere to the traditional Gothic architecture of Princeton. The main entrance, set off-center and broadside in the building, is marked by a bold marble and gray granite panel recalling early Renaissance ornament and symbolizing the entrance to the College as a whole as well as to the building itself. Inside, the long dining room recalls the English Gothic halls traditional to Princeton. Two-story bay windows at each end of the building create a spaciousness and scale typical of historical prototypes, and admit lots of cheerful light. Furnishings chosen by the architects create intimate detail and promote comfort. To the left of the lobby, a stair rises by a bay window to a lounge. From the lounge, a hall leads past offices to a library / study area. The lounge and the library each include one of the large bay windows, visually expanding their relatively small spaces. Both inside and outside spaces have been designed to provide opportunities for informal and spontaneous interaction among students. The stairway itself serves several purposes. The first flight extends to one side to form bleacher-like risers suitable for sitting. The extension suggests a grand stair sweeping upward, and serves informally as a spontaneous waiting and gathering place. On special occasions it becomes an indoor
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Wu Hall is the centerpiece of Butler College, a new undergraduate residential college at Princeton University. The firm faced the challenge of creating a new building that would provide an identity for the new college, serve as a focal point for its social life and also give a sense of cohesiveness with other Butler College facilities in two existing buildings of disparate styles. The site is irregular, sloping and narrow. Further constraints included the proximity of the other buildings and the need for the new hall to share an existing kitchen with adjacent Wilson College.

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amphitheater. The building is fully accessible to the handicapped. A walk parallel to Wu Hall modulates the slopes of the northsouth axis with a series of steps, ramps, retaining walls and small courts. These resultant outside spaces also serve as gathering areas with some opportunities for seating. At the south end of the building VSBA designed a small piazza for the junction of College Walk, a major campus pedestrian thoroughfare, and Butler College Walk. Here College Walk widens to accommodate access to new dormitories and to hold the Butler Memorial that identifies and unites the three disparate buildings that form Butler College. This arrangement in conjunction with the siting of Wu Hall has given identity to the western end of College Walk.

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Guild House
The program required 91 apartments of varying types with a common recreation room, to house elderly people who want to remain in their old neighborhood. Local zoning limited the building height to six stories. The small urban site faces south on Spring Garden Street. The interior program suggested a maximum of apartments facing south, southeast, and southwest for light and for the interesting activity of the street-yet the urban character of the street suggested a building that would not be an independent pavilion, but instead would recognize the spatial demands of the street in front. This results in a building inflected in shape, whose front is different from its back. The front facade is
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separated from the back at its top ends where the common room terraces occur in order to emphasize the vestigial role of the street facade. The contrastingly -intricate side facades, more sensitive to interior than exterior spatial demands in their exact configurations, accommodate the need for maximum southeast and southwest light, views, and garden space below. The interior spaces are defined by intricate mazes of walls, which accommodate the very complex and varied program of an apartment house (as opposed to an office building, for example), and the irregular framing allowed by flat plate construction. There is a maximum of interior volume and a minimum of corridor space. The corridor is an irregular and varied residual space rather than a tunnel. Economy dictated not "advanced" architectural elements, but "conventional" ones. We did not resist this. The dark brown brick walls with double-hung windows recall traditional Philadelphia row houses or even the tenement-like backs of Edwardian apartment houses. Their effect is uncommon, however, because they are subtly proportioned and unusually big. The change in scale of these almost banal elements contributes an expression of tension and a quality to these facades, which now read as both conventional and unconventional forms at the same time. The big round exposed column at the center of the street facade is polished black granite. It accommodates and emphasizes the exceptional entrance opening on the ground floor, and it
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contrasts with the white, glazed brick area, which extends to the middle of the second floor on this small section of the street facade. The balcony railings on this floor, like those on the other floors, are perforated steel plate, but here they are painted white rather than black to create a continuity of surface in this area despite the change in material. The central window on the top floor reflects the special spatial configuration of the common room inside and relates to the entrance below, increasing the scale of the building on the street and at the entrance. Its arched shape also permits a very big opening to penetrate the wall and yet remain a hole in a wall rather than a void in a frame. The television antenna atop this axis and beyond the otherwise constant height line of the building strengthens this axis of scale-change in the zone of the central facade, and expresses a kind of monumentality similar to that at the entrance at Anet. The antenna, with its anodized gold surface, can be interpreted two ways: abstractly, as sculpture in the manner of Lippold, and as a symbol of the aged, who spend so much time looking at TV. The ornamental line created by a row of white bricks contradictorily intersects the row of upper windows, but it terminates the otherwise plain facade. With the area of white glazed bricks on the front below, it also sets up a new and larger scale of three stories, juxtaposed on the other smaller scale of six stories demarked by the layers of windows. GUILD HOUSE, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER First published in Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic

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Architecture 1996 ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY How thrilling and sad it was to hear someone say, driv-ing by the Guild House recently, "You wonder now what all the fuss was about." The design of Guild House seemed extraordinary in its time because it looked ordinary. As housing for the elderly sponsored by the Friends Neighborhood Guild, it sits at home in its context a conventional urban neighborhood in north Philadelphia combining typical row houses and occasional industrial buildings of the second half of the last century all in brick. ITS DESIGN WAS EXTRAORDINARY BECAUSE: A Building on a Street; Not a Slab or a Tower in a Superblock It was not a monumental slab or a pure tower as a point in landscaped space as idealized superblockbut a ge-neric building directing space on a lot along a street pragmatically working within the existing urban fabric. THE REASONS FOR ITS IRREGULAR SHAPE As an irregular non-slabwhose front was different from its back!it could embrace exterior space in front and maximize the area of apartment units facing the view of the Philadelphia skyline toward the south and the number of corner rooms in the units.
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NOT RC BUT BRICK Its exterior surfaces were not made of exposed reinforced concrete that would work to one-up the old brick neighborhood; its analogous brick surfaces helped make the building at home in its context and promote urban unity. WINDOWS RATHER THAN AN ABSENCE OF WALLS And there were windows on its facade-the bete noire Modernism not only holes in walls rather than absences of walls, but conventional windows that were symbolically explicit--not only double-hung but bisected by mullions: they not only were windows but they looked like and reminded you of windows. (This almost square four-paned window has since become, of course, a motif in architecture all over.) HIERARCHY OF SCALES And the same kind of window appeared in different sizes and this promoted hierarchy of scale and diminished the modular consistency that reigned in architecture at the time. ORNAMENTAL PATTERN AND HIERARCHY The most extraordinary element for the time was the ornamental pattern on the facadesand the most difficult for me to handle, not so much because of what critics would say but because of what I was thinking as a result of my upbringing: would this aesthetic gesture be equated with crime by Adolf Loos and his Minimalist cohorts looking down from Modernist heaven? But the pattern deriving from a white brick

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area at the base and a stripe near the top had an aesthetic justification again to reinforce the element of hierarchy creating base, middle, and attic in the manner of the facades of Italian palazzi. I must admit I enjoyed the contradictory juxtaposition of this tripartite decorative order upon the sixstory functional order expressed literally via the layers of windows on the facade. These thin stripes might look pathetic now when stripes are all over. HIERARCHY ENCORE Another hierarchical element of the facade is its central portion, expressing again a base, a middle, and a top via the entrance, the series of balconies, and the arched window (!) of the community room acting as termination again as counteractions to the modular consistency, vertical as well as horizontal, of Modernist facades of the time. Again, today this architectural effect you can find in the facades of many multistoried buildings-as well as the arched window. THE FACADE AS PLANE The wing walls at the balconies flanking the arched window say the facade is a plane along the street as well as a surface of a form. REALISTIC SCULPTURE AND DUALITY This kind of generic architecture requires iconographic flourish that manifest in the sculpture above the arched window in the form of a television antenna as objet trouve; because the client was Quaker there could be no Madonna on top. And then
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there is the duality derived from the position of the column at the entrance this column in granite, itself structural and decorative, and uniquely big in a time when the thin-ner the better prevailed. Inside, the corridors are nicely not long and contain decorative tile friezes designed by elementary school students of the neighborhood. Many of the rooms have windows facing two ways.

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