Robert Venturi

His mother called the Pledge of Allegiance coercive patriotism, and he never went to public school. Vanna Venturi, the self-educated wife of a Philadelphia produce merchant, was a socialist, a feminist, a vegetarian and an absolute pacifist who had converted to Quakerism, and the family kept meeting at Arch Street. Princeton carried her son through the war years and gave him two degrees, the second in 1950. He drafted for Eero Saarinen, then for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. The Rome Prize followed in 1954 and two years at the American Academy, and Baroque Rome supplied the argument he spent the rest of his life making: modern architecture had thrown away far too much.

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, argued for ambiguity, for historical reference, for both-and instead of either-or, and answered Mies van der Rohe's less is more with less is a bore. It has since appeared in 18 languages. Learning from Las Vegas came in 1972, written with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, and took the commercial strip seriously enough to hand the field the duck and the decorated shed. The buildings pressed the same case: the Vanna Venturi House he built for his mother, Guild House, the Sainsbury Wing in London.

Denise Scott Brown was his co-author, his wife from 1967, and principal in charge of planning in the firm from 1969. The 1991 Pritzker Prize went to Venturi alone. She did not attend the ceremony. She had already written the essay for it: Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture, drafted in 1975, withheld for years because she feared what publishing it would cost her, and finally printed in 1989. It describes how credit for joint work reliably attaches to the man. In 2013 two students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design opened a petition asking the Pritzker to add her name retroactively. It drew many thousands of signatures, past laureates among them. The jury declined. Venturi said publicly that she was his full and equal partner.

What came after the books was not what he had asked for. By the 1980s the historical quotation he argued for was being stapled onto office parks and shopping malls as veneer, columns carrying nothing, pediments with no building behind them, and the movement credited to him arrived under a label he refused. He said repeatedly that he was not a postmodernist and disliked most of what was done in his name. The reputation outlasted the style. In 2016 the American Institute of Architects gave its Gold Medal to Venturi and Scott Brown jointly, 25 years after the Pritzker had not. He died in Philadelphia on September 18, 2018, at 93, of complications from Alzheimer's disease.

Robert Venturi's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Vanna Venturi House building
  Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia — built for his mother and given the AIA Twenty-five Year Award in 1989 1964
• Guild House building
  Housing for the elderly in Philadelphia, and an early decorated shed 1964
• Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture book
  The gentle manifesto against orthodox modernism, since published in 18 languages 1966
• Learning from Las Vegas book
  With Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour — the duck and the decorated shed 1972
• Franklin Court building
  The steel ghost frame over Benjamin Franklin's vanished Philadelphia house 1976
• Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London building
  Designed with Denise Scott Brown as co-principal 1991

• June 25, 1925 aged 0 Born in Philadelphia to Robert Venturi Sr. and Vanna Luizi Venturi Raised Quaker in a household his mother ran on pacifism and socialism.
• 1947 aged ~22 Graduates summa cum laude from Princeton He returned for a second degree, completed in 1950.
• 1954 aged ~29 Wins the Rome Prize and spends two years at the American Academy in Rome Looking hard at Baroque Rome gave him the case against modernist orthodoxy.
• 1960 aged ~35 Meets Denise Scott Brown at a University of Pennsylvania faculty meeting She was arguing against demolishing the Frank Furness library. He was teaching alongside Louis Kahn.
• 1964 aged ~39 Finishes the Vanna Venturi House and Guild House His first buildings as an independent architect, both in Philadelphia.
• 1966 aged ~41 Publishes Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture Vincent Scully called it the most important writing on architecture since Le Corbusier.
• 1972 aged ~47 Publishes Learning from Las Vegas with Scott Brown and Izenour It came out of a Yale studio that sent students to document the Strip.
• 1991 aged ~66 Awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize alone Denise Scott Brown, his equal partner, was left off and did not attend the ceremony.
• September 18, 2018 aged 93 Dies in Philadelphia at 93 Complications from Alzheimer's disease.

• Louis Kahn 1901–1974
  The Salk Institute, the Kimbell and the National Assembly at Dhaka, from an architect who began at 50. worked in his office
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1886–1969
  Directed architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology and defined American modernist steel-and-glass buildings. answered
• Philip Johnson 1906–2005
  Named the International Style at MoMA, then built it and publicly repudiated it. influenced
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. opposed the tradition of
• I. M. Pei 1917–2019
  Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture. rival
• Maya Lin b. 1959
  Designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial whose work transformed American memorial architecture. later generation