Robert Venturi

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Robert Charles Venturi (June 25, 1925 -) is an award winning American architect. Based in Philadelphia, he worked under Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn before forming his own firm with John Rauch. As a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, Venturi met his future wife, the architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, who joined the firm in 1967. After Rauch's resignation in 1989, the firm took its current form and was named Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.. Robert Venturi won the Pritzker Prize in 1991.

Venturi was a controversial critic of the purely functional and spare designs of modern orthodox architecture and was considered a counterrevolutionary. He published his manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in 1966.

He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 and received his M.F.A. there in 1950.

Important works by his firm include:

Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London
Provincial Capitol Building, Toulouse, France
Guild House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Vanna Venturi House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

The Vanna Venturi House, designed for Venturi's mother, was recognized as a "Masterwork of Modern American Architecture" by the United States Postal Service in May 2005.

[edit] See also

Postmodern architecture

[edit] Bibliography

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York 1966.
Learning from Las Vegas (with D. Scott Brown and S. Izenour), Cambridge MA, 1972, revised 1977.
Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture : A View from the Drafting Room, MIT Press, 1998.
Architecture as Signs and Systems (with D. Scott Brown), Harvard University Press, 2004.