robert venturi

Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. (born June 25, 1925 in Philadelphia) is an award-winning American architect and founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. Robert Venturi and his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, are regarded among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and theoretical writings and teaching. Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991.[1] He is also known for coining the maxim "Less is a bore" as antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more". Venturi lives in Philadelphia with Denise Scott Brown. They have a son, James Venturi. Contents [hide] 1 Education and Teaching 2 Writings 3 Architectural Practice 4 Selected works 4.1 Other works 5 Awards 6 Bibliography 7 References 8 External links //

Education and Teaching

Venturi attended school at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 and received his M.F.A. there in 1950. In 1951 he briefly worked under Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and later for Louis Kahn in Philadelphia. He was awarded the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1954, where he studied and toured Europe for two years.

From 1954 to 1965, Venturi held teaching positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Kahn's teaching assistant, an instructor, and later, as associate professor. It was there, in 1960, that he met fellow faculty member, architect and planner Denise Scott Brown. Venturi taught later at the Yale School of Architecture and was a visiting lecturer with Scott Brown in 2003 at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.

Writings

A controversial critic of the purely functional and spare designs of modern orthodox architecture, Venturi has been considered a counterrevolutionary. He published his "gentle manifesto," Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966, described in the introduction by Vincent Scully to be "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's 'Vers Une Architecture', of 1923." Venturi received a grant from the Graham Foundation in 1965 to aid in its completion. The book has been translated and published in 18 languages.

In 1972, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Venturi wrote Learning from Las Vegas later revised in 1977 as Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. The book published studies of the Las Vegas Strip undertaken by a 1968 research and design studio Venturi taught with Scott Brown at the Yale School of Architecture. Learning from Las Vegas was a further rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural tastes.