Learning from Robert Venturi

On Tuesday 18 September, at 93 years, the American architect Robert Venturi died, who has been classified as one of the most original talents of contemporary architecture. Serve this article as a tribute and to know a little more of this renowned figure of world architecture.

 

Considered the father of postmodernism, American architect Robert Venturi, a Pritzker prize winner, died at 93 years old.

Robert Venturi (Philadelphia, 1925-2018) was a key character in the history of architecture: He renewed the airs of the project and the theory advocating for diversity, when most modern architects defended concepts such as formal consistency and containment. . This happened in the 1960s, a decade after the architect obtained the Rome Prize and returned, after two years at the American Academy of that city, convinced that it was worth supporting a little mess to get vitality in architecture. He had learned it by observing Baroque works: the concave and the convex in Bernini and Borromini. But to protest against the modern monolithic purity and to declare itself defender of the ambiguity to safeguard the expressive richness was to rebel against a profession which, by then, believed majority and uncritically in the god of the modern purity.

Here we share briefly some of your contributions:

1. Venturi is known as the author of the first post-modern building: The house Vanna Venturi, a stereotype of housing with symbolic features that he made for his mother in Philadelphia. He never accepted that title. It was defined as inclusive and was against any reductionism.
2. The fundamental sources for Venturi were the eclectic and classicists traditions (Baroque, Mannerism, Rococo) and popular architecture. He was also a fan of Le Corbusier, Aalto, Van Eyck, and Louise Kahn who rescued the establishment of a connection with the past and given the architecture an autonomous development.
3. It is necessary to emphasize its contemporaneousness with the pop art, whose values, the admiration for the vernacular commercial and the objects of consumption are reflected in his work.
4. It coined in the years 60 the term "less is a bore" (less is boring) to recover the figurative form, contrary to the abstraction, and appealing to the capacity of communication of the architecture.
5.  Its buildings include the Seattle Art Museum; The Guild House in Philadelphia; The Vanna Venturi House, located on Chestnut Hill and an extension of the National Gallery Museum in London.
6. This architect's reputation is based on both his architecture and his theoretical and critical writings. His work includes a building of the provincial capitol of Haute-Garonne in Toulouse, France; The Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri Resort near Nikko, Japan; The Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery in London; Additions to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Seattle Museum of Art; As well as the conceptual design of two high-rise offices in Shanghai; Major expansions to Lehigh Valley Hospital; A chapel for the Episcopal Academy near Philadelphia, among others.
7. He wrote two of the most influential texts of the architecture theory of the second half of the twentieth century. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), where it defends a position contrary to modern architecture, showing that the complexity of the architectural form cannot be reduced to a single logical and aesthetic system. and learning from Las Vegas, considered to be one of the great manifestos of postmodernism in architecture.
8. He shared his life with the South African architect Denise Scott Brown, partner and wife, both cult professionals, Cosmopolitan, very observant and progressive. With it he founded in 1967 the company VSBA (Venturi Scott Brown Associates), which operated until the 2012, the year in which Venturi withdrew from architecture. Despite sharing the authorship of essays and works, Scott Brown's work did not have the same recognition. Therefore, as a protest in 1991, the year in which the Pritzker was granted, the architect did not attend the ceremony. He took a few years to publicly claim to share the award with her (2014). He didn't get it, but in 2016 the American Institute of architects granted them his gold medal. Both of us, at last, together.