Robert Venturi
Architect of the National Gallery extension who called for ‘messy vitality’ in modern design
ROBERT VENTURI, the architect, who has died aged 93, was often described as the grandfather of postmodernism – the reaction against the abstract modernist landscape of the 1950s and 1960s. In Britain he was best known as the designer, with his wife and fellow architect Denise Scott Brown, of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, the building which replaced the original Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) “monstrous carbuncle” denounced by the Prince of Wales.
A shy professor from Philadelphia, Venturi burst on to the architectural scene in 1966 with his manifesto Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in which, bravely for the time, he declared his love for Renaissance, Baroque and Mannerist Italy, and called for a return to complexity, contradiction and symbolic meaning in architecture. Where modernist theory decreed that function should be the only guiding principle behind the design of a building, Venturi argued that deliberate ambiguity and contradiction were preferable: “I am for messy vitality over obvious unity.”
To Mies van der Rohe’s famous aphorism “Less is more”, Venturi retorted: “Less is a bore”; and he proceeded to build a classically inspired house for his mother, the Vanna Venturi House (1959-64) at Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. The house, incorporating a gabled roof that culminates in a deep slit instead of the more conventional peak, was revolutionary for its time, but has come to be regarded as a post-modern classic. Architects weary of the grey, rectilinear aesthetic of the 1960s breathed a sigh of relief.
In fact, Venturi later regretted his riff on the great Modernist architect, telling an interviewer in 2012 that “All architects should kiss the feet of Mies van der Rohe.” Moreover, he claimed that the message of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture had been misunderstood. His point had been that architects should learn from Borromini, Michelangelo and Vanbrugh, not copy them – to create buildings of symbolic depth, not empty pastiche.
He and Denise Scott Brown followed up the conclusions of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture with studies on the vernacular architecture of “Main Street” America. In another hugely influential work, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), written by the Venturis with Steve Izenour, they observed that fine art had often followed folk art, and they rejected modernism’s intolerance of the American roadside vernacular of burger bars, neon signs and billboards.
The profession, they suggested, might benefit from integrating the vulgar elements of modern culture into architecture as an alternative to holding on to “prim dreams of pure order”. The Dutch architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas has acknowledged Learning from Las Vegas as a model for his own influential work on urban environments.
Yet, as with the followers of Mies van der Rohe, the post-modern “followers” of Venturi often lacked his wit and erudition. As a result, he was blamed for the theme-park style post-modern cityscape, full of high-rises in pastel colours and adorned with “ironic” historical references – pediments, gables, arches and the like – a style described by Jack Pringle, past president of Riba, as “trite dolls-house architecture”.
Venturi himself supported the objections to much of what passes as “post-modern”, claiming that he often felt “more comfortable with my critics than with those who have agreed with me”. In 2004 he declared: “I am not a post-modernist and I have never been a post-modernist.”
The National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing remains the Venturis’ most controversial work, partly because, in replacing ABK’S competition-winning scheme for the extension, which had been killed off after the Prince of Wales’s notorious intervention in 1986, the whole debacle became a flashpoint in the bunfight between the conservative and modernist factions that passed for architectural debate in Britain at the time.
When the new wing finally opened in 1991, it received a vicious critical roasting from architects and their allies in the press, and was variously described as “a monstrous failure”, “a camp joke”, “picturesque mediocre slime” and a “vulgar American piece of post-modern mannerist pastiche”.
For a time Venturi seemed to have achieved the impossible – offending both sides of the debate, because the building seemed to break the rules of both modernism and classicism, mixing the modernist idiom with historical references.
Nevertheless, for the most part the public, and indeed many critics, loved the new wing – and this year it was grade I listed. It blended into the original gallery, picking up the classical pillars of its Trafalgar Square facade before cleverly changing as it turned the corner into Pall Mall into a more obviously “modern” structure. More importantly (and in contrast to some other recent gallery designs), behind the facade there was a functioning building whose galleries showed up the early Italian Renaissance paintings, for which they were mainly designed, beautifully.
The Venturis, however, bruised by the critical drubbing they had received, went home to Philadelphia and did not return.
The son of an Italian-american wholesale fruit merchant, Robert Charles Venturi was born on June 25 1925 in Philadelphia. Brought up as a Quaker, he registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War.
Inspired by his parents’ love of old buildings, he entered Princeton to study Architecture. The university at that time was under the aegis of Jean Labatut, and the course was relatively traditional. After graduation in 1947 Venturi remained there as a postgraduate, winning the Palmer scholarship in 1948, the American Institute of Architecture student medal in 1949 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1950.
He completed his studies at the American Academy in Rome on a Rome Prize Fellowship, and it was here that his ideas about architecture began to take shape. He described the city as “architectural heaven” and would cite Italian Renaissance architecture as the greatest influence on his thinking.
He returned to Philadelphia to work in the architectural firm of Louis Kahn, whom he had met in a lift in 1947 and whose ideas on the layering of buildings and spatial complexity Venturi shared. In 1958 he left Kahn’s practice to go into partnership with Cope & Lippincott, with whom, among other projects, in 1959 he renovated the James B Duke House on East 78th Street in Manhattan, restoring all the original Edwardian cornices and mouldings of the 1912 mansion, but fitting the interior with contrasting modern elements such as steel shelving and bentwood chairs.
He left Cope & Lippincott in 1961 to work with William Short, and in 1964 he set up in practice with John Rauch. During this period he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, rising to become associate professor of architecture. It was here that he met Denise Scott Brown. They married in 1967 and she joined her husband’s practice the same year. A teacher of architecture and planning in Philadelphia, she brought to their work a sociological concern for the everyday users of buildings.
Venturi’s second important work after the Vanna Venturi House was the Guild House, an old people’s home in Philadelphia (1965). This consisted of 91 apartments, mostly facing south and on to the street, and a common room with a large curve-headed window. The exterior was manipulated to reduce the scale of the building: a course of white glazed bricks on the fifth floor refers to the white bricks at the bottom of the building, thus creating the illusion of the building being smaller. Venturi’s version of an ordinary apartment block was crowned, controversially, with a gold-plated imitation television aerial, a playful reference to the major occupation of its residents.
In 1966, the year of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi was appointed Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Professor of Architecture at Yale and he lectured at the American Academy in Rome and at the University of California.
Learning from Las Vegas (1972) was also notable for popularising the terms “ducks” for buildings that are representational in their shapes, and “decorated sheds”, for containers that depend on applied ornament to convey meaning.
Modern architecture, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown claimed, had gone astray in producing “ducks” using the outdated symbolism of the industrial revolution; “decorated sheds”, which make use of the language of pop culture, they saw as more appropriate to the modern world. This populist aspect of their thinking proved extremely contentious, but gained support in both academic and professional circles.
Venturi’s architectural output was never as great or as influential as his writings. On the whole, his ideas gave more opportunities to others than to his own practice, which was confined in the 1960s and early 1970s to unbuilt projects and small-scale buildings, mostly houses. These included the Trubeck and Wislocki houses (1970), conventional-looking holiday homes by the sea in Nantucket, the less classical Brant House in Connecticut (1970), and Tucker House (1974), in the woods near New York.
By the 1980s the Venturis were winning large commissions, including new buildings on the campuses of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. By incorporating historical elements as surface decoration, and materials such as patterned brickwork and natural oak, they helped to bridge the gap between the historic heart of the universities and the standard boxy 20th-century aesthetic. Other important projects included the Seattle Art Museum (1991) and a government complex in Toulouse, France.
In the mid-1970s the American Institute of Architects had deemed Venturi unworthy of fellowship, but over time many of his theories about “messy vitality” and the importance of context, history and ornament were absorbed into mainstream thinking and he went on to win several awards.
These included the 1991 US Pritzker architectural prize, the jury praising him for having “expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this century, as perhaps no other has”. Venturi felt, however, that he should have shared the award with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, with whom he had collaborated for so long.
She survives him, with their son.