Postmodern Architecture - Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi was at the forefront of this movement. His book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (published in 1966), was instrumental in opening readers eyes to new ways of thinking about buildings, as it drew from the entire history of architecture—both high-style and vernacular, both historic and modern—and lambasted overly simplistic Functional Modernism. The move away from modernism’s functionalism is well illustrated by Venturi’s adaptation of Mies van der Rohe’s famous maxim “Less is more” to "Less is a bore." The book includes a number of the architect's own designs in the back, including structures such as Guild House, in Philadelphia, that became major icons of postmodernism. He sought to bring back ornament because of its necessity. He explains this and his criticism of Modernism in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by saying that:

Architects can bemoan or try to ignore them (referring to the ornamental and decorative elements in buildings) or even try to abolish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time, because architects do not have the power to replace them (nor do they know what to replace them with).

Venturi's second book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972) further developed his take on modernism. Co-authored with his wife, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas argues that ornamental and decorative elements “accommodate existing needs for variety and communication”. Alex Todorow in one of his essays, A View from the Campidoglio, to that effect when he says that:

When was young, a sure way to distinguish great architects was through the consistency and originality of their work...This should no longer be the case. Where the Modern masters' strength lay in consistency, ours should lie in diversity.

Postmodernism with its diversity possesses sensitivity to the building’s context and history, and the client’s requirements. The postmodernist architects often considered the general requirements of the urban buildings and their surroundings during the building’s design. For example, in Frank Gehry's Venice Beach House, the neighboring houses have a similar bright flat color. This vernacular sensitivity is often evident, but other times the designs respond to more high-style neighbors. James Stirling's Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University features a rounded corner and striped brick patterning that relate to the form and decoration of the polychromatic Victorian Memorial Hall across the street, although in neither case is the element imitative or historicist.