Robert Venturi quotes

Robert Venturi was an influential American architect, celebrated as a pioneer of postmodern architecture. His work challenged the minimalist principles of modernism by embracing complexity and contradiction in design. He became renowned for reshaping architectural theory and inspiring generations of architects. Here are 18 of his quotes:

I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism.

Robert Venturi

It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building.

Robert Venturi

Less is a bore.

Robert Venturi

The essential purpose of the interiors of buildings is to enclose rather than direct space, and to separate the inside from the outside.

Robert Venturi

Main Street is almost alright.

Robert Venturi

The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program.

Robert Venturi

I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function.

Robert Venturi

But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable.

Robert Venturi

Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and its drama. And by recognizing the difference between the inside and the outside, architecture opens the door once again to an urbanistic point of view.

Robert Venturi

Orthodox Modern architects have tended to recognize complexity insufficiently or inconsistently. In their attempt to break with tradition and start all over again, they idealized the primitive and elementary at the expense of the diverse and the sophisticated.

Robert Venturi

The double meanings inherent in the phenomenon both-and can involve metamorphosis as well as contradiction. I have described how the omni-directional spire of the tower of Christ Church, Spitalfields, evolves into a directional pavilion at its base, but a perceptual rather than a formal kind of change in meaning is possible. In equivocal relationships one contradictory meaning usually dominates another, but in complex compositions the relationship is not always constant. This is especially true as the observer moves through or around a building, and by extension through a city: at one moment one meaning can be perceived as dominant; at another moment a different meaning seems paramount.

Robert Venturi

Rationalizations for simplification are still current, however, though subtler than the early arguments.

Robert Venturi

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

Robert Venturi

Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.

Robert Venturi

As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

Robert Venturi

Disharmony that comes from circumstances that are valid has tension, poignancy, quality, and beauty.

Robert Venturi