REVISITING COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION

October 2020

Robert Venturi’s 1966 publication ‘Complexity and Contradiction’ is one of very few architectural publications that can claim to have altered the path of architectural design. This seminal piece endeavoured to provide a counter argument to the prevailing modernist movement. It sought to reawaken notions of ornament, historical styles and exaggeration - famously flipping Mies van der Rohe’s ‘less is more’, upside down to ‘less is bore’. The publication is often identified as beginning Postmodernism, a notion and term that Venturi was always quick to dismiss. Complexity and Contradiction became a perennial bestseller and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Given the importance of this book and the conjecture around the resulting conclusions it felt fitting to delve deeper into the books ideas and legacy.

Robert Venturi was born in Philadelphia in 1925. He started studying architecture at Princeton in 1944, a time when other programs were transitioning to more modernist curriculums. However, Princeton’s architecture department at this time was still heavily linked to the art and archaeology department, allowing Venturi’s studies to focus on architectural history and flourish in the rich historical styles of the campus.

After completing his graduate and post-graduate studies at Princeton he worked for both Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen, before receiving a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. This lead to two-years studying the work of architects such as Bernini and Michelangelo across Italy. This experience coupled with his art history education proved to be an extremely pivotal period of exposure that would define his career. 

Venturi returned from Rome fresh with ideas and joined the architecture faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. With this new role he met Denise Scott Brown, an architect and planner who was also teaching at Penn. They married in 1967 and worked together for more than 50 years. Their firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates employed nearly 100 people at its peak. Scott Brown was integral to Venturi’s career and in his 1991 Pritzker Prize acceptance speech he made a clear point of using ‘we’, instead of ‘I’ in protest of the decision to award him the prize individually.

Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction was first published in 1966 and was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, an institution with a strong history of supporting pivotal texts, including The International Style of 1932.  In this book Venturi aimed to shift the focus to the ‘Main Street’: the constantly evolving urban streetscapes of Italy that he admired during his time abroad. These spaces were spontaneous and captured a level of richness that he felt was missing in the ideals of pure modernism.

The early part of 20th century architecture was defined by Le Corbusier’s Toward A New Architecture, which was originally published in 1923. This publication formed an important base for what the modernism movement went on to explore and simultaneously enraged many who preached the prevailing Beaux-Arts style of the time.

The arrival of Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, roughly half a century after Toward a New Architecture stands as a bookend to Le Corbusier’s publication. Venturi, much like Le Corbusier was underwhelmed with the prevailing style and looked to disrupt its momentum through the publishing of his manifesto. Each was able to free themselves of the fixed norms of their time and articulate an alternate path forward.

The comparisons between Le Corbusier and Venturi are fitting. Whilst their styles were contrasting, their paths and mindsets follow interesting similarities. Le Corbusier found solace in the isolated white forms of the heroic Greek Temple. He studied and refined these ideas to develop a style of architecture in great contrast to all that had come before. He looked backwards to find a path forward. Similarly Venturi actively looked beyond the style that evolved from Le Corbusier’s writings and found his answers in a different historical setting: the urban facades of Italy. Venturi loved their unheroic wealth of character - each façade responding individually to both their interior and exterior constraints. Rather than constraining and hiding the complexity, these streetscapes celebrate their diversity. Much like Le Corbusier, Venturi is an architectural historian researching existing architectural conditions to enrich and refresh the current architectural discourse.

Complexity and Contradiction is underpinned by Venturi’s impressive architectural history knowledge. Throughout this publication he uses visuals and analysis of buildings from a range of eras and styles – with prominent focus on his favoured Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo periods of design. This analysis has a dual focus of both highlighting the importance of precedent analysis, as well as drawing attention to the limitations of modernisms rejection of history.

Venturi retorted against modernist architects who rejected history in the hope of inventing new ideas. He instead outlined a design mantra that is able to both thoughtfully utilise the rich history of design and also the economical advances in technology. He stressed that the continual focus of modernist architects on what is different had led to the abandonment of what is essentially unchanged and integral to centuries of design.

After the opening critic of the modernist movement, Complexity and Contradiction builds into a manifesto on what Venturi is aspiring to create - a doctrine of hope, rather than a critique bemoaning the current status quo. This starts boldly with his mission statement:

Venturi felt that the worlds increasing levels of complexity, from both the innate aspects of shelter and the evolving contemporary needs of program and services. Instead of fighting to constrain these aspects, as was often the approach of modernism, Venturi welcomed them - a mindset that is for a ‘richness of meaning rather then clarity of meaning’.

Venturi is an expert in art history, as well as gifted architect. It is this combination that enabled his desire to tame disorder into a systematic whole. It is this inherent focus on achieving a truth of meaning that allows Venturi to liberally explore the toolset outlined in Complexity and Contradiction – ‘more is not less’. Venturi found in the urban streets of Italy a level of vitality that he felt was inherently missing in the prevailing modernist design.

He referenced Philip Johnson’s Wiley House as a project that exemplified the inherent flaws of the International Style. In this project the constraints of modernism have dictated an outcome that is simplified to the point of blandness. He felt the projects complexity warranted a solution of greater depth and that the level of simplification left an outcome lacking in both clarity of style and character. In contrast to this, Venturi strived to develop an overall aesthetic that welcomes the idea of ‘both-and’, instead of restriction through ‘either-or’.

Venturi’s manifesto takes aim at the modernist movement, in particular the purist International Style movement at its core. He was concerned by the movement’s culture of exclusion – best proclaimed by Mies van der Rohe’s mantra of ‘less is more’. Venturi perceived modernism as being quite hypocritical in how it preached the advances of modern technologies, whilst actively ignoring the complexities that it raised. The success of Mies’ projects are due to their ability to exclude all that gets in the way of aesthetic vision. He felt that if Mies were to adequately acknowledge the complexities of the modern residential program his projects would be far less potent. The selective exclusion of modernism is both its inherent strength and weakness. Modernism empowers the architect to not only define how solutions will be solved, but also which problems are to be addressed or dismissed.

This mindset calls into question some of the defining pieces of modernism - most critically the pavilion form that was such a rich source of inspiration for the era. From Le Corbusier’s Mason Dom-Ino (1914), to Mie van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (1929), along to Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949), these projects are all viewed with the highest esteem due to their clarity of thought. Venturi cautions against their use as inspiration for residential design due to their inherent sole focus. He instead leans toward drawing ideas from projects that acknowledge the diverse ‘complexity and contradiction’ inherent in daily life.

Venturi is not trying to dismiss the ideas of refinement and simplification - which are obviously still important to the overall whole. He is refuting the notion that something can be designed successfully from one viewpoint, ignoring the inherent multiplicity of life. He stresses that simplification needs to understood as an important part of executing complex art, but not mistaken for the goal itself. 

A part of Venturi’s concern with the trajectory of modern design focuses on its inability to convey the tension that is intrinsic to architecture. He relishes these ambiguities and actively seeks the undulating relationships that are implicit to each part of the built form. Believing that the layering of expression promotes a level of richness that outweighs the clarity of meaning sought by modernists.

To acknowledge this ambiguity Venturi proposes to dismiss the modernist ‘either-or’ mantra, in favour a ‘both-and’ ideology that stimulates his ideas of complexity. Rather than striving for the narrowness of orthodox modernism, he preferred to embed inherent struggles and hesitations into his projects to deliver a more vivid sensitivity for those experiencing his work. Visually this ‘both-and’ mentality led to contradictions such as big and little, closed and open, round and square, structural and spatial all coexisting. This allows for the tensions inherent in the site and program to be expressed and celebrated in the overall form. As Louis Kahn, one of Venturi’s closest mentors, professed: “It is the role of the design to adjust to the circumstantial” - exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright’s VC Morris Gift Shop, which is able to balance the inherent tensions between the inside and out in a confident piece of design.

Venturi celebrated the architects of the modern era who were willing to incorporate the inconsistencies of the real world into the rigid frame of modernism. Architects such as Alvar Aalto, an interesting outlier in the design timeline of the twentieth century, designed in a playful and rhythmic manner that was successful thanks to its ability to harness a curated series of inconsistent standardised elements. Venturi feels that the celebration of complexity in Alto’s work is underappreciated for its role as a crucial part of his works success.

Venturi’s mindset entrenched within Complexity and Contradiction was crystallised during his stint exploring the streetscapes of Italy. In this setting he fell in love with the layering of urban areas. The bones of these streetscapes were beautiful, and onto this was applied a rich collage of varied generations and traditions - creating a fullness of eye-level experiences that would forever change the trajectory of his career. Italian streetscapes embrace contradiction, variation and dualities in a manner that is both vivid and cohesive. The individual diversity in these facades is most successful when it is able to meld together into a unified whole.

Venturi with this new sense of how diversity and richness could exist with clarity started to turn his thoughts back home in search of examples to draw upon in the US. One such example was the Clearing House by Frank Furness, sadly now demolished, which embodied an energetic clash of architectural energy framed within a uniting frame of neighbouring buildings. This building through its unique series of juxtaposed elements highlights the intricacy of urban life. Its success is drawn from the ‘difficult unity through inclusion, rather than the easy unity through extrusion’.

Venturi continued to discover projects that skilfully acknowledged both the demands of program and human engagement. He featured projects like Louis Sullivan’s Farmers & Merchants’ Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin as examples of how complex briefs could be solved artfully. This project has an inherent duality prompted by a public and private split in the floor plan - which is expressed by the different form of the door and window co-existing at street level on the main façade. This imbalance is held together by a strong arch and banner form above the openings, which binds the buildings exterior together. This interplay of both individual elements and uniting features is harnessed skilfully by Sullivan to create a cohesive whole.

Complexity and Contradiction culminates in a series of Venturi’s own built and theorised projects to reinforce his concepts and provide examples of possible outcomes. One of the most pertinent of these is the Guild House - a project that is landmark of the postmodernist movement, situated in central Philadelphia. The six-storey project consists of 91 varying sized apartments and a common recreation area, housing elderly residents from the local area. 

The projects modest budget necessitated the use of conventional materials - which was something Venturi did not resist. The project utilises brown brick walls and double hung windows, strongly reminiscent of the nearby row houses. The small scale of the brick unit is dwarfed at this large scale, becoming flat and banal – a use of brick that is both conventional and unconventional, a tension that Venturi actively sought. The windows are also intentionally varying across the facade, with each opening illustrating the functional requirements of the space within.

Guild House continues to draw widespread comment and critique. Ada Louis Huxtable described it is ‘a perverse assortment of details that sets other architects’ teeth on edge … [and] is meant to make the educated viewer look twice, to see why the ordinary is extraordinary’. These ideas were not aimed at the laymen and accordingly draw the ire of most who observe the project. His projects draw upon standard materials, using his fine art sensibilities, and mannerist inspirations to create a collaged whole through surprising combinations.

The release of Complexity and Contradiction in 1966 marked a turning point in the architectural timeline towards post-modernism. Venturi was quite uneasy with any notion that this book lead to the post-modernist movement, or the idea that he himself was a postmodernist:

Whether you agree with Venturi’s concepts or projects it is hard to doubt the poignancy of his ideas. He is heralded as one of the most impressive architecture and fine art academics and this deep understanding oozes from his written and built work. As with all disrupters, his ideals stirred bitter resentment from the incumbent style of the time. The most orthodox of modernists found Venturi’s notions of irony and incorporation of popular culture offensive and have fought against his ideals.

Venturi’s work undoubtedly made a fundamental impression on the architectural discourse. The deeper you read into his work, both written and built, the greater the inspiration that can be found – even for the staunchest modernist. Underneath it all, Venturi was a humanist. His ideals sought to use cost accessible materials in a way that both acknowledged the complexities of the modern world and also the importance of the user experience. Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction sits alongside Le Corbusier’s Towards A New Architecture as one of the most important pieces of architecture literature in recent times and I would recommend it to all that strive to fully understand the progression of 20th century architectural history.