Robert Venturi – författare

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is the first in a series of occasional papers concerned with the theoretical background of modern architecture. Unlike other Museum publications in architecture and design, the series will be independent of the Museum''s exhibition program and will explore ideas too complex for presentation in exhibition form, and authors will represent no single professional group. According to the author, this book is both an attempt at architectural criticism and an apologia—an explanation, indirectly, of his work. The examples chosen reflect his partiality for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo especially. Separate chapters cover concepts such as nonstraightforward architecture; complexity and contradiction vs. simplification or picturesqueness; contradictory levels of meaning and use in architecture; and the ""double-functioning"" element. Also discussed are the complexity and contradiction that develops from the program of the building and reflects the inherent complexities and contradictions of living. The final chapter presents photographs and descriptions of the author''s work.

A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper.Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time—that the billboards and casinos of Las Vegas were worthy of architectural attention—and offered a challenge for contemporary architects obsessed with the heroic and monumental. The physical book itself, designed by MIT's iconic designer Muriel Cooper, was hailed as a masterpiece of modernist design, but the book's design struck the authors as too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental. The MIT Press published a revised version in 1977—a modest paperback that the authors felt was more in keeping with the argument of the book—and the original Cooper-designed book fell out of print and became a highly sought-after collectors' item; it now sells for thousands of dollars in the rare book market, while the author-redesigned paperback has remained continuously in print at a price affordable to students. Now, decades after the original hardcover edition sold out, the MIT Press is publishing a facsimile edition of the original large-format Cooper-designed edition of Learning from Las Vegas, complete with translucent glassine wrap. This edition also features a spirited preface by Denise Scott Brown, looking back on the creation of the book and explaining her and Robert Venturi's reservations about the original design.Learning from Las Vegas begins with the Las Vegas Strip and proceeds to "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. As Scott Brown says in her introduction, the book "upended sacred cows … would not bad-mouth bad taste, and redefined architectural research."

Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of "common" people and less immodest in their erections of "heroic," self-aggrandizing monuments.This revision includes the full texts of Part I of the original, on the Las Vegas strip, and Part II, "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," a generalization from the findings of the first part on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. (The final part of the first edition, on the architectural work of the firm Venturi and Rauch, is not included in the revision.) The new paperback edition has a smaller format, fewer pictures, and a considerably lower price than the original. There are an added preface by Scott Brown and a bibliography of writings by the members of Venturi and Rauch and about the firm's work.

Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.

Robert Venturi gehört zu denjenigen Architekten, welche die Debatte über die Ästhetik der Architektur durch Schriften und eigene Projekte wieder in Gang gebracht haben. Sein Buch ist ein Plädoyer zur Wiederaneignung des mannigfaltigen Reichtums der Baukunst, ein Damm gegen die Sintflut von Funktionalität und Purismus. In einer Anmerkung zur zweiten Auflage dieses Buches vermerkt Venturi: "Ich schrieb dieses Buch in den frühen 60er Jahren als praktisch tätiger Architekt und versuchte, zu einigen Aspekten der Theorien über Architektur und der Dogmen in der Architektur meinen eigenen Standpunkt zu bestimmen. Heute gelten andere Notwendigkeiten. Ich bin deshalb der Meinung, dass dieses Buch heute wegen seiner allgemeineren Thesen über das Problem der Form in der Architektur aber auch als zeitgeschichtliches Dokument - vorwiegend mit einer historischen, nicht aber einer präskriptiven Absicht verfasst - gelesen werden kann."