Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (respectively, born June 25, 1925, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 18, 2018, Philadelphia; born October 3, 1931, Nkana, Northern Rhodesia [now Zambia]) were American architects who proposed alternatives to the functionalist mainstream of 20th-century American architectural design. Their design partnership was at the vanguard of the eclectic movement known as postmodernism.

Venturi studied at the Princeton University School of Architecture in New Jersey, where he received a B.A. in 1947 and an M.F.A. in 1950. Between 1950 and 1958 he worked as a designer for the architectural firms of Oscar Stonorov, Eero Saarinen, and Louis I. Kahn; he also held a residency as a Rome Prize fellow (a juried award given to a select group of emerging artists, architects, and scholars) at the American Academy in Rome (1954–56). By 1964 he and partner John Rauch had established the firm of Venturi & Rauch. Scott Brown attended the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture before going to the United States with her husband, the architect Robert Scott Brown (who was killed in an auto accident in 1959), to study with Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a master’s degree in urban planning in 1960. Scott Brown joined the faculty that same year, teaching while she studied for her M.Arch. (1965), and met Venturi, who was teaching in the School of Architecture. The two soon formed a professional as well as a personal relationship.

In 1962 Venturi designed for his mother the Vanna Venturi House (completed 1964) in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. The house was an embodiment of the architectural philosophy he set forth in his influential book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Venturi called for an eclectic approach to design and an openness to the multiple influences of historical tradition, ordinary commercial architecture, and Pop art. He championed the ambiguity and paradox, the “messy vitality” of the great architecture of the past over the simple, unadorned, cleanly functional buildings of the International Style. Venturi’s manifesto had a profound impact on younger architects who were beginning to find similar constraints and limitations in the Modernist architectural aesthetic.

In 1967 Scott Brown joined Venturi & Rauch, and she and Venturi were married that same year. Scott Brown became a partner in the firm in 1969. During this period she and Venturi continued to teach, including a 1968 architecture studio class on Las Vegas that became the basis for their groundbreaking work, with coauthor Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (1972). The authors took the thesis of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture several steps further and analyzed with wry appreciation the neon-lit urban sprawl and the automobile-oriented commercial architecture of Las Vegas. They questioned the Modernist rejection of the use of applied ornament and decoration and ended the book with a discussion of their own work.

The firm’s buildings frequently exhibited the ironic humour of Venturi and Scott Brown’s theoretical pronouncements. Their early buildings incorporated materials and visual references standard to the shopping centre and subdivision but previously shunned by so-called serious architects. During the late 1970s and ’80s they turned to historical precedent in their work, which often made studied allusions to building styles of the past. Formal and stylistic elements were combined with a willful inconsistency that achieved an often playful effect. Among Venturi and Scott Brown’s more important commissions were various buildings for Yale University, Princeton University, and Ohio State University. They designed several museums, notably the Seattle Art Museum (1985) and the Sainsbury Wing (1986) of the National Gallery in London.

In 1991 Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Scott Brown’s exclusion from the award ignited controversy that highlighted the lack of recognition of women architects more generally. Later projects from the firm included the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (1996), the Provincial Capitol Building in Toulouse, France (1999), and buildings and campus plans for a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad, including Brown University (2004). The Pritzker controversy was reignited in 2013 when a petition to retroactively award the prize to Scott Brown garnered several thousand signatures and endorsements from a score of influential architects and critics but was not acted on. In 2015 the team went on to receive the American Institute of Architects’ 2016 Gold Medal, that organization’s highest honour and the first time a woman has been awarded it in her lifetime.