Abstract
Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1966 is an architectural, not an urban book. Its compositional principles and analysis focus on individual buildings, with the city in only a minor role. Yet urbanism was a central theme in Venturi’s second book, Learning from Las Vegas, co-authored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1972. Moreover, Complexity and Contradiction originated as an urban study. Its genesis was Venturi’s proposal for an American Academy Rome Prize, refined in three applications from 1952–54, all on urbanism. Was Venturi’s first book merely a detour from his early urban interests, which re-emerged later? Or does it sublimate ideas about the wider built environment? His well-known interest in Townscape during the 1950s shaped his early research into context and two early essays, one on the Campidoglio’s surroundings in Rome, and another on Frank Lloyd Wright’s integration of buildings and landscape. This research remained at the core of Complexity and Contradiction. Although the book pulls architectural issues into the foreground, “crypto-urban” themes connect it to ideas about how to see and experience the broader built environment.
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Notes
- 1.
McLeod notes that Vincent Scully had “often pushed Venturi to extend his argument to urban issues” in their extensive discussions about the book [16 54–55]. In her study of the book’s relationship with Venturi’s theory course, Lee Ann Custer attributes its sporadic mentions of the urban dimension to the influence of Denise Scott Brown [10].
- 2.
Significantly, the postwar period also saw the first English translation of a seminal source that argued for an alternative urbanism, Camillo Sitte’s Der Städte-Bau nach seinem künstlerischen Grundsätzen of 1889 [21], published in 1945 as The Art of Building Cities: City Building According to its Artistic Fundamentals.
- 3.
This observation likely reflects the experience of Venturi on his first European trip of 1948. For Scott Brown, a South African upbringing and years of study in London made North America and Italy equally “foreign” urban landscapes.
- 4.
The nature of projects and policies at the French Academy and British School summarized here and below will be discussed at length in my forthcoming book on the Rome Prize in architecture after the Second World War.
- 5.
Stierli, who notes the clear influence of Townscape and Gestalt psychology in Venturi’s Princeton thesis, also makes a larger claim that “it is likely that he transported terms such as context or perceptual whole, which are used repeatedly in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, into architectural discourse” [23, 119].
- 6.
An example of the journal’s influence is that familiarity with Colin Rowe’s “Mannerism and Modern Architecture” in the May 1950 [19] issue (Architectural Review 107) provides the only plausible explanation for Venturi’s mention of Mannerism in all three of his Rome Prize statements. When he wrote his first statement in 1952, Rowe’s article was the only published argument for this recently-minted, still obscure art historical category’s contemporary architectural relevance [3].
- 7.
Venturi’s theme anticipates the more rigorous argument for a similar thesis published by Anthony Alofsin [1].
- 8.
Stierli notes the obvious influence of Townscape and Gestalt psychology in Venturi’s Princeton thesis, and makes the larger claim that “it is likely that he transported terms such as context or perceptual whole, which are used repeatedly in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, into architectural discourse” [23, 119].
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Costanzo, D.R. (2021). Beyond the Formalist Façade: Complexity and Contradiction’s Urban Roots. In: Bianconi, F., Filippucci, M. (eds) Digital Draw Connections. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 107. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59743-6_5
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