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Robert Charles Venturi Jr. (June 25, 1925 – September 18, 2018) was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the built environment. Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings, and teaching have also contributed to the expansion of discourse about architecture.

Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991; the prize was awarded to him alone, despite a request to include his equal partner, Scott Brown. Subsequently, a group of women architects attempted to get her name added retroactively to the prize, but the Pritzker Prize jury declined to do so. Venturi coined the maxim "Less is a bore", a postmodern antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more". Venturi lived in Philadelphia with Denise Scott Brown. He is the father of James Venturi, founder and principal of ReThink Studio.

Early life and education

Venturi was born in Philadelphia to Robert Venturi Sr. and Vanna (née Luizi) Venturi, and was raised as a Quaker. Venturi attended school at the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 where he was a member-elect of Phi Beta Kappa and won the D'Amato Prize in Architecture. He received his M.F.A. from Princeton in 1950.……

Career

A controversial critic of what he saw as the blithely functionalist and symbolically vacuous architecture of corporate modernism during the 1950s, Venturi was one of the first architects to question some of the premises of the Modern Movement. He published his "gentle manifesto", Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966;……

Architecture

The architecture of Robert Venturi, although perhaps not as familiar today as his books, helped redirect American architecture away from a widely practiced modernism in the 1960s to a more exploratory design approach that openly drew lessons from architectural history and responded to the everyday context of the American city. Venturi's buildings typically juxtapose architectural systems, elements and aims, to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent in a project or site.……

Death

Venturi died on September 18, 2018, in Philadelphia from complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was 93.

Notable students

Venturi's notable students include Amy Weinstein and Peter Corrigan.

Selected works

Vanna Venturi House; Philadelphia (1964) won the AIA Twenty-five Year Award and was recognized as a "Masterwork of Modern American Architecture" by the United States Postal Service in May 2005.

Guild House; Philadelphia (1964)

The Lieb House located in Barnegat Light, New Jersey was designed by Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown and built in 1967. It is best known for the huge number 9 on its front, and the sailboat-shaped window on one side.……

Awards

Fellow, American Academy in Rome; 1954-1956

AIA Medal for Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture; 1978

Fellow in the American Institute of Architects, 1978

AIA Architecture Firm Award, to Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown; 1985

• Commendatore of the Order of Merit, Republic of Italy; 1986
• AIA Twenty-five Year Award to the Vanna Venturi House; 1989
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; 1990
• The Pritzker Architecture Prize; 1991