Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

The format is approximately 11 inches by 8.50 inches. 136 pages. Illustrations. Notes. This is one of the Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture. Introduction by Vincent Scully. The contents include Introduction, Preface, Nonstrightforward Arthicture: A Gentle Manifesto; Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification or Picturesqueness; Ambiguity; Contradictory Levels: The Phenomenon of :both-And: in Architecture; Contradictory Levels Continues: The Double-Functioning Element; Accommodation and the Limitations of Order: The Conventional Element; Contradiction Adapted; Contradiction Juxtaposed; The Inside and the Outside; The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole; and Works. 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 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". Vincent Joseph Scully Jr. (August 21, 1920 – November 30, 2017) was an American art historian who was a Sterling Professor of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and the author of several books on the subject. Architect Philip Johnson once described Scully as "the most influential architectural teacher ever." His lectures at Yale were known to attract casual visitors and packed houses, and regularly received standing ovations. He was also the distinguished visiting professor in architecture at the University of Miami. First published in 1966, and since translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document of architectural literature. A "gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture," Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture expresses in the most compelling and original terms the postmodern rebellion against the purism of modernism. Three hundred and fifty architectural photographs serve as historical comparisons and illuminate the author's ideas on creating and experiencing architecture. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was the winner of the Classic Book Award at the AIA's Seventh Annual International Architecture Book Awards. Not many architecture books have defined a specific historical moment in the way Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture has; a book that fundamentally changed how we look at, think and talk about architecture. The architectural historian Vincent Scully’s famous assessment of Venturi’s treatise as ‘probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture’ has proven to be to the point in many ways, and few architecture books since have achieved a comparable significance in shaping the discipline’s discourse. Complexity and Contradiction can in many ways be understood as an intellectual digest of Venturi’s two-year tenure at the American Academy in Rome from 1954 to 1956, where he not only pursued his passion for Baroque and Mannerist architecture, but also became acquainted with the work of leading architects of the Italian postwar period, among them Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Luigi Moretti (whose splendid Casa del Girasole Venturi included in his treatise and later singled out as one of his favorite buildings). Both architects paved the way for Venturi’s revision of the tenets of Moderni.…