Robert Venturi (1925–2018) was an American architect and, with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown, founding principal of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. One of the first architects to question the premises of the Modern Movement, he answered Mies van der Rohe's "Less is more" with "Less is a bore". He studied at Princeton and worked for Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn. Vincent Scully called his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) probably the most important writing on architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture; Learning from Las Vegas (1972), with Scott Brown, studied the Las Vegas Strip. He received the Pritzker Prize in 1991; it was awarded to him alone despite a request to include Scott Brown.
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The Vanna Venturi House in Philadelphia (1964), designed for his mother, was with the Guild House his first work as an independent architect and one of the first prominent works of postmodernism. Its broken-gable front, a non-structural arch and "hole in the wall" windows openly challenged modernist orthodoxy; Scully called it "the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century".
