Biography

Robert Venturi was born on June 25, 1925 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was married to Denise Scott Brown. He died on September 18, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale in the 1950s and 1960s. During those years, he supplemented his income from the family's produce business, which he managed as president until 1973.

He was an influential architect considered by many to be the "father of postmodernism".

His father ran a wholesale fruit business, and his mother was a socialist and feminist. Venturi was raised as a Quaker, and was a conscientious objector during WWII. He received a master's degree from Princeton's architecture school in 1950, and joined the architectural firm of Eero Saarinen. He won a fellowship and moved to Rome, where he spent two years studying architecture and urban design.

He received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1991.

In the landscape of the automobile, the architecture becomes insignificant, a pimple on the landscape of parking lots. The lesson of Las Vegas is that, in order to be read in that context, architecture cannot be a refined, detailed form to be savored as you walk by it at three miles an hour. It must be symbolic, not pure, if it is to be read at 70 miles an hour.

Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure,' compromising rather than 'clear,' distorted rather than 'straightforward' ... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity ... I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning.