Let an element do more than one thing and belong to more than one order at once: a wall that is both inside and outside, a column that is both structure and sign.
Less is a bore
Prefer richness of meaning to clarity of meaning: accept the complex and contradictory demands of program, structure and context, and resolve them in a “difficult whole” rather than excluding them for the sake of simplicity.
Venturi’s book is an argument against the orthodox modernist virtues of purity and reduction. When simplicity is achieved by leaving problems out, he says, the result is not simple but simplistic; real architecture must include the awkward, the conventional and the contradictory. His examples range from Michelangelo and Borromini to Hawksmoor, Lutyens and Aalto.
His own house for his mother (Chestnut Hill, 1962–64) is a small manifesto: a symmetrical gable split in the middle, a chimney that swerves around the stair, windows of different sizes each placed for its room: an ordinary house made strange by the way it holds its contradictions together.
Related rules
A building can carry meaning in two ways: as a duck, whose whole form is shaped into a symbol, or as a decorated shed, a plain, efficient shelter with symbols applied to it. Prefer the shed.
Speak two languages at once: the technical language of modern construction for the profession, and a language of familiar, historical or popular signs for everyone else.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Less is a bore”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/less-is-a-bore. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.