Two books that broke the authority of orthodox modernism: the first defended richness, ambiguity and the “difficult whole” against modernist simplicity; the second, written after a studio on the Las Vegas Strip, argued that buildings communicate and divided them into “ducks” and “decorated sheds”.
Venturi called Complexity and Contradiction a “gentle manifesto”. Drawing on Mannerist and Baroque churches, English country houses, Lutyens and Aalto as much as on modern work, it argues that an architecture of real vitality accepts the messy and contradictory demands of program, structure and meaning rather than excluding them for the sake of purity. It prefers elements that are hybrid rather than pure, ambiguous rather than articulated, both-and rather than either-or, and it answers Mies’s famous economy with a four-word retort of its own: less is a bore.
Learning from Las Vegas grew out of a Yale studio led by Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in 1968. Studying the commercial strip without contempt, the authors observed that in a landscape seen from a car at speed, signs matter more than buildings, and that modern architecture, having banned ornament, had turned its whole building into an ornament. They proposed a distinction between the duck, a building whose form is itself a symbol, and the decorated shed, an ordinary, efficient shelter with symbolism applied to its front; and they argued for the second, for an architecture that is “ugly and ordinary” and frankly communicative.
The book, part by part
I Complexity and Contradiction (1966)
Against simplification; ambiguity; both-and; the double-functioning element; the inside and the outside; the obligation to the difficult whole.
Rules: Less is a bore · Both-and, not either-or
II Learning from Las Vegas (1972)
The Strip as a landscape of communication; the duck and the decorated shed; the ugly and ordinary.
Rules: Duck or decorated shed · On the Strip, the sign is bigger than the building