Robert Venturi Quotes

• When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

  Robert Venturi

  Order, Giving, Anomalies

  Robert Venturi, Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1977). “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”, p.41, The Museum of Modern Art

  61 Copy quote

• Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.

  Robert Venturi

  Communication, Space, Should

  62 Copy quote

• Disharmony that comes from circumstances that are valid has tension, poignancy, quality, and beauty.

  Robert Venturi

  Quality, Circumstances, Tension

  35 Copy quote

• As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

  Robert Venturi

  Writing, Artist, Past

  57 Copy quote

• It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building.

  Robert Venturi

  Building, Unusual, Prettiness

  30 Copy quote

• Main Street is almost alright.

  Robert Venturi

  Main Street, Streets, Alright

  "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture". Book by Robert Venturi, 1966.

  23 Copy quote

• The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

  Robert Venturi

  Children, Italian, Naked

  32 Copy quote

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