A controversial critic of what he saw as the blithely
functionalist and symbolically vacuous architecture of corporate modernism during the 1950s, Venturi was one of the first architects to question some of the premises of the Modern Movement. He published his "gentle manifesto",
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966; in its introduction,
Vincent Scully called it "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since
Le Corbusier's
Vers Une Architecture of 1923." The work was derived from course lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, and Venturi received a grant from the
Graham Foundation in 1965 to aid in its completion. The book demonstrated, through countless examples, an approach to understanding architectural composition and complexity, and the resulting richness and interest. Citing
vernacular as well as high-style sources, Venturi drew new lessons from the buildings of architects familiar (
Michelangelo,
Alvar Aalto) and, at the time, forgotten (
Frank Furness,
Edwin Lutyens). He made a case for "the difficult whole" rather than the diagrammatic forms popular at the time, and included examples — both built and unrealized — of his work to demonstrate the possible application of such techniques. The book has been published in 18 languages to date. Immediately hailed as a theorist and designer with radical ideas, Venturi went to teach a series of studios at the
Yale School of Architecture in the mid-1960s. The most famous of these was a studio in 1968 in which Venturi and Scott Brown, together with
Steven Izenour, led a team of students to document and analyze the
Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the least likely subject for a serious research project imaginable. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour published the folio,
A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas. It was revised using the student work as a foil for new theory, and reissued in 1977 as
Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. This second manifesto was an even more stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural tastes. The book coined the terms "Duck" and "Decorated Shed", descriptions of the two predominant ways of embodying iconography in buildings. The work of Venturi, Scott Brown, and
John Rauch adopted the latter strategy, producing formally simple "decorated sheds" with rich, complex, and often shocking ornamental flourishes. Venturi and his wife co-wrote several more books at the end of the century, but these two have so far proved to be the most influential. ==Architecture==