Artist Six: Robert Venturi

Robert Venturi is an American architect, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on the 25^th of June 1925; he is the true founder of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, as well as one of the major architectural figures of the twentieth century.  His wife, Denise Scott Brown, is his partner and together they have worked to shape the way that other architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and how it relates to the American built environment.  He attended Princeton University for his undergraduate studies and also received his Masters in Fine Arts from Princeton University in 1950.  The program at Princeton during his years there where a large factor in Venturi’s development to approach architectural theory and design from an analytical stand point rather than a stylistic one.  He worked both in Michigan and Philadelphia before studying in Rome and traveling Europe for two years.  In the mid 1950s Venturi began to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the Yale School of Architecture and in 2003 he was a visiting lecturer with his wife at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.  Although he is also a well know writer, Venturi’s architecture helped to redirect American architecture.  At a time when American architecture was focused on modernism, Venturi introduced a style more focused on the exploratory designs that took from architectural history and allowed the builders and buildings respond to the American city, rather than the city responding to the buildings.  His buildings are based on a simplistic design.  By the 1960s Venturi’s architecture had become a worldwide influence.  He allowed for new ways to embrace and transform the simplistic, typical buildings of the past and created new, decorative and abstract architecture of the future.