After the publication of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, many of Venturi’s peers began to see his treatise as a liberation from the orthodoxies of high modernism. Soon the book was hailed as a source text of the Postmodern critique. The continuing significance and relevance of Venturi’s “gentle manifesto” is exemplified not only by the fact that it has remained in print continuously, making it the museum’s longest-run publication, but also by the various conferences, exhibitions, and festivities for the 50th anniversary of the publication two years ago.
Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby’s handsome and lavishly illustrated booklet is another celebration of Complexity and Contradiction’s achievement. For both authors, Venturi’s thinking was transformative in their architectural education and decisive for their careers as practicing architects and educators. Their book is predicated on the notion that the work was fundamentally informed by Venturi’s two-year tenure as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in the mid-1950s. Fisher and Harby take the reader on a journey of nearly 30 Roman places that demonstrate Venturi’s “revolutionary” ideas. They are not the first to notice: given the attention the architect’s intellectual formation has received over the last few years, it is surprising not to find any mention of existing scholarship on this topic in Fisher and Harby’s volume.
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