Architect Robert Charles Venturi Jr. died Tuesday, September 18, 2018, at the age of 93, from complications of Alzheimer's disease in his home in Philadelphia. According to his son Jim Venturi, he was free of pain and listening to his favorite Beethoven piano sonatas. With him was his wife and longtime collaborator architect Denise Scott Brown.
Hailed as a catalyzing force of the Postmodern architecture style, the Princeton-trained architect published his groundbreaking treatise, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in 1966, six years after founding his first firm with William Short. (John Rauch replaced Short in 1964.) The text is credited with redirecting the profession’s prevailing Modernist sensibilities toward a more sophisticated, historically referential approach; in the book’s original preface, Venturi wrote, “As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past—by precedent, thoughtfully considered."
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