Seventeen essays by two prominent American architects examine prominent buildings of the past and present and discuss the theoretical basis for modern design

A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953-1984 (Icon Editions)

Arts & Photography

Venturi, Robert

Architecture

HarperCollins, Publishers

Seventeen essays by two prominent American architects examine prominent buildings of the past and present and discuss the theoretical basis for modern design

A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays 1953-1984 (ICON EDITIONS)

Brown, Denise Scott

Harper&Row

A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper.
Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time―that the billboards and casinos of Las Vegas were worthy of architectural attention―and offered a challenge for contemporary architects obsessed with the heroic and monumental. The physical book itself, designed by MIT's iconic designer Muriel Cooper, was hailed as a masterpiece of modernist design, but the book's design struck the authors as too monumental for a text that praised the ugly and ordinary over the heroic and monumental. The MIT Press published a revised version in 1977―a modest paperback that the authors felt was more in keeping with the argument of the book―and the original Cooper-designed book fell out of print and became a highly sought-after collectors' item; it now sells for thousands of dollars in the rare book market, while the author-redesigned paperback has remained continuously in print at a price affordable to students. Now, decades after the original hardcover edition sold out, the MIT Press is publishing a facsimile edition of the original large-format Cooper-designed edition of Learning from Las Vegas, complete with translucent glassine wrap. This edition also features a spirited preface by Denise Scott Brown, looking back on the creation of the book and explaining her and Robert Venturi's reservations about the original design.
Learning from Las Vegas begins with the Las Vegas Strip and proceeds to "Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed," on symbolism in architecture and the iconography of urban sprawl. As Scott Brown says in her introduction, the book “upended sacred cows … would not bad-mouth bad taste, and redefined architectural research.”

Learning from Las Vegas, facsimile edition (Mit Press)

Izenour, Steven

The MIT Press

Book by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Teven Izenour

Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

MIT Press]

"...the most thought-provoking architecture book of the year." -- Martin Filler, The New York Times Book Review 
Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas (the latter coauthored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) are among the most influential books by any architect of our era -- the one celebrating complexity in architecture, the other the uses of symbolism in commercial and vernacular architecture and signage. This new collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a generic architecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualities become shelter and symbol. Venturi, who along with his partner, Denise Scott Brown, made the vulgar acceptable and found virtue in the commercial, the kitsch, and the ordinary, is respected equally as a theorist and an architect who communicates his architectural ideas, formal and verbal, with grace and wit. These essays, letters, reports, lectures, manifestoes, and polemical texts offer a candid, uncensored view from the drafting room -- commonsense responses, urgent and diverse, of a busy architect, in part a reaction against the conceptualizing of architecture today invaded by other disciplines and made obscure. Seven of the essays were coauthored with Denise Scott Brown. The voice is personal -- eloquent in expounding on the unglamorous side of practice; sometimes vituperative and corrective in addressing clients, theoreticians, and critics; often amusing and humorous in looking back on past projects and opportunities; instructive in describing early influences and tastes; and reflective in assessing his own impact on the profession. The lead essays can be described as an argument embracing reference and representation in our information age, whose technical basis is truly of our time and whose iconographic basis derives from a long tradition in architecture including hieroglyphic Egyptian pylons, early Christian basilicas, scenographic Baroque interiors, and even eclectic Romantic architecture and twentieth-century electronic signs and displays. The essays include Venturi's 1950 M.F.A. thesis, published here for the first time -- a work that foreshadows many of the themes that were later to make him a controversial and ground breaking architect and writer -- and a series of vintage Venturi aphorisms.

Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room

Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas (the latter coauthored with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) are among the most influential books by any architect of our era -- the one celebrating complexity in architecture, the other the uses of symbolism in commercial and vernacular architecture and signage. This new collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a generic architecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualities become shelter and symbol.The voice is personal -- eloquent in expounding on the unglamorous side of practice; sometimes vituperative and corrective in addressing clients, theoreticians, and critics; often amusing and humorous in looking back on past projects and opportunities; instructive in describing early influences and tastes; and reflective in assessing his own impact on the profession.The essays include Venturi's 1950 M.F.A. thesis, published here for the first time -- a work that foreshadows many of the themes that were later to make him a controversial and ground-breaking architect and writer -- and a series of vintage Venturi aphorisms.

Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room

Mit Pr

Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas. Now, for the first time, these two observer-designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has informed.
The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.
Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as well as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scott Brown have devoted their professional lives to broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural society.

Architecture as Signs and Systems: For a Mannerist Time (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies)

Scott Brown, Denise

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

Mother's House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi's House in Chestnut Hill

Rizzoli

A practicing architect discusses the theoretical background of modern architecture

Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Little,Brown & Co

The founder of the Acadia Summer Arts Program, Marion Boulton Stroud, asked Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour to design and construct houses and other structures for the camp. The architects took as inspiration Maine's indigenous architecture, such as shingle houses and lobster shacks.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour at Acadia Summer Arts Program

Acadia Summer Arts Program

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Books by Venturi, Robert