In loving memory of Robert Venturi, postmodernist and icon of American architecture. 

In Venturi’s treatise “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” (1966) he argued that ornament, historical allusions and even humor had a place in modern architecture: “But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.”

In the interview with Andrea Tamas Venturi replied that his work with his partner Denise Scott Brown has been positive in many ways: “Denise is an architect and a planner, I am an architect. For us, a large part of design is setting out ideas and critiquing them. You try something and then you criticize it. I love that we constantly critique what we are doing – and do it as partners. But one life is all we have and when we come home at night we don’t talk about work.”

Remembering Venturi’s words “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer ‘both-and’ to 'either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and Workable in several ways at once.”