Robert Venturi was principal in charge of design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Pritzker Prize and the Centennial Medal of the American Academy in Rome and, with Denise Scott Brown, the National Medal of Art and the Vincent J. Scully Prize of the National Building Museum. He taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. Denise Scott Brown is principal in charge of urban and campus planning and design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the ACSA-AIA Topaz Medallion for Architecture Education and the Chicago Architecture Award. She has taught at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Architecture as Signs and Systems is based on lectures at Harvard
which provided [Venturi and Scott Brown] with the opportunity to
reflect on their careers...Their key achievement was to overthrow
an arid modernist orthodoxy and to prepare the ground for today's
pluralism. They nonetheless profess to remain wedded to a central
tenet of modernism, that architecture should be appropriate to its
age... But whatever qualifications or disagreements one may have,
the Venturis remain among the most refreshing, inspiring, least
pompous presences on an architectural scene peopled with prickly
egos, whingeing prima donnas and ideologues. Their greatest
virtue...is that they genuinely invite open debate on the big
issues of architecture and urban design.
*Times Literary Supplement*
[Venturi and Scott Brown's] new book, Architecture as Signs and
Systems, is a direct challenge to architecture's increasingly
tortuous quest for shapes and spaces that might give new physical
meaning to that increasingly diffuse term, modernity...[Their] new
polemic is a wonderfully intelligent provocation.
*The Independent*
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