Robert Venturi died on September 18, 2018. After I heard, I sent an email to a few colleagues and friends. It read:
Robert Venturi had a profound influence on my early life as an architect, which began formally when I was an undergraduate in the early to mid 1970s. In those years I pored over his work—the plans, elevations, the little photographs, and the narratives, which were a revelation to me, as much as anything for their uncanny resonance and connection to contemporary art and literature and also to the sense of decay and ennui that was pervasive in those days. If Daniel Burnham had spoken at the beginning of the century of making no small plans, as we entered its final quarter Venturi was one of those who spoke of making no large ones—if any. All that irony. It seemed perfect.
I might not have realized how extraordinary—but I do now—for his first book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (it was a manifesto, a monograph, and a portfolio all in one), to begin with the words, “I like . . . .” I realize now that almost nothing that follows those two words is as important as those two words themselves: the implicit declaration that it is what “I like” that matters. “I like” was a shot heard around the world of architecture. What it meant for me is that it centered architectural production and responsibility for architecture on the architect—that is, on the judgments, the percipient certainties, the questionings, the searching, of the architect. Centered on me. Centered on you. Far more than what Venturi said he liked or believed was so, and far more than whether one agreed with him or not, or liked the work or not, was the example he provided of the architect in the world, reckoning with the world and making something of it. Something that reflected that reckoning.
Author Richard Munday, AIA, is a principal at Newman Architects, New Haven, Connecticut. He was a founding editor and publisher of the Australian architecture journal, Transition, and co-editor of Perspecta, the Yale architecture journal, vol. 23. He has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, RMIT University (Melbourne), and the University of Adelaide.
From arcCA DIGEST Season 10, “Other Beauty.”
