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Robert Venturi, 1966:
"The examples chosen reflect my partiality for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo especially. [...] As an artist I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like - what we are easily attracted to - we can learn much of what we really are. Louis Kahn has referred to ‘what a thing wants to be,' but implicit in this statement is its opposite: what the architect wants the thing to be. In the tension and balance between these two lie many of the architect's decisions."
"This book deals with the present, and with the past in relation to the present. It does not attempt to be visionary except insofar as the future is inherent in the reality of the present. It is only indirectly polemical. Everything is said in the context of current architecture and consequently certain targets are attacked - in general, the limitations of orthodox Modern architecture and city planning, in particular, the platitudinous architects who invoke integrity, technology, or electronic programming as ends in architecture, the popularizers who paint ‘fairy stories over our chaotic reality' lo and suppress those complexities and contradictions inherent in art and experience. Nevertheless, this book is an analysis of what seems to me true for architecture now, rather than a diatribe against what seems false."
"Ironic convention is relevant both for the individual building and the townscape. It recognizes the real condition of our architecture and its status in our culture. Industry promotes expensive industrial and electronic research but not architectural experiments, and the Federal government diverts subsidies toward air transportation, communication, and the vast enterprises of war or, as they call it, national security, rather than toward the forces for the direct enhancement of life. The practicing architect must admit this. In simple terms, the budgets, techniques, and programs for his buildings must relate more to 1866 than 1966. Architects should accept their modest role rather than disguise it and risk what might be called an electronic expressionism, which might parallel the industrial expressionism of early Modern architecture. The architect who would accept his role as combiner of significant old clichés - valid banalities - in new contexts as his condition within a society that directs its best efforts, its big money, and its elegant technologies elsewhere, can ironically express in this indirect way a true concern for society's inverted scale of values."
"In God's Own Junkyard Peter Blake has compared the chaos of commercial Main Street with the orderliness of the University of Virginia [...]. Besides the irrelevancy of the comparison, is not Main Street almost all right? Indeed, is not the commercial strip of a Route 66 almost all right? As I have said, our question is: what slight twist of context will make them all right? Perhaps more signs more contained. Illustrations in God's Own Junkyard of Times Square and roadtown are compared with illustrations of New England villages and arcadian countrysides. But the pictures in this book that are supposed to be bad are often good. The seemingly chaotic juxtapositions of honky-tonk elements express an intriguing kind of vitality and validity, and they produce an unexpected approach to unity as well."
VENTURI, Robert. Complexity and contradiction in architecture. Nova York; Chicago: MoMA; Graham Foundation, 1966, grifos do autor. Col. The Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture. v. 1.
"It is a very American book, rigorously pluralistic and phenomenological in its method; one is reminded of [Theodore] Dreiser, laboriously trodding out the way. Yet it is probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's Vers une Architecture, of 1923. Indeed, at first sight, Venturi's position seems exactly the opposite of Le Corbusier's, its first and natural complement across time. This is not to say that Venturi is Le Corbusier's equal in persuasiveness or achievement - or will necessarily ever be. Few will attain to that level again. The experience of Le Corbusier's buildings themselves has surely had not a little to do with forming Venturi's ideas. Yet his views do in fact balance those of Le Corbusier as they were expressed in his early writings and as they have generally affected two architectural generations since that time. [...]"
SCULLY, Vincent. Introduction. In: VENTURI, Robert. Complexity and contradiction in architecture. Nova York; Chicago: MoMA; Graham Foundation, 1966, grifo do autor. p. 11-16. Col. The Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture. v. 1.
"Venturi has developed his ideas of ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture' in a manifesto of that name published in 1966. This book is in some respects an inversion of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture of 1923, except that it eschews any arguments from a technical base and conducts the discussion on the levels of architectural history and personal taste [...]"
"Venturi's ‘gentle manifesto' has had an extraordinary impact in architectural circles, perhaps because he is virtually the only practising architect who has written an extended, comprehensible polemic. In any case, his arguments for an ‘inclusive architecture' which can use any elements whatever (whether they be Las Vegas billboard [...] or classical arches) have effectively challenged the prevailing exclusivist arguments for purity and restriction. [...] In a sense his polemic is directed against the idea of an historicist sensibility which wants to restrict the available metaphors to those which are only current or technologically up to date. The idea is that in the age of travel and tourism, the age of the ‘museum without walls', this restriction is no longer relevant and furthermore that in any large city with its plurality of sub-cultures, such limitations is highly paternalistic."
JENCKS, Charles. Modern movements in architecture. Nova York: Anchor; Doubleday, 1973, grifo do autor.
"In a sense, [Louis] Kahn became the new hero-architect of the early sixties, perhaps the last such creator-formgiver that we shall see. With the passing of the heroes, the Age of Romanticism passes, Romantic-Classicism and Romantic-Naturalism alike. The new age (let us say the new moment) can hardly yet be named, but all the arts of its early years suggest that the Age of Irony so far describes it. Kahn, like Corbusier, indeed did something to bring it about - Kahn especially in his role as the most productive teacher of the late fifties and early sixties. It was one of his many students and collaborators, Robert Venturi, who took a first step into the new age, and toward the revitalization of architectural conceptions, programs, and form. It was a giant step, because it finally disavowed idealism and architectural heroics alike in favor of a renewed, if rather ironic, acceptance of reality and a new realistic symbolism, and it moved toward what can only be called a ‘semeiological' intention in design. [...] ‘Main Street is almost alright,' Venturi wrote in his important book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, of 1966. As he did so, the past no less that the present changed. This is always the case in history. A new concept opens our eyes to aspects of past experience that had temporarily dropped out of focus. [...]"
SCULLY JR., Vincent. Part 3: TWELVE YEARS AFTER: The Age of Irony. In: SCULLY JR., Vincent. Modern architecture: the architecture of democracy. 2. ed. Nova York: George Braziller, 1974. p. 49-62, grifo do autor.
"[...] [N]othing could be more removed from the political essence of the city-state than the exclusively economic categories of rationalistic planning theory; that theory espoused by planners such as Melvin Webber, whose ideological conceptions of community without propinquity and the non-place urban realm are nothing if not slogans devised to rationalize the absence of any adequate realm of public appearance within modern suburbia. The manipulative and ‘apolitical' bias of such ideologies has never been more openly expressed than in Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, wherein the author asserts that the Americans don't need piazzas, since they should be at home watching television. These and similar reactionary modes of beholding seem to emphasize the impotence of an urbanized populace who have paradoxically lost the object of their urbanization. [...]"
FRAMPTON, Kenneth. The status of man and the status of his objects: a reading of The Human Condition [1979]. In: HAYS, Michael (Ed.). Architecture theory since 1968. Nova York; Cambridge: Columbia Books; The MIT Press, 1998, p. 362-377, grifos do autor.
"To the promise of [Louis] Kahn - communication is possible by giving voice to institutions - Robert Venturi has responded with the following objection: the only institution is the real, and only the real speaks. The present writer has been among the few to consider infantile the enthusiasm of Vincent Scully for a text like Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which did nothing other than reveal facts already established. Nevertheless, in spite of the snobbish element of Venturi's operation, the alliance between Pop Art in decline and the new Architectural Realism contains a nucleus, that, by wishing to be the exact inverse of the rigorism of Kahn, comprehends many of his deepest motives. If Kahn could have produced a school of mystics without religions to defend, Venturi has in fact created a school of the disenchanted without any values to transgress. [...]"
TAFURI, Manfredo. The sphere and the labyrinth: avant-gardes and architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge; Londres: The MIT Press, 1987, grifos do autor.
"Venturi published a book called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture as part of a Museum of Modern Art series on ‘the theoretical background of modern architecture.' Venturi's essay looked, on the face of it, like sheer apostasy. He took Mies' famous dictum, ‘Less is more,' and turned it on its head. ‘Less is a bore,' he said. [...] In A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas and ‘Learning from Levittown' he and his collaborators, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, told where the necessary ‘messy vitality' might be found. Its cues would come from the ‘vernacular' architecture of America in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘Main Street is almost all right,' according to one of his dicta. So were the housing developments (Levittown) and the commercial strips (Las Vegas)."
"Not for a moment did Venturi dispute the underlying assumptions of modern architecture: namely, that it was to be for the people; that it should be nonbourgeois and have no applied decoration; that there was a historical inevitability to the forms that should be used; and that the architect, from his vantage point inside the compound, would decide what was best for the people and what they inevitably should have."
"In the Venturi cosmology, the people could no longer be thought of in terms of the industrial proletariat, the workers with raised fists, engorged brachial arteries, and necks wider than their heads, Marxism's downtrodden masses in the urban slums. The people were now the ‘middle-middle class,' as Venturi called them. They lived in suburban developments like Levittown, shopped at the A & P over in the shopping center, and went to Las Vegas on their vacations the way they used to go to Coney Island. The middle-middle folk were not the bourgeoisie. They were the ‘sprawling' masses, as opposed to the huddled ones. To act snobbishly toward them was to be elitist. [...]"
WOLFE, Tom. From Bauhaus to our house. Nova York: Washington Square, 1981, grifos do autor.
"Even among the early critics of modernism, however, the position concerning audience was hardly cohesive. Although Learning from Las Vegas (1972) embodied clear populist sympathies, Venturi's earlier and more influential work Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) vividly illustrated the tensions between an elitist appreciation of high art and a populist embrace of Main Street that would be so characteristic of the later postmodern movement. Indeed, the balance of the argument and the number of plates (346 of 350) in the book clearly favors the former. [...]"
McLEOD, Mary. Architecture and politics in the Reagan Era: from Postmodernism to Deconstructivism. Assemblage, Cambridge, n. 8, fev. 1989, grifos da autora.