Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi

Abstract

When I arrived at Princeton University nearly thirty years ago to start my undergraduate education, I secured a work-study job washing dishes on the breakfast shift at Gordon Wu Hall. While the work was tedious, and the dank scullery air left my clothes smelling of eggs, I took pleasure in the design of my workplace. In Architecture 101 the following semester, the first assignment was to choose a room someplace on the campus for analysis through drawings and text. Aware that Wu Hall was a celebrated recent building, and knowing it from daily experience, I chose to write about its entry hall and dining room. In words and novice pencil drawings, I carefully described the postmodernist interplay between modernist and medieval architectural forms staged in the building's facades and primary public spaces. This intimate engagement with Wu Hall was my path into the work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown (VRSB), into Complexity and Contradiction , and into architectural history, theory, and criticism at large. I learned postmodernism in part from these close interactions with Wu Hall and from studying the ways it engaged the campus context. Walking each morning through the quadrangles and passages of Princeton's Tudor Revival dormitories on my way to the dishwashing station, I passed ogival doors, bay windows, and pedimented archways similar to those depicted in Complexity and Contradiction . In Wu Hall, as well as in halls paneled and trimmed with Gothic …