"Less is a bore," was the maxim that architect Robert Venturi was known for, a not-so-subtle jab at Mies van der Rohe's "less is more" that should make you smile whether or not you've heard his name before. Venturi, who passed away peacefully yesterday at the age of 93, was along with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown a pioneer of postmodernism, that oft-maligned architectural movement that cemented cartoonish colors, oversized columns and pediments, asymmetries, and lots of other whimsical stylistic forms into our American (and other; take the Neue Staatsgalerie building in Stuttgart, Germany) skylines. At the time, a lot of people hated it, and many still do. But when you understand what these kind of buildings stood for—historical context, stylistic richness, playfulness, and critique, all as a retort against the super minimal, definitely occasionally boring lines of modernist structures that were having a heyday in the mid-century, hence the van der Rohe rebuttal—it becomes highly apparent that our cities owe him and the whole movement a great debt of thanks. You wanna live in a town that's all brand new, no-character high rises? Didn't think so. Here are some of our favorite buildings that Venturi and his wife brought to life.
Venturi's Lieb House—which Philip Johnson famously called "ugly and ordinary," a moniker that Venturi and Scott Brown then adopted as their tag line—was transported from New Jersey to Long Island when it was purchased in 2009 for $1.
