The news last week that Robert Venturi is retiring from his firm, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates (which will be renamed VSBA), is bittersweet. I wrote about Venturi and his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, in The New York Timesat the very beginning of my career, in 1971, when I was still a student at Yale, and in a sense I trace my career as an architecture critic to the impact their work had on my thinking.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, modern architecture—often in the form of the harsh concrete buildings everyone is fighting about preserving today—reigned supreme. Venturi questioned whether the emperor of modernism was quite as clothed as people had thought. His book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,_published in 1966, was for architects what Jane Jacobs’s_Death and Life of Great American Citieswas for city planners: the book that overturned the orthodoxy. Venturi argued that modern buildings were simplistic and reductivist, and that they aspired to a purity that most of architectural history denied. Great buildings were complicated responses to all kinds of situations, not pieces of abstract sculpture indifferent to their surroundings, Venturi said.

And he proceeded to design buildings that demonstrated what he had in mind. They weren’t modern in the sense that we had understood modern architecture to be, but they certainly weren’t traditional, either. Venturi considered himself a modern architect, and he wanted to make buildings that were of his time—he just saw his time as something other than the revolutionary era that modernists fantasized that they were living in. The house he designed for his mother in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, has become something of an icon: it combines the thin, lightness of modernism with the idea of a gable, and it looks almost, but not quite, like a child’s drawing of a house. But a few things are off kilter, and there is nothing soft or sentimental about it.

My other favorite early Venturi building from the 60s, his design for the National Football Hall of Fame, was never built. Venturi called it the “Bill-ding Board,” and he envisioned a small, vaulted display hall behind a gigantic sign on which would be shown images of famous football plays in lights. The sign was bigger than the building, and the message—decades before the work of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro and others who have explored the connection between media and architecture—was that electronic imagery would eventually triumph over constructed space. Conceived long before we had the vast television screens of baseball parks, it was really the beginning of the notion of virtual space.

For a while, Venturi seemed to symbolize everything that was new and radical about architecture, all the more so once Denise Scott Brown became his collaborator. Together they wrote *Learning from Las Vegas,*published in 1972, which brilliantly extended the argument that, sometimes, the sign is the architecture, and they celebrated the virtues of the ordinary, everyday buildings that most architects were taught to disdain. “Main Street is almost all right,” they famously said. (Scott Brown, who specializes in urban design and urban planning, will continue to practice with VSBA.)

Venturi and Scott Brown’s most famous project was the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, which summed up his beliefs: it used classical elements similar to those of the original 19th-century building beside it, but assembled them together with modern ones in a new, and to some, irreverent or flippant way, with deliberately strange juxtapositions, such as a glass curtain wall next to a wall of limestone.

I suppose one has to call this building post-modern, a label Venturi never liked—he hated being thought of as the father of post-modernism, in part because so much of it turned out to be awful, and in part because he didn’t like to be mistaken for a historical copyist. What he really was, I think, was a mannerist, the greatest mannerist architect of our time, picking up elements from the past and stretching them, changing them, and combining them in entirely new ways, just as Michelangelo and Giulio Romano did to create Mannerism out of the architecture of the Renaissance.

Venturi designed some exquisite houses, gentle and wise comments on traditional architecture but always with a surprising, ironic twist of some sort. He did a wonderful addition to Cass Gilbert’s Allen Art Museum at Oberlin College, a checkered box that manages to defer to the elegant older building and enliven it at the same time. But his career was full of disappointments. He never got the big jobs he deserved in his home town of Philadelphia, and his biggest, the new concert hall for the Philadelphia Orchestra, was taken away from him and given to Rafael Vinoly after he had completed a design. He never had a Bilbao or a Walt Disney Hall or a Beaubourg or a Gherkin tower, the kind of spectacular, highly visible buildings that made architects like Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano and Norman Foster household names. Venturi was never a celebrity architect. In the end, his buildings didn’t wow you. They made you think.