Pioneer's Vindication

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Robert Venturi, the man who launched architectural Postmodernism a quarter- century ago, is not exactly unsung: only a few of his living peers are better known, and none has been credited with more deeply influencing the way houses and cityscapes look. Still, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, his wife and partner, feel chronically underappreciated. They have never got as much work as they might have: after almost 40 years as architects, much of that time as world-famous architects, Venturi and Scott Brown have built a few score buildings, many of those within driving distance of their office and none of them very large. Spring after spring, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, a 13-year-old pseudo Nobel, went to other people, sometimes Venturi's inferiors.

Now, at age 66, comes vindication -- kudos, prestigious buildings, the works. Last April, Venturi won the Pritzker. In July his impeccable addition to the National Gallery of Art on Trafalgar Square in London was dedicated. And now all of haute Seattle is celebrating his latest creation, the city's fetching new art museum.

Is he finally happy? Almost. "You always look at what you have done and say, 'Oh, I could have done that better.' " But, he agrees, it's a pretty nice museum, particularly given its hemmed-in, heart-of-downtown site. "It is a little building with big scale," Venturi said on the eve of the grand opening, "surrounded by big buildings with little scale."

That sounds familiar -- and, sure enough, he used it in his seminal book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, to describe one of his early buildings. Complexity and Contradiction was a galvanizing manifesto, liberating architects from Modernist, minimalist dogma. "Less is a bore," Venturi declared, meaning that it was time to begin using ornament in buildings again. And also, "Main Street is almost all right," meaning that familiar, off-the-shelf architectural forms also deserved to be revived. The past could be a rich source of inspiration for contemporary architects. Relax, Venturi told his snobbish profession, and enjoy the old-fashioned gewgaws, the color, even the kitsch.

This is now conventional wisdom, but in the early '60s it was crazy talk, downright revolutionary, particularly coming from a respected young Princeton graduate and Rome Prize winner. By the time his book was published in 1966, Venturi had actually built a house illustrating his alarming, thrilling ideas in a Philadelphia suburb, for the perfect client: his well-to-do socialist mother. As with much of his work since, he took the debased, muddled classical references residually present in most suburban houses and made them self- conscious, explicit, arch. The house was two decades ahead of its time. Imagine a Pop artwork from 1945, or a rap recording from 1965.

Amazing -- and not always, at the time, likable. His 1973 addition to Oberlin College's art museum has a checkerboard exterior and a comically oversize Ionic column inside. Outrageous! The molecular-biology lab at Princeton, designed in 1983, has a wild Argyle sheathing of bricks and oddly orientalized archways. Ridiculous!