The Architecture of Robert Venturi

It is a curious condition of current architectural criticism that Robert Venturi, while acknowledged to be one of the most important theorists of the past quarter century as well as a major American architect, has been only sporadically studied in scholarly and critical essays. In producing an anthology with an eminent line-up of American scholars, Christopher Mead has made a significant step in filling this critical vacuum. The authors assembled here, notes architect Mark A. Hewitt, offer an interpretation that is solidly within the tradition of the Yale-Philadelphia axis, which was so important in the 1960s, when Venturi was doing his major academic and theoretical work. The reader should feel close to Venturi's ideas when reading Vincent Scully's marvelously anecdotal and personally authoritative essay, David Van Zanten's essay, at once an objective analysis and reminiscence of the Princeton program, and Stephen Kieran's reading of the representation elements in Wu Hall. Neil Levine discusses the question at the center of this collection the significance of historical sources in architecture-and Thomas Beeby provides an architect's welcome analysis of the Trubek and Wislocki Houses in Nantucket. -- from book jacket.