Robert Venturi

Venturi trained at Princeton and worked for Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen before opening his own Philadelphia practice, whose first built commission was a house for his own mother, Vanna Venturi, and second a subsidised apartment block for elderly residents, Guild House. His 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture argued for a "both-and" architecture of quotation, ornament and deliberately unresolved form against the reductive slogans of late Modernism — "less is a bore" answered Mies's "less is more" — and made him architecture's first postmodern theorist before he had built much at all. From the late 1960s his practice and his life were an equal partnership with Denise Scott Brown, whom he married in 1967; together they wrote Learning from Las Vegas (1972) and built the firm's larger institutional work as Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. The 1991 Pritzker Prize went to Venturi alone, a decision Scott Brown herself protested and architecture historians still contest.