Architects: Robert Venturi.
Location:  Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Year: 1964.
Photographs: Via #1 #2 .

The Vanna Venturi House is perhaps the ur-postmodernist building; the font from which the style sprang. Post-modernism is a reaction to the failure of modernism, rejecting the idea of an ‘international style’ and instead reviving the historical languages of architecture, albeit in an ironized, self-referential manner. It accepts diversity, prefers hybrids to pure forms, encourages multiple and simultaneous readings, and borrows from the form and strategies of both modernism and the architecture that preceded it. Post-modernist architects such as Venturi mimicked and reinvented classical principles by using historical symbolism. Venturi rejected Mies van der Rohe’s modernist approach ‘Less is more’ and spun it with his own approach “Less is a bore”. Post-modernists believed it was boring to reduce everything and be a minimalist, and instead wanted hybridity instead of purity.

The post-modernist movement was a key vehicle of semiotics in association with architectural form. Symbols and signifiers have always existed in the architectural discipline, but the signifier can mean many different things. An example of this is the modern use of columns, which were seen as symbolic due to the extortionate amount of man-hours they required to construct and the materials and resources required. Post-modernistic ideology borrows this symbolism and places it within a modern context using it as an ornament. Charles Moore’s use of columns is purely symbolic as not being used for structural integrity but for ornamentation, mimicking an ionic column.

Vanna Venturi house was designed by Robert Venturi in 1959 and completed in 1964. It was his first project as an independent architect and explores the ideology of ‘Complexity and Contradiction in architecture’. It was a direct response to the modernist architecture that preceded it, with features such as a pitched roof, a closed ground floor, a broken gable, ornamental features, and a ‘Nowhere staircase’ to create bewilderment and humility. Venturi rejected Modernist architecture by implementing a pitched roof, and windows instead of a glass wall and showing no expression of the horizontality of floors on the exterior. He wanted to express the fundamental elements of a house, such as windows with multiple panes defined by mullions and muntins, and to communicate its programme.

He was also concerned with how the house performed, as the function of the house is to protect and provide privacy, physiological as well as physical. Venturi’s use of an arch over the clerestory symbolizes the relationship between mother and son.