A view from the Campidoglio

These seventeen essays span thirty-two years in the careers of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In these careers one can see the inextricable blending of the building of buildings and the building of words. They "look, analyze, synthesize through writing, synthesize through design, then look again." Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966, has been acknowledged as the most important thinking and writing on architecture since Le Corbusier. It provided a theoretical base for architects to transform architectural design from Modern to contemporary. A leading exponent of the Postmodern, the firm of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown has been in the forefront of new approaches in architecture and design, combining traditional with modern. And their writing has been viewed as "brilliant and liberating." Paul Goldberger, in The New York Times, says of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: "They merge a kind of childlike delight with an adult's ironic sensibility, bringing to architecture an attitude not altogether different from that which Lewis Carroll brought to literature." -- from book cover.