ARCHITECHTURE as SIGNS and SYSTEMS

ARCHITECHTURE as SIGNS and SYSTEMS

FOR A MANNERIST TIME

Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown

Belknap Harvard

Evolutionary Pragmatism rather than Revolutionary Ideology.

serious beauty may lie in what you see and can’t, at first, accept.

Robert Venturi exploded onto the architectural scene in 1966 with a radical call to arms in Complexity and Contradiction. Further accolades and outrage ensued in 1972 when Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (along with Steven Izenour) analyzed the Las Vegas trip as an archetype in Learning from Las Vegas.
Now, for the first time, these two observer- designer-theorists turn their iconoclastic
vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has
informed.
The views of Venturi and Scott Brown have influenced architects worldwide for nearly half
a century. Pluralism and multiculturalism; symbolism and iconography; popular culture
and the everyday landscape; generic building and electronic communication are among the many ideas they have championed. Here, they present both a fascinating retrospective of
their life work and a definitive statement of its theoretical underpinnings.
Accessible, informative, and beautifully illustrated, Architecture as Signs and Systems is a must for students of architecture and urban planning, as ell as anyone intrigued by these seminal cultural figures. Venturi and Scot Brown have devoted their Professional lives to
broadening our view of the built world and enlarging the purview of practitioners within in
it. By looking backward over their own life work, they discover signs and systems that
point forward, toward a humane Mannerist architecture for a complex, multicultural
society.

Condition: Great