Robert Venturi Quotations

Main Street is almost alright.

It was very unusual to employ prettiness as part of a building.

Disharmony that comes from circumstances that are valid has tension, poignancy, quality, and beauty.

As an architect, I try to be guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully considered...As an artist, I frankly write about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what we find we like-what we are easily attracted to-we can learn much of what we really are.

When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture.

The Italian landscape has always harmonized the vulgar and the Vitruvian: the contorni around the duomo, the portiere'S laundry across the padrone's portone, Supercortemaggiore against the Romanesque apse. Naked children have never played in our fountains, and I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.

Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.