Reconciliations: New Views and Re-views

At certain moments of receptivity, ideas or ways of thinking presciently coincide with frames of mind. I first read Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (published almost forty years ago) at a transitional and skeptical moment. Deploying now-legendary turns of phrase such as both-and, more is not less, and less is a bore, the young architect challenged the hegemony and austerity of modern architecture. 1 Venturi's "quiet manifesto" made history and popular culture permissible subjects for architectural innovation. His examination of modernism was not a simple condemnation, however, but rather a renegotiation of old with new ideas, formal concepts with cultural phenomena, and past with future. Alternately praised and criticized as a beacon of (a now-dubious) postmodernism, Venturi's intellectual bridge-building demonstrated habits of the mind that were integrative rather than exclusionary.