Robert Venturi

Less is a bore.

— Robert Venturi

Main Street is almost alright.

— Robert Venturi

I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism.

— Robert Venturi

But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable.

— Robert Venturi

I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function.

— Robert Venturi

Orthodox Modern architects have tended to recognize complexity insufficiently or inconsistently. In their attempt to break with tradition and start all over again, they idealized the primitive and elementary at the expense of the diverse and the sophisticated.

— Robert Venturi

Rationalizations for simplification are still current, however, though subtler than the early arguments.

— Robert Venturi

Nor does complexity deny the valid simplification which is part of the process of analysis, and even a method of achieving complex architecture itself.

— Robert Venturi

The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program.

— Robert Venturi

The essential purpose of the interiors of buildings is to enclose rather than direct space, and to separate the inside from the outside

— Robert Venturi

Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and its drama. And by recognizing the difference between the inside and the outside, architecture opens the door once again to an urbanistic point of view.

— Robert Venturi