Architecture as Signs and Systems

For a Mannerist Time

Robert Venturi

Denise Scott Brown

  • Finalist 2005 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Architecture Category

Architecture as Signs and Systems is based on lectures at Harvard which provided [Venturi and Scott Brown] with the opportunity to reflect on their careers...Their key achievement was to overthrow an arid modernist orthodoxy and to prepare the ground for today's pluralism. They nonetheless profess to remain wedded to a central tenet of modernism, that architecture should be appropriate to its age... But whatever qualifications or disagreements one may have, the Venturis remain among the most refreshing, inspiring, least pompous presences on an architectural scene peopled with prickly egos, whingeing prima donnas and ideologues. Their greatest virtue...is that they genuinely invite open debate on the big issues of architecture and urban design.
   --Jules Lubbock, Times Literary Supplement

[Venturi and Scott Brown's] new book, Architecture as Signs and Systems, is a direct challenge to architecture's increasingly tortuous quest for shapes and spaces that might give new physical meaning to that increasingly diffuse term, modernity...[Their] new polemic is a wonderfully intelligent provocation.
   --Jay Merrick, The Independent

  • Cover: Architecture as Signs and Systems
  • A photo of the author

Photo of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown by Matt Wargo

Robert Venturi is principal in charge of design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Pritzker Prize and the Centennial Medal of the American Academy in Rome and, with Denise Scott Brown, the National Medal of Art and the Vincent J. Scully Prize of the National Building Museum. He has taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

Denise Scott Brown is principal in charge of urban and campus planning and design in the architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the ACSA-AIA Topaz Medallion for Architecture Education and the Chicago Architecture Award. She has taught at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania.