Architecture as Signs and Systems

“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