Book List of the Week

The Books That Inspired Robert Venturi

Books as signposts and guides

By Steve Kroeter and Stephanie Salomon September 21, 2018

Robert Venturi, Architect, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.

Robert Venturi (1925–September 18, 2018), along with his partner and wife, Denise Scott Brown, was the original inspiration behind the founding of Designers and Books. Together, these two esteemed architects, renowned as much for their writing as for their buildings, defined the relationship between the creative work of designers and the books they read—and write—as an expanding universe of interacting thoughts and ideas.

Venturi and Scott Brown’s long list of the books that inspired them was one of the first we published, and it is our profound honor to feature it again. The books included, the architects note, have been “signposts and guides in the evolving of our ideas.”

Robert Venturi, Las Vegas, NV, November 1966. Photo by Denise Scott Brown, courtesy of VSBA

Venturi’s groundbreaking book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, first published in 1966 and a major influence on the work and thinking of a generation of architects, remains the most frequently selected title on the lists we have published of books that have inspired many other designers (“10 Most Frequently Chosen Design Books”). That list also includes Venturi and Scott Brown’s iconic Learning from Las Vegas, first published in 1972 and reissued in multiple editions and many languages since that time, most recently as a facsimile of the long out-of-print large-format edition designed by Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017).

“The selections from our own writing show what we derived from what we read,” say Venturi and Scott Brown.

View Robert Venturi's Book List (click on any title to learn more)

View Books by Robert Venturi (click on any title to learn more)

Still Learning from Denise Scott Brown

The 1968 Learning from Las Vegas Studio Revisited

You Are What You Read: A New Book Series from Designers & Books — Special Preview from Denise Scott Brown

10 Most Frequently Chosen Design Books

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