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

comments powered by Disqus

Announcements

Designers & Books Tours

Designers & Books Tours:

Customized tours providing the opportunity to explore the places, meet the people, and see the books of the design book world in New York City.

For information:
PH: 212-777-9080
or
info@designersandbooks.com

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986 by Andrew Blauvelt

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986

by Andrew Blauvelt
Publisher: Cranbrook Art Museum
Published: June 1, 2018

Explores the printed matter—posters, flyers, zines, and album covers—produced by and for the punk and post-punk music scenes in the United States and UK. Printed as a special, oversized, 52-page color newspaper, the catalogue has been published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name, curated by Andrew Blauvelt, on view at the Cranbrook Art Museum through October 7, 2018.

To order