ABSTRACT
Modern architecture is characterized by its harshest critics as being ‘judgmental’, ‘intolerant’, and in the business of ‘altering’ the existing environment rather than enhancing it. Such are the complaints Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour advanced in Learning From Las Vegas. The modern architecture they criticize is ‘orthodox Modern architecture’. 1 Earlier, in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Le Corbusier is praised for rejecting simplicity in his works, which Venturi argues embody both complexity and contradiction. 2 If Le Corbusier does not represent orthodox modern architecture, then followers of Mies van der Rohe’s reductive paradox that less is more must. Indeed, Venturi’s text supports this reading. 3
