ABSTRACT
Public dissatisfaction with what Robert Venturi in 1966 called ‘the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture’ (Venturi 1977:16), and with an equally austere and technocratic modernist urban planning, already had a respectable history when the term postmodernism was actually introduced in the architectural debate, in the mid-1970s. The attack on modernism can be traced through Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), Robert Stern’s New Directions in American Architecture (1969), Learning from Las Vegas by Venturi, his wife Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour (1972), and Peter Blake’s Form Follows Fiasco (1974), to mention some of the more consequential salvoes in that battle. While Jane Jacobs’s book initiated a long overdue discussion on urban planning, Venturi’s work was mainly responsible for getting the debate on the inadequacies of modernist architecture underway. When he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 1991, the jury could indeed say that he is ‘generally acknowledged to have diverted the mainstream of architecture away from Modernism’ (Ketcham 1992: 91).
