page_title: Vanna Venturi House
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Vanna Venturi House / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Vanna Venturi House from the south (side). V V House is viewed as the first Post-modern building, being designed in the early 1960s by architect Robert Venturi for his mother. In the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of NW Philadelphia. The entire neighborhood is a National Register of Historic Places historic district.
context_page_description: The Vanna Venturi House, one of the first prominent works of the postmodern architecture movement, is located in the neighborhood of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed by architect Robert Venturi for his mother, Vanna Venturi, and constructed between 1962 and 1964.
  The five-room house stands only about 30 feet tall, but has a monumental front facade, an effect achieved by intentionally manipulating the architectural elements that indicate a building's scale. Elements such as a non-structural applique arch and "hole in the wall" windows were an open challenge to Modernist orthodoxy, as described in Venturi's 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.
  Architectural historian Vincent Scully called it "the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century."
context_section_description: Venturi designed the Vanna Venturi House at the same time that he wrote his anti-Modernist polemic Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in which he outlined his own architectural ideas.  During the writing he redesigned the house at least five times in fully worked-out versions. A description of the house is included in the book and the house is viewed as an embodiment of the ideas in the book.  He states:
  Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than "pure," compromising rather than "clear," distorted rather than "straightforward."... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim duality.
  Many of the basic elements of the house are a reaction against standard Modernist architectural elements: the pitched roof rather than flat roof, the emphasis on the central hearth and chimney, a closed ground floor "set firmly on the ground" rather than the Modernist columns and glass walls which open up the ground floor. On the front elevation the broken pediment or gable and a purely ornamental applique arch reflect a return to Mannerist architecture and a rejection of Modernism. Thus the house is a direct break from Modern architecture, designed in order to disrupt and contradict formal Modernist aesthetics. More simply, Venturi demonstrated his intentions by figuratively giving the finger to the Modernist establishment.
  The site of the house is flat, with a long driveway connecting it to the street.  Venturi placed the parallel walls of the house perpendicular to the main axis of the site, defined by the driveway, rather than the usual placement along the axis. Unusually, the gable is placed on the long side of the rectangle formed by the house, and there is no matching gable at the rear.  The chimney is emphasized by the centrally placed room on the second floor, but the actual chimney is small and off-center. The effect is to magnify the scale of the small house and make the facade appear to be monumental. The scale magnifying effects are not carried over to the sides and rear of the house, thus making the house appear to be both large and small from different angles.
  The central chimney and staircase dominate the interior of the house.
  Two vertical elements — the fireplace-chimney and the stair — compete, as it were, for central position. And each of these elements, one essentially solid, the other essentially void, compromises in its shape and position — that is, inflects toward the other to make a unity of the duality of the central core they constitute. On one side the fireplace distorts in shape and moves over a little, as does its chimney; on the other side the stair suddenly constricts its width and distorts its path because of the chimney.
  The themes of scale, contradiction, and "whimsy" – "not inappropriate to an individual house," can be seen at the top of the stair, that seems to go from the second floor to a non-existent third floor.
  On one level, it goes nowhere and is whimsical; at another level, it is like a ladder against a wall from which to wash the high window and paint the clerestory. The change in scale of the stair on this floor further contrasts with that change of scale in the other direction at the bottom.
  The house was constructed with intentional formal architectural, historical and aesthetic contradictions. Venturi has compared the iconic front facade to "a child's drawing of a house." 
  Yet he has also written, "This building recognizes complexities and contradictions: it is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little; some of its elements are good on one level and bad on another its order accommodates the generic elements and of the house in general, and the circumstantial elements of a house in particular."
  The Swiss architectural theorist Stanislaus von Moos views the monumental facade as a reference to Michelangelo's Porta Pia, the back wall to Palladio's Nymphaeum at Villa Barbaro, and the broken pediments to the facade of
caption: View from the side (south-east)
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