ARCHITECT'S

The Vanna Venturi House, referred to by the architect as "my mother's house", took more than six years to design and marked the beginning of his break with the Modernist movement. It incorporates many of the devices used by Modernist architects like Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, from horizontal ribbon windows, to a simplistic rendered facade. But Venturi chose to also include ornament in the design – something his Modernist peers had shunned. By reintroducing elements traditionally associated with houses – from a gabled roof to an arch-framed entrance – but stripping them of their original functions, he laid the foundations for the entire Postmodern movement.Italian architect Aldo Rossi credited the building with having "liberated architecture in America and elsewhere", while fellow American architect Peter Eisenman described it as "the first American building to propose an ideological break with Modern abstraction at the same time that it is rooted in this tradition." The project began shortly after the death of Venturi's father in 1959. His mother Vanna was keen to move out of the family home in favour of a more modestly sized residence, so she asked her son to come up with a design for a plot on Milman Street in the Philadelphia suburb of Chestnut Hill. The architect was 34 years old, had yet to complete any buildings and was working as a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania – where the following year he was to meet his future wife and business partner, fellow architect Denise Scott Brown. He was also a teaching assistant to the already established architect Louis Kahn. Vanna's brief was straightforward: she wanted a simple and unpretentious home, with most rooms on one level and no garage, as she no longer used a car. There was no detailed list of requirements and no deadline for completion. Many different designs emerged over the course of six years. The early versions were heavily influenced by Kahn, who was also building a house on the same street – the Esherick House of 1961. But by the final design, Venturi and Scott Brown were working together on the project and it took on a much more radical form. "If you look at the first five of his designs, you'll see that Bob is the Kahn groupie," she explained. "And suddenly, the sixth one, it changes." (© Dezeen)

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