"Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and its drama. And by recognizing the difference between the inside and the outside, architecture opens the door once again to an urbanistic point of view."
Robert Charles Venturi Jr. was an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
"But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable."
"The essential purpose of the interiors of buildings is to enclose rather than direct space, and to separate the inside from the outside"
"The calculated ambiguity of expression is based on the confusion of experience as reflected in the architectural program."
"Perhaps it is the fate of all theorists to view the ripples from their works with mixed feelings. I have sometimes felt more comfortable with my critics than with those who have agreed with me. The latter have often misapplied or exaggerated the ideas and methods of this book to the point of parody. Some have said the ideas are fine but dont go far enough. But most of the thought here was intended to be suggestive rather than dogmatic, and the method of historical analogy can be taken only so far in architectural criticism."
"I like complexity and contradiction in architecture. I do not like the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture nor the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism."
"I am for messy vitality over obvious unity."