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In this April 1991 file photo, architect Robert Venturi poses in his office in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, with a model of a new hall for the Philadelphia Orchestra in background.GEORGE WIDMAN/The Associated Press

Robert Venturi, the American architect and theorist whose buildings and bestselling books helped inspire the movement known as postmodernism, in which historic elements enliven contemporary forms, died Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 93.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his son, James Venturi, an urban planner.

For much of the 20th century, “serious” architects, led by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, favoured unadorned surfaces and strictly geometric forms. But in his treatise, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966, Robert Venturi argued that ornament, historical allusions and even humour had a place in modern architecture. The book was a retort to Mies’s assertion that “less is more.”

“Less is a bore,” Mr. Venturi wrote.

“I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning,” he explained. His goal, he said, was to awaken architects “from prim dreams of pure order.”

The book, backed by the Museum of Modern Art and the Graham Foundation, became a perennial bestseller translated into more than a dozen languages. In the introduction, eminent architectural historian Vincent Scully called it “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture” since Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, published in 1923. He accused Mr. Venturi’s critics of “preoccupation with a rather prissily puristic aesthetic.”

Mr. Venturi was based in Philadelphia, where he and his wife of more than 50 years, architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, ran a firm with international reach while living in a sprawling old house they filled with an eclectic mix of furniture, some of which they designed. Their buildings were known for using familiar elements in unfamiliar combinations.

In 1964, for example, Mr. Venturi completed a small house for his mother, Vanna Venturi, in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia. The building has a gabled roof that culminates in a deep slit instead of the expected peak. (In 2005, it was hailed as a masterwork on a U.S. postage stamp.)

His Guild House, a retirement home in Philadelphia also completed in 1964, has a flat façade punctured by mismatched windows. Its central bay originally culminated in a gold and aluminum television antenna.

In 1971, Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times, said Guild House contained “a perverse assortment of details that sets other architects’ teeth on edge.”

But, she wrote, “it is meant to make the educated viewer look twice, to see why the ordinary is extraordinary.”

By the 1980s, the Venturi firm was winning large commissions, including additions to the Harvard, Yale and Princeton campuses. By decorating his façades, sometimes using brick in jaunty patterns, he helped the colleges bridge the gap between their historic buildings (such as Princeton’s Gothic dormitories) and the spare, stark, boxy forms that had become the 20th-century default.

Outside the United States, he and Scott Brown were known for their addition to the National Gallery in London, which opened in 1991 and was acclaimed for eccentricity in a country in which eccentricity is prized. The building featured Corinthian columns arranged at uneven intervals, like a jazz musician riffing on classical themes.

Other important projects included the Seattle Art Museum, which also opened in 1991 and was later incorporated into a larger building by Allied Works Architecture, and a government complex in Toulouse, France. In both projects, elements of classical architecture are rendered in exaggerated form as surface decoration.

Though he disowned the title, Mr. Venturi was often called the father of postmodernism. Philip Johnson, who left his own large imprint on 20th-century architecture, said in a conversation with architect and author Robert A.M. Stern in 1985 that Mr. Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction had helped liberate him from modernism’s rigidity.

“It was such a relief that it appeared,” he said of the book.

Mr. Venturi himself complained that his followers had sometimes “misapplied or exaggerated” his ideas. In the introduction to the second edition of Complexity and Contradiction, published 11 years after the original, he wrote, “I have sometimes felt more comfortable with my critics than with those who have agreed with me.”

In 2001, in an effort to set the record straight, he appeared on the cover of Architecture magazine proclaiming, “I am not now and never have been a postmodernist.”

“It is one’s fate to be misunderstood,” he said in an interview for this obituary at his house in Philadelphia in 2009.

Robert Charles Venturi Jr. was born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1925. His father ran a produce business; his mother, Vanna (Luizi) Venturi, was active in socialist and feminist circles. Robert, their only child, attended the Episcopal Academy in Merion, Pa., and then enrolled at Princeton University. Raised as a Quaker, he said he registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War.

Mr. Venturi arrived at Princeton in 1944, when modernism had taken root at other architecture schools. Princeton’s architecture program, however, was affiliated with its art and archeology department, and Mr. Venturi became immersed in architectural history. Outside the classroom, the historical styles of the Princeton campus had him “walking on air,” he said.

After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton, he worked for Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn, modernists with iconoclastic streaks, before winning a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. He spent two years in Europe, studying buildings by the likes of Michelangelo, Bernini and, in Spain, Antoni Gaudi.

After returning to the United States, Mr. Venturi joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Ms. Scott Brown, who was also teaching at Penn and who had recently been widowed. They married in 1967.

Mr. Venturi went into private practice in 1960, first in partnership with William H. Short and then, starting in 1964, with John Rauch. Ms. Scott Brown joined the Venturi Rauch firm in 1969 as partner in charge of planning. In 1989, when Mr. Rauch resigned, the firm was renamed Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. At its peak, it employed nearly 100 people. It is now known as VSBA Architects & Planners.

Almost as influential as his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was Mr. Venturi’s second book, Learning From Las Vegas, written with Ms. Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, then a principal in the couple’s firm. Published in 1972, it grew from a course Mr. Venturi and Ms. Scott Brown taught at Yale.

The book’s focus was on the aesthetic virtues of the Las Vegas Strip, the kind of lowbrow environment that most academic architects derided. The book popularized the terms “ducks,” for buildings that were representational in their shapes, and “decorated sheds,” for containers that depended on applied ornament to convey meaning. It also helped establish the influence on architecture of pop art, with its surprising plays of scale.

Mr. Scully, the architectural historian, wrote that Venturi was “one of the very few architects whose thought parallels that of the Pop painters –and probably the first architect to perceive the usefulness and meaning of their forms.”

Mr. Venturi won the Pritzker Prize, considered architecture’s highest honour, in 1991. In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged the role his wife had played in his success, making a point of using “we” instead of “I.”

“Denise’s input, creative and critical, is crucial,” he said. Ms. Scott Brown had refused to attend the ceremony, in Mexico City, where she said she would have been treated as an adjunct. In 2013, speaking at an awards ceremony for women in architecture, Ms. Scott Brown said she deserved to share the prize with her husband; that prompted a petition drive to gain her the honour retroactively.

In addition to his son, Mr. Venturi leaves Ms. Scott Brown.

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