During his time at Princeton, Venturi studied under the guidance of Jean Labatut, a leading French architect, who taught Venturi not only how to create buildings in the minds of the architect, but also how their perceptions are shaped in the minds of the people on the street.
Venturi also studied architectural history under notable scholar, Donald Drew Egbert, which provided a vital source of inspiration in his later designs. In , he secured employment first at the architectural office of Oscar Stonorov, and later with Eero Saarinen.
In , he returned to the US, and began teaching a course in architectural theory at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Architecture. Meanwhile, he also collaborated with Louis Kahn on several ventures. In , he decided to establish his own architectural practice, and he formed Venturi, Cope, and Lippincott.
The team gave considerable thought to taming the shops, information desks and other facilities that crowd into contemporary gallery buildings. They conducted careful research into lighting, mixing daylight and artificial illumination to light the paintings beautifully while conserving them.
Inside and out were modified historical quotations from sources ranging from Filippo Brunelleschi, the great architect of Renaissance Florence , through to s Odeon cinemas. The facade took details from the s facade of the original gallery by William Wilkins , and played around with their rhythm and detail, fading to a plain wall as it moved further from the classical source. Even at the design stage the facade was widely attacked by both conservatives and modernists as appearing arbitrary, or even as being a parody of the existing gallery building.
Venturi defended it compellingly as a legitimate mannerist variation on a theme. On its completion, the Sainsbury Wing was received with admiration by some, but mistrust and hostility by more.
Committed modernists sneered at its reintroduction of historical motifs, while traditionalists were driven to fury by the ironic undermining of those motifs — intentionally industrial-looking railings cut out of a steel sheet to exaggerated profiles, rather than hand-wrought in iron, and purely decorative Victorian-style arches hanging from the suspended ceiling over the main stairs.
Now the dust has settled it is unmistakably in the absolute top rank of postmodern buildings internationally. Despite accusations of populism, the blend of modern and classical details at the Sainsbury Wing was anything but a modish pandering to 80s conservatism. A visit to Europe in stimulated an enduring admiration for Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor and Lutyens, but also the greatest of the modernists, Le Corbusier.
Venturi also fell in love with Rome, to which he returned on a Rome prize fellowship There he became fascinated by the perverse mannerist classicism of the s.
Later he came to believe that its diversity and love of eccentricity provided the ideal model for the architecture of the late 20th century. Immediately hailed as a theorist and designer with radical ideas, Venturi went to teach a series of studios at the Yale School of Architecture in the mids. The most famous of these was a studio in in which Venturi and Scott Brown led a team of students to document and analyze the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the least likely subject for a serious research project imaginable.
This second manifesto was an even more stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural tastes. The book coined the terms "Duck" and "Decorated Shed" - descriptions of the two predominant ways of embodying iconography in buildings. The work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown adopted the latter strategy, producing formally simple "decorated sheds" with rich, complex and often shocking ornamental flourishes.
Though he and his wife co-authored several additional books at the end of the century, these two have proved most influential. Venturi created the firm Venturi and Short with William Short in John Rauch replaced Short as partner in , changing the name to Venturi and Rauch.
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