If anyone can be called the father of post-modem architecture in America it is Robert Venturi, however reluctantly he admits his paternity. Some would say that postmodernist architecture has two fathers, Venturi and Charles Moore, who is perhaps a bit more willing to acknowledge the child than Venturi. Still, it is Venturi’s book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, that provided the manifesto for the movement—if, indeed, the “movement” exists as more than a ubiquitous attitude. Certainly as a manifesto Venturi’s book has none of the commitment and belligerence that characterized modernism during the Teens and Twenties. Venturi himself refers to Complexity and Contradiction as a “gentle manifesto.” His diminuendo seems appropriate given his oblique program, which merely calls for a “non-straightforward architecture.” Even so, Vincent Scully, in his introduction, proclaimed the book “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture in 1923.” Such it has turned out to be.

Thus, the comprehensive exhibition of the work of the firm, “Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown; A Generation of Architecture,” which is currently making the rounds of eight American museums, is an event of consequence.[1] I caught it at Princeton University, a particularly appropriate place. Venturi is an alumnus of both its college and its school of architecture, and his alma mater has recently become a patron. A short walk from the exhibition stands the recently completed Gordon Wu Hall, which