Also presented are spectacular renovations for the Frank Furness library building at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Memorial Hall and designs for houses, exhibitions, fabrics, furniture, and decorative items. The catalog, written by the architects, focuses on important aspects of their practice in the late 1980s and the 1990s, notably the juxtaposition of a "hype" sensibility in decoration - manifested in large-scale LED signs and colorful supergraphics - and a generic architecture. The introductory essay, by Stanislaus von Moos, discusses five major themes in Venturi and Scott Brown's architecture: its dialogue with their hometown, Philadelphia, as both a national shrine and a center of architectural innovation; the importance of the American campus as a model for planning and design; organicism as a source of their design theory; the role of realism and abstraction in the firm's architecture; and the Venturis' recent interest in Japan and its traditions.

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.

Also presented are spectacular renovations for the Frank Furness library building at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Memorial Hall and designs for houses, exhibitions, fabrics, furniture, and decorative items. The catalog, written by the architects, focuses on important aspects of their practice in the late 1980s and the 1990s, notably the juxtaposition of a "hype" sensibility in decoration - manifested in large-scale LED signs and colorful supergraphics - and a generic architecture. The introductory essay, by Stanislaus von Moos, discusses five major themes in Venturi and Scott Brown's architecture: its dialogue with their hometown, Philadelphia, as both a national shrine and a center of architectural innovation; the importance of the American campus as a model for planning and design; organicism as a source of their design theory; the role of realism and abstraction in the firm's architecture; and the Venturis' recent interest in Japan and its traditions.

The observer-designer-theorists who analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in "Learning from Las Vegas" now turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has spawned for this fascinating retrospective of their life work.

"The exhibition catalogue is published in the form of a guidebook, Your Guide to Downtown Denise Scott Brown. This new book offers a fresh view of Scott Brown's achievements as a preeminent architectural designer, urbanist, theoretician, and teacher. It is a fantastic guide to her life and ideas, it also reveals her humanism, complexity, and wit. Accompanied by previously unpublished material and an extensive conversation with the architect herself the book leads readers through Denise Scott Brown's life and work and explains the genesis of the exhibition". (éditeur).

In the 1960s, American architect Robert Venturi made a case for the difficult whole, opposing mainstream modern architecture that ignores all the intricacies of life and produces pure space, or "easy unity". The architecture Venturi was aiming for embraces diversities, inevitable in any project. This new book, edited by Architecture Without Content, a research group at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne's School of Architecture, offers a fresh analysis and a thorough re-evaluation of Venturi s idea of "the difficult whole" as both a looking glass and a possible tool for architecture today. Through a radical re-reading of found material from the Venturi Scott Brown archives, the editors seek to propose a credible alternative to contemporary architectural discourse. Its format combines the ambiguity of interpretation with the factual material, keeping the precision of the argument. This elusive position is elaborated in essays, complemented by interviews with Kazunari Sakamoto and Alvaro Siza.Around 35 projects by Venturi Scott Brown, and also by Alvaro Siza and James Stirling, form a visual narrative with original plans and sections and other archive material as well as new perspective images and photographs especially produced for this book.