Chapter VI, The Scholastics Summary and Analysis

The architect who was to change things, to avoid being expelled but change the Bauhaus community nonetheless, was Robert Venturi, who published a book called Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture within a Museum of Modern Art series. His book looked like heresy since he rejected Mies's dictum, "Less is more," for "Less is a bore." He wanted messy vitality and hybridity to replace modernism. He embraced the distorted over the straightforward, the ambiguous to the articulated.

Venturi argued that architecture should not be restricted to the elite university world but should be brought once more to ordinary people. Yet Venturi's buildings still baffled people, particularly because he had built so few of them. He only mildly departed from modernism. Venturi had good academic credentials and his book had strong endorsements; his treatise turned out to...