Architecture Should be Complex

In 1966 Robert Venturi published a commentary meant to guide architecture professionals. In it, he laments at the growing trend loss of complexity and culture in architecture in exchange for minimalism and the clean machine aesthetic. He argues for an embrace not just of the motifs of historic western architecture, but also a design mindset that recognizes the depth and tension of living in the modern world.

...I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art. Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged... (Venturi, 1966, p. 16)

He observes how architecture has slowly become a kind of neutral agent in the world, meant to go unnoticed and provide only what is necessary such as shelter from the weather, electricity, and space for business. To Venturi, there is more that the built environment should offer, but these things appear to have contradictory goals.

But architecture is necessarily complex and contradictory in its very inclusion of the traditional Vitruvian elements of commodity, firmness, and delight. And today the wants of program, structure, mechanical equipment, and expression, even in single buildings in simple contexts, are diverse and conflicting in ways previously unimaginable.

Local Loops, in partnership with the NDC should consider the various ways architecture provides for community. At the same time, if the team identifies contradictory needs backed by primary research, they should consider's Venturi's call to embrace a complex solution that incorporates all of these needs.

I prefer "both-and" to "either-or," black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once. But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality.

Designers are challenged by these words to see the whole impact of the built environment on its users. This matters also in terms of circular economy, since better stewarding local materials means seeing a bigger picture and more total understanding of product lifecycle.

It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.

References
Venturi, R. (1966). Complexity and contradiction in architecture (2nd ed.). The Museum of Modern Art.