The new book by Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby, both Fellows of the American Academy in Rom, reconsiders Complexity and Contradiction in the form of a guidebook to Rome, and forms a rich framework for re-engaging. Chapter by chapter, the authors revisit key buildings that Venturi cites. With each, they include a piece of Venturi's original text, interpret the text and describe the building. And each building is illustrated with a monochrome watercolor painting. The watercolors are meant to translate the complex buildings into form, mass, space and light. This interpretive method, while sensual in its own right, allows the narrative/reader to focus on the most compelling aspects of each building.
It's hard to underestimate how impactful Complexity and Contradiction can be for young architecture students. For decades students were given Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture and Colin Rowe's Mathematics of the ideal Villa as a college freshman.
So it was unsettling for freshly minted modernist converts to confront Complexity and Contradiction. It was both revelation and heresy, a graduate-student level text for top thinkers. But it allows young designers to think about the pleasures or architectural languages, and how they can be manipulated to communicate, to tell stories and create narratives. Like the mature languages that were at the disposal of Michelangelo, Palladio, John Soane, Edwin Lutyens, Paul Rudolph and Anthony Ames. For those designers who are John Hedjuk's "continuators", Venturi suggests a rich path for the creative practice.
This book is not an essential scholarly text. Rather, it's an indulgence, a work of thoughtfulness and beauty for the library of anyone keen on Rome, Robert Venturi, or the art of watercolor sketching.
