Vanna Venturi House

The Vanna Venturi House is a house in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, designed by the architect Robert Venturi for his mother and completed in 1964. Its street facade presents a broken, non-structural pediment and an asymmetrical arrangement of windows and applied ornament, deliberately contradicting the plain geometric volumes and unornamented surfaces that modernist houses of the period favored. Venturi treated the house as a built demonstration of the ideas he set out in his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, using historical reference, ambiguity and apparent inconsistency rather than a single unifying modernist logic. It is widely regarded as one of the first works of postmodern architecture.