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Robert Charles Venturi (June 25, 1925 -) is an award winning American architect. Based in Philadelphia, he worked under Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn before forming his own firm with John Rauch. As a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, Venturi met his future wife, the architect and planner Denise Scott Brown, who joined the firm in 1967. After Rauch's resignation in 1989, the firm took its current form and was named Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.. Robert Venturi won the Pritzker Prize in 1991. Robert Venturi coined the maxim "Less is a bore" as antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more".

Venturi was a controversial critic of the purely functional and spare designs of modern orthodox architecture and was considered a counterrevolutionary. He published his "gentle" manifesto, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, in 1966, and it was described in the introduction by Vincent Scully to be "probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's 'Vers Une Architecture', of 1923." Venturi received a grant from the Graham Foundation in 1965 to aid in the completion of the book.

He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 and received his M.F.A. there in 1950.

Important works by his firm include:

• Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London
• Provincial Capitol Building, Toulouse, France
• Guild House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Vanna Venturi House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington

The Vanna Venturi House in Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill, designed for Venturi's mother, was recognized as a "Masterwork of Modern American Architecture" by the United States Postal Service in May 2005.

See also

• Postmodern architecture
• Semiotics