‘They wouldn’t do this to Shakespeare’: the pioneers of postmodern architecture, as seen by their son

Jim Venturi’s new film follows his parents Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, bringing scrappy wit and colour to chilly modernism as they battle the establishment and wind-up traditionalists at the National Gallery

When Denise Scott Brown visited Las Vegas for the first time in the 1960s, she was overwhelmed with emotions. But she wasn’t quite sure which ones. “The first thing I felt was a kind of shiver,” she recalls in a new documentary. “Was it horror or was it pleasure?” She was intoxicated by the frenzy of neon signs that “reach out and hit you as you travel down the highway”, and exhilarated by the overload of pure “communication without architecture”. Was there something there, she wondered, that architects could learn from?

Half a century later, we find her back in Vegas, walking around a graveyard of neon signs in a dusty lot with her husband Robert Venturi. Together the duo changed the course of modern architecture, championing everyday popular taste and the “ugly ordinary” over the rarefied, bleached white world of modernism. They brought back wit, colour and meaning, and embraced messy diversity over the bland homogeneity of so much of the built environment. And Sin City was the cradle of their inspiration – proselytised in their seminal 1972 book, Learning from Las Vegas.

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