Charles Robert Venturi, Jr. (born June 25th, 1925) is an American architect, principal founder of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the leading figures of twentieth century architecture. Along with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the american built environment. Its buildings, urban planning, theoretical and didactic writings have also contributed to the expansion of the discourse on architecture. He wrote in 1972 in collaboration with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour "Learning from Las Vegas: the forgotten symbolism of architectural form", one of the most influential books on architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.
Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1991; the prize was awarded to him alone, despite a request to include his partner Denise Scott Brown. Fifteen years later, both jointly were awarded the AIA Gold Medal 2016, the most important architecture prize in the US. Venturi is also known for coining the slogan "Less is a bore", a post-modern antidote to the famous modernist Mies van der Rohe sentence "Less is more". He reached prestige when in the 1960s he began criticizing the orthodoxy of the modern movement, which led to the postmodernism of the 1970s His cause advocated a complex architecture and accepted its contradictions. He rejected the austerity of the modern movement and encouraged the return of historicism, added decoration and of a resounding symbolism in architectural design.
