A Prize Year for Celebrating the Venturi Vision : Architecture: The Pritzker Prize jury chooses Robert Venturi for his enduringly successful combination of theory and practicality in designs.

Robert Venturi, an architectural free-thinker and outspoken champion of ordinary American buildings, is the 1991 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The annual award, known as the Nobel Prize of architecture, consists of a $100,000 grant, a bronze medallion and a certificate. Venturi will receive the prize on May 16 in a ceremony at Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City.

The Philadelphia-based architect, author and educator is known for challenging the hegemony of the modernist International School and for revitalizing traditional forms by using them in bold new ways. His projects range from such dignified structures as the Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Medical Research Laboratories at UCLA and a proposed addition to the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art to a low-slung building splashed with flower designs that serves as Best Products Catalog Showroom in Oxford Valley, Pa.

Hailing Venturi as both “a theorist of exceptional insight” and “a master practitioner,” the Pritzker jury said this year’s laureate has combined physical and conceptual aspects of architecture more successfully than any other architect.

“I like that, but there are dangers,” the 65-year-old architect said of the jury’s assessment. “We are architects first,” he said, referring to his partnership with Denise Scott Brown. “The theory just helps us to do our work. We don’t set up a theory and make buildings to fit it. When I first taught theory (at the University of Pennsylvania, 1957-65), it was the only course on architectural theory. Now there are too many theory courses. You should forget your theory while you do your work--and then come back to it to see how it holds up.”

A citation issued by the jury states that Venturi “has expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this century . . . through his theories and built works. Of the former, his thin but potent volume, ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,’ published in 1966, is generally acknowledged to have diverted the mainstream of architecture away from modernism.”

Venturi, who was educated at Princeton University, challenged the International School’s insistence on clean lines and reductive forms by taking a fresh, fond view of America’s vernacular architectural landscape. He found much to admire in “the messy vitality” of American towns and asked in his book, “Is not Main Street almost all right?” To modernist Mies van de Rohe’s “less is more” dictum, Venturi responded, “Less is a bore.”

Twenty-five years later, Venturi acknowledges his early claim to fame, but he doesn’t cast himself as an enemy of modernist ideals. “I have enormous respect for modernism. It’s a historical style,” he said in a telephone interview. “I worship modern masters such as Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. We’re not trying to murder our fathers. We are trying to stand on their shoulders and grow. Good children are both dependent and independent.”

Venturi didn’t expect 1991 to be his year for the Pritzker. “I try not to think about such things and just keep going,” he said. “I have kind of a funny attitude about prizes. It’s nice to get recognition and it’s important for an artist. If you are a child, these things can help you to grow and we are all children. But I can’t take it too seriously. We all know that there are injustices involved with prizes.”

The injustice in this case--Venturi’s “one little complaint”--is that his partner and frequent collaborator, Denise Scott Brown, wasn’t named in the award. “Architecture, more than any other art, is a collaborative effort,” he said.

The Pritzker brings instant celebrity, but Venturi hopes that the prize may provide a measure of freedom as well. “Architects are constrained more than other artists because our work is commissioned. It’s harder to be truly original. In some ways it’s easier to be extreme,” he said. “Historically, architects dealt with a single patron. He might be a tyrant, but at least the architect knew who he was. Now we work with committees.”

While some architects develop a signature style, Venturi prides himself on creating a variety of buildings that accommodate the people who use them. He has developed trademarks, however, including his revival of vernacular forms, the notion of “a window as a hole in a wall” and “hierarchical” facades, clearly differentiating a building’s bottom, middle and top.

“You can’t imagine how outrageous these things were when we first did them,” he said. But now his innovations seem so conventional that Venturi said he doesn’t know whether to feel flattered about being so widely emulated or frustrated that his ideas have been so thoroughly absorbed and taken for granted. “It makes me wonder if we weren’t extreme enough,” he said.

One of his first projects to capture attention was a house built in 1961 for his mother, Vanna Venturi, in Philadelphia. Since then, Venturi has designed homes, educational facilities, museums, restaurants, a greenhouse and a fire station. He has also applied his talents to decorative arts, including tea sets, furniture, jewelry and fabric design. Major architectural projects scheduled for completion this year include the Seattle Art Museum, the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and a clinical research building for the University of Pennsylvania.

Venturi is the seventh American to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was founded in 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation.

A site for the award ceremony is chosen each year to pay homage to some aspect of architecture and its leaders. Mexico was selected this year to honor two Mexican architects, Pritzker juror Ricardo Legoretta and the late Luis Barragan, who won the prize in 1980. Palacio de Iturbide served as the home of Mexican Emperor Agustin de Iturbide, from 1822-23, and has been restored as a museum.

PRITZKER WINNERS

1979 Philip Johnson, U.S.

1980 Luis Barragan, Mexico

1981 James Stirling, England

1982 Kevin Roche, U.S.

1983 Ieoh Ming Pei, U.S.

1984 Richard Meier, U.S.

1985 Hans Hollein, Austria

1986 Gottfried Boehm, Germany

1987 Kenzo Tange, Japan

1988 Gordon Bunshaft, U.S.; Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil

1989 Frank Gehry, U.S.

1990 Aldo Rossi, Italy