Robert Venturi and JohnRauch designed the Vanna Venturi house in 1962 for Robert Venturi’s mother in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. The house is an object that explors “complexity and contradiction in architecture”—which is also the name of his eponymous book published several years after the house’s completion. In that book, Venturi explains the house “is both complex and simple, open and closed, big and little. ”He designed the building based not on the consistency of form that modernism espoused, but as a manifestation of his “love for history and variety.”

The house’s seemingly hodge-podge elements “borrowed from other times and places” are not a singular experiment, but an ongoing architectural crusade by Venturi. The array of architectural objects used by Venturi make reference to typical architectural symbols (such as “entrance” demarcated by an arch) but the way that he combines them distorts meaning. In this way, the symbols used within the Vanna Venturi house contradict one another so that there is no singular essence of the building. The house has numerous contradictory elements, but the façade and the staircases are the two elements in which the contortion of traditional meaning and use is most apparent.