Vanna Venturi House

On a quiet street in Chestnut Hill, you’ll find a small grey-green home that, on first glance, might look quite ordinary. Keep looking, however, and you’ll begin to notice unusual specificities in its design; some subtle, some less so. The more you observe, the more unconventional architectural details you’ll see, from the massive offset windowed chimney to the numerous plays on scale throughout the structure.

The Vanna Venturi house was built by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Robert Venturi as a residence for his elderly mother. Widely considered the exemplar of postmodern architecture, the structure juxtaposes generic design features with postmodern elements like a dead-end staircase.

Venturi’s body of work is highly concerned with the tensions contained by complexity and contradiction. At a certain point, architectural theory merges with philosophy, as occurs in Venturi’s book of essays, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, where he questions what a sheltering space is and how its design impacts the lived experience of those who exist within it. In this work, he expounds on his feelings about modernism, which can be boiled down to a critique of the Modern obsession with precision and functionality in the name of purism.

To view the Vanna Venturi house is to understand how these theories and abstract concepts show up in the built environment. The 1,800-square foot structure is informed by the geometry of modernism and features Modernist details like ribbon windows, but rejects the modernist tenet that form must follow function. “I am for messy vitality over obvious unity,” wrote Venturi. Thus, the structure features unusual installations like an oversized fireplace that competes for centrality with a staircase in the living space. The negative space of the fireplace is juxtaposed—with complexity and contradiction, of course—to the solidity of the staircase. 

Vanna Venturi lived in the home until 1973, when she entered a nursing home and it was sold to new owners. Since then, the house has changed hands just once. Today it is occupied by a resident who locals say cheerfully greets the streams of architecture students and fans as they pass by, sometimes by the busload, to check out the house.