The work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown has shaped almost every aspect of contemporary design, from architecture and city planning to furniture and jewelry. In writings such as Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas, they have taught us how to discuss the culture of our times. Venturi and Scott Brown have played dual roles as artists and cultural analysts, and their separate contributions to their multidimensional practice are closely intertwined.

Born an ocean apart, in Philadelphia and Zambia, Africa, respectively, Venturi and Scott Brown came to their partnership with remarkably similar ideals. They met in 1960, drawn together in part by a shared skepticism about the elite and in-grown character of the prevailing modernist architecture. Arising after World War I, architectural modernism rejected ornament and the use of historical models, adopting instead the simple forms and man-made materials of industry and the abstract language of modern painting.
By the 1960s, modernist architecture had become increasingly lifeless and routine, and it began to come under fire. Venturi and Scott Brown were among its most vocal critics. As Venturi explained in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, they rejected the "less is more" credo of modernism and chose "messy vitality over obvious unity." They drew inspiration from the riches of history, including nineteenth-century shingle style, Art Deco, the mannerism of the late Renaissance master Andrea Palladio, and even the early modernist work of Le Corbusier. Venturi and Scott Brown also brought the architecture of everyday life into their projects, including elements of popular culture. While respecting the abstraction of modernism, they invested their own works with a rich vocabulary of symbols and associations. Working "from the outside in as well as the inside out," they reconnected architecture with its context and human purpose.

By enlarging the repertoire of acceptable forms, emphasizing the communicative function of architecture, and revaluing the role of the viewer, Venturi and Scott Brown have been among the leaders of the broad cultural transformation called postmodernism. However, their work stands apart from the pretty but often self-indulgent and self-styled postmodern architecture that arose in the 1980s, for it has been disciplined by the rigors of comprehensive planning, fortified but not seduced by the study of the past, and determinedly respectful of real people. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have done more than create the style of a decade; they have made contemporary architecture "out of the ordinary" at once familiar and special.