Own an Icon
John Hill
22. julio 2015
Photo: Courtesy of Kurfiss/Sotheby's
An icon of Postmodern architecture, the Vanna Venturi House that Robert Venturi designed for his mother in 1964, is up for sale for the first time since 1973.
Venturi completed the house two years before his influential treatise Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture; the house appears to embody everything that title implies, from its house-like form with broken pediment and its asymmetrical window composition to its hidden front door and odd vertical circulation inside. It is widely considered the first Postmodern building in the United States, even though Venturi has denied that label.
Located in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Chestnut Hill, the house is listed at $1.75 million – steep for a relatively small house by today's standards but a reasonable sum for an icon of 20th century architecture.