Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View From the Drafting Room.

This collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a generic architecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualities become shelter and symbol. Venturi, who along with his partner, Denise Scott Brown, made the vulgar acceptable and found virtue in the commercial, the kitsch and the ordinary, is considered equally as a theorist and an architect who communicates his architectural ideas, formal and verbal. These essays, letters, reports, lectures, manifestoes and polemical texts offer a view from the drafting room - commonsense responses, urgent and diverse, in part a reaction against the conceptualizing of architecture today invaded by other disciplines and made obscure. Seven of the essays were co-authored with Denise Scott Brown.