Each learned most from very different things. Le Corbusier's
great teacher was the Greek temple, with its isolated
body white and free in the landscape, its luminous
austerities clear in the sun. In his early polemics he would
have his buildings and his cities just that way, and his
mature architecture itself came more and more to embody
the - Greek temple's sculptural, actively heroic character.
Venturi's primary inspiration would seem to have come
from the Greek temple's historical and archetypal opposite,
the urban fa~adeso f Italy, with their endless adjustments to
the counter-requirements of inside and outside and their
inflection with all the business of everyday life: not primarily
sculptural actors in vast landscapes but complex spatial
containers and definers of streets and squares. Such "accommodation"
also becomes a general urban principle for Venturi.
In this he again resembles Le Corbusier, in so far as
they are both profoundly visual, plastic artists whose close
focus upon individual buildings brings with it a new visual
and symbolic attitude toward urbanism in general-not the
schematic or two-dimensionally diagrammatic view toward
which many planners tend, but a set of solid images, architecture
itself at its full scale.