At this distance, I feel doubly honored to have been invited
to write the original introduction, which now seems
to me not so well written as the book itself (edited by
Marian Scully), but embarrassingly correct in its conclusions.
I am especially pleased to have had the wit to assert in
it that Complexity and Contradiction was "the most important
writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's
Vers une Architecture, of 1923." Time has shown that
this outrageous statement was nothing more than the unvarnished
truth, and the critics who found it most amusing
'or infuriating at that moment now seem to spend a remarkable
amount of energy quoting Venturi without acknowledgment,
or chiding him for not going far enough, or showing
that they themselves had really said it all long before.
It doesn't matter much. What counts is that this brilliant,
liberating book was published when it was. It provided
architects and critics alike with more realistic and effective
weapons, so that the breadth and relevance which the architectural
dialogue has since achieved were largely initiated by
it. Of primary interest are the newly eloquent buildings that
have been inspired by its method, of which those by Venturi
and Rauch have not surprisingly remained the most intellectually
focused, archetypal, and distinguished. Once again,
as when it sponsored the exhibition from which Hitchcock
and Johnson's The international Style of 1932 derived, The
Museum of Modern Art started something important when
it backed this book.
V.S.
April, 1977.