Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

"I am especially pleased to have had the wit to assert in [my original introduction] the 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 acknowledgement, 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." - Vincent Scully, April, 1977