Robert Venturi: The difficult whole

Robert Venturi (1925–2018), Facade Study for Gordon Wu Hall, Butler College, Princeton, 1981. Marker pen ink on trace, 304 × 645 mm. DMC 2041.

Lying on the border between an elevation and a perspective, with a bold delineation of the facade and a vague evocation of the volume it bounds, this sketch seems to reflect — in its manner as in the form it explores — everything Venturi had to say about the weaving together of contradictions, the decisive and the uncertain, to achieve the ‘difficult whole’.