Belvedere staircase, American architect Robert Venturi designed and built a small house for his
a modernist horizontal window for the kitchen and square windows serving the bedroom and bathroom on the other side of the front facade.
In the interior, he also experimented with scale. Certain elements are “too big,� such as the
in height, especially in contrast to the grandness of the entrance space. In the rear elevation of the house is an oversized lunette window, which follows the main elements of the exterior that are exaggerated in size. A manifesto for Postmodern architecture, the Vanna Venturi House is a composition of rectangular, curvilinear, and diagonal elements coming together (or sometimes juxtaposing each other) [1].
But perhaps the best way to describe the house and Venturi's ambitious intentions are his own words: I have written of the house as modern but also as referential/imageful - as a generic/iconic house - as not striving to be original as architecture, but to be good. It connects with ideas of mine of the time involving complexity and contradiction, of accommodation to its particular Chestnut Hill suburban context, to aesthetic layering I learned from the Villa Savoye, its
[1] ArchDoc AD Classics: Vanna Venturi House
Candela Oliva Varier