Robert Venturi (H’80), Pritzker-prize winning architect and former PennDesign faculty member whose work can be seen across Penn’s campus, died September 18 at his home in Philadelphia from complications due to Alzheimer’s. He was 93.

Mr. Venturi, the pioneer of the post-modern architecture movement who lived by the mantra “less is a bore” and who embraced history, humor and diversity in his work, was born in Philadelphia. After attending Episcopal Academy in Merion, PA, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Princeton. After working for architects Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Louis Kahn (GAR’24) in Philadelphia and spending two years  as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Mr. Venturi joined the faculty of Penn’s Graduate School of Fine Arts (now PennDesign) in 1957. He continued to teach at Penn until 1965. He also taught at Yale and Harvard. Mr. Venturi authored two key, influential books on architectural theory: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1967) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972; with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour).

Mr. Venturi founded his own firm in 1965; his wife, Denise Scott Brown (GCP’60, GAR’65, H’94), whom he met at Penn, became a partner in 1969. Venturi Scott Brown & Associates (later renamed VSBA Architects & Planners) designed a number of internationally recognized buildings, including the Sainsbury Wing at the UK’s National Gallery; Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton; the Houston Children’s Museum; a huge government complex in Toulouse, France (Almanac January 23, 2001); and in Philadelphia, two early groundbreaking works, Guild House (1961-1966) and the Vanna Venturi House, designed for his mother. VSBA has been responsible for a number of architecture and campus planning commissions at Penn. Among them are the Clinical Research Building, the restoration of Fisher Fine Arts Library, the Roy and Diana Vagelos Laboratories and planning and design of alterations and additions to Houston Hall, Logan Hall (now Claudia Cohen Hall), Irvine Auditorium and Perelman Quadrangle. His close relationship with PennDesign continued to evolve over the course of his life. From 1985 to 2002, he served on the Board of Overseers.

In 1998, the firm began working with Penn’s Architectural Archives to establish the Venturi, Scott Brown Collection. In the subsequent two decades, they transferred drawings, models, photography and correspondence papers to the Archives, creating the most extensive documentation of their architectural and planning projects to be found anywhere in the world. (Almanac November 14, 2006). He retired from the firm in 2016.

He won the Pritzker prize in 1991, and, together with his wife, received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from Penn in 1980.

Mr. Venturi is survived by his wife Denise Scott Brown and his son, James. The family is planning a memorial to celebrate Mr. Venturi’s life; details will be announced.