"A house constructed for a young couple who wanted to house their collection of Pop Art paintings and Art Deco objects and accommodate their growing family. The site is 30 acres, serenely beautiful, flat, open and lightly wooded.

"The south elevation has a contrapuntal rhythm of doors and windows recalling a plain Georgian country house, but the green glazed brick in two shades makes a bold Op Art/Art Deco pattern. In contrast, the other side of the house, unpatterned, has a central motif and a more complex rhythm of openings with a bigger scale to reflect its greater height and the large inside spaces.

"The main entrance to the house is a low flight of wide stairs leading upward from a sunken auto court with access to an open basement and two-car garage. The stairs lead into a long two-story gallery displaying some of the big paintings in the collection. This gallery opens on a garden toward the north, a series of rooms to the south, and the stairs to the second floor. On the south side of the gallery, the kitchen is arranged to oversee the children's playroom on one side and the library on the other, where the family can eat informally.

— from Stephen Prokopoff. Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown: A Generation of Architecture. p23.

"...The site is 30 acres, not dramatic, but serenely beautiful, open and lightly wooded. A central asphalt driveway with streetlights, installed and dedicated by some intending subdivider, ends in a cul-de-sac edged by a fine stable and a small suburban ranch house, which the clients like for its own quality and which can house guests, older children, or staff. The immediate site for the new house is open and almost flat....

"...The gallery serves for general circulation, upstairs and down, for occasional formal dining, and incidentally for some of the big paintings in the collection; but its main purpose is to create spaciousness inside...."

— from Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. p172.

The Creator's Words

"When I was young a sure way to distinguish great architects was through the consistency of their work... For these masters varieties of style within their own oeuvres would have implied indecision and lack of commitment to a unified ideal, yet the work of each strove to assert the originality that was considered the sine qua non of artistic expression of Romantic and also of Modern artists. This was a time in architecture when form was emphasized over symbol and when universal industrial processes were considered essential determinants of form for all kinds of building everywhere, so the priority on the individual architect's original vocabulary was combined curiously with a rigid ideal of formal unity for architecture as a whole.

"This should no longer be the case. Where the Modern masters' strength lay in consistency, ours should lie in diversity....I shall try to show that architects today should be distinguished by the rich variety of their work and the diversity of their architectural vocabularies rather than by the unity of their work and the consistency and originality of their vocabulary."

— Robert Venturi. from A. Sanmartín, ed. Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown. p7-8.

Details

7,475 square feet