"With the Trubeck and Wislocki Houses we are in the presence of what modern architects have always said they most wanted: a true vernacular architecture—common, buildable, traditional in the deepest sense, and of piercing symbolic power."

— Vincent Scully. The Shingle Style of Today. p36.

"The exteriors have a family resemblance and so do the plans. Both ground floors are essentially one large room leading on to a broad porch overlooking the sea, with kitchens tucked into corners. The bedroom floor of the smaller house is a simple set of rooms. In the larger, the spatial complexities around the staircase are noteworthy, especially the division of the Palladian corridor to light both the staircases and the upmost floor's w.c.

"The sections too show ingenuity, for while the exterior form may be borrowed from a vernacular, Venturi and Rauch have used every cubic inch of space within that form, so that the roof form is read within each bedroom."

— David Dunster. Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century Volume 2: Houses 1945-1989. p76-77.

"These are two vacation cottages on a moor by the sea in Nantucket for two families. The larger house is complex and contradictory; the smaller house is more ordinary. The houses are sited so as to look toward the water. First seen from the rear, they are set far enough apart to create a sense of openness, yet close enough to be perceived as a pair. They fit into the environment because they are like the old fishermen's cottages of that island and like 19th century shingle style vacation houses of New England, too—weathered grey to mold into the grey-green foliage and soft blue seascape."

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

The Creator's Words

"An essential reason for using symbolism today is that it can provide a diversity of architectural vocabularies appropriate for a plurality of tastes and sensitive to qualities of heritage and place. This use suits the need to respond in our time to both mass culture and pluralist expression. Today the world is at once smaller and more diverse, more interdependent yet more nationalistic; even small communities seriously maintain ethnic identities and carefully record local history. People are now more aware of the differences among themselves yet more tolerant of these differences.

"It's a time in architecture too when the shifting balance between the universal and the unique favors the latter. The early Modern movement was named the International Style to proclaim among other things its universality. Our diversified approach to symbolism will distinguish our architecture from that of our recent predecessors whose buildings had to look like factories, or at least contain industrial references, and promote thereby a universal industrial order...."

— Robert Venturi. from A. Sanmart’n, ed. Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown. p9.