Robert Venturi's assertion in Complexity and Contradiction that “the examples chosen reflect my partiality for certain eras: Mannerist, Baroque and Rococo especially” (19) stakes a multifaceted claim for the importance of early modern architecture.¹ Quoting Henry-Russell Hitchcock about how the changing interests of architects in certain periods of architectural history reflect their own preoccupations, Venturi proposes that mannerism, baroque, and rococo provide the most apposite historical references for contemporary architecture. But he also suggests that the “eras” of these three styles share principles that are not specific to a particular moment in history. In the chapter “Complexity and Contradiction vs. Simplification and Picturesqueness,” Venturi affirms that “the desire for a complex architecture, with its attendant contradictions,” is “an attitude common in the Mannerist periods,” which include the sixteenth century, but also Hellenism, and the seventeenth century up to modernism, in the works of “Le Corbusier, Aalto, Kahn, and others” (26). In Complexity and Contradiction, early modern architecture represents both a historical body of references and a sample of suprahistorical design principles.

With these claims Complexity and Contradiction resembles earlier essays by Colin Rowe and Anthony Blunt that had tested the relevance of mannerism for modernist architecture.² It also prefigures later uses of …