Vanna Venturi House

Chestnut Hill, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

Find out more

The Vanna Venturi House, located in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, stands as one of the first prominent works of postmodern architecture. Designed by Robert Venturi for his mother and built between 1962 and 1964, this five-room house achieves monumental presence despite standing only 30 feet tall through deliberate manipulation of architectural scale. Its most striking features—a non-structural appliqué arch and "hole in the wall" windows—represented an open challenge to Modernist orthodoxy, ideas Venturi would elaborate in his influential 1966 book *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture*. Architectural historian Vincent Scully famously called it "the biggest small building of the second half of the twentieth century."