Allen Art Museum Addition Commentary
             "Pink granite and red sandstone cladding were used to create a decorative facade that plays composite elements against the whole in a reinterpretation of the main building's character. Venturi says: 'we tried to harmonize with his masterpiece in ways not too obvious.'
             "The long 'International Style' strip windows of the school and workshop wing make for an uninteresting facade, as the architects themselves acknowledge, since it was intended to simulate loft buildings that house studios for artists and to please the occupants by not infringing on their creativity by an excess of architectural zeal."
             "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 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.
             "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.
             "Venturi's first important project to be built was his mother's house, the Vanna Venturi House of 1961-1964. Disarmingly simple after the spatial antics of later Modernism, its plan, like that of the Beach House project, is based on a symbolic conception rather than upon one that is purely spatially abstract. It is centered on the idea of the chimney, the hearth, from which- and you can feel it-the space is pulled. The space is distended from that hearth as the mass of the chimney ...