Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the built environment.

[1][2][3] Venturi coined the maxim "Less is a bore", a postmodern antidote to Mies van der Rohe's famous modernist dictum "Less is more".

[5] He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 where he was a member-elect of Phi Beta Kappa and won the D'Amato Prize in Architecture.

The work was derived from course lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, and Venturi received a grant from the Graham Foundation in 1965 to aid in its completion.

Citing vernacular as well as high-style sources, Venturi drew new lessons from the buildings of architects familiar (Michelangelo, Alvar Aalto) and, at the time, forgotten (Frank Furness, Edwin Lutyens).

He made a case for "the difficult whole" rather than the diagrammatic forms popular at the time, and included examples — both built and unrealized — of his own work to demonstrate the possible application of such techniques.

The most famous of these was a studio in 1968 in which Venturi and Scott Brown, together with Steven Izenour, led a team of students to document and analyze the Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the least likely subject for a serious research project imaginable.

The work of Venturi, Scott Brown, and John Rauch[10] adopted the latter strategy, producing formally simple "decorated sheds" with rich, complex, and often shocking ornamental flourishes.

This "inclusive" approach contrasted with the typical modernist effort to resolve and unify all factors in a complete and rigidly structured—and possibly less functional and more simplistic—work of art.

Venturi's work arguably provided a key influence at important times in the careers of architects Robert A. M. Stern, Rem Koolhaas, Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Graham Gund and James Stirling, among others.

In the wake of Venturi's death, Michael Kimmelman, the current architecture critic for The New York Times, tweeted..."RIP the great, inspiring Robert Venturi who opened millions of eyes and whole new ways of thinking about the richness of our architectural environment, and whose diverse work with Denise Scott Brown contains a mix of wit and humanity that continues to transcend labels and time".