Blending historic and modern styles with references to high and low culture, Venturi and Scott Brown reduced the elegant shape of an eighteenth-century Queen Anne chair to a flattened silhouette in bent plywood. They also designed the “Grandmother” pattern covering the form, which is based on a mass–produced floral tablecloth owned by the grandmother of one of their employees. In his 1966 text Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Venturi countered Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous modernist dictum, “Less is more” with “Less is a bore,” an irreverent slogan for the postmodern era.
Gallery label from Designing Modern Women 1890–1990, October 5, 2013–October 1, 2014.
