For the Children of Architects, Filmmaking as Therapy

Why have so many children of architects made films about their parents?

To a list that includes Eric Saarinen, son of Eero; Tomas Koolhaas, son of Rem; and most famously Nathaniel Kahn, son of Louis, we can now add Jim Venturi, whose lively, affecting and long-gestating first film, “Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” will open the 2024 Architecture and Design Film Festival’s New York run on Sept. 25. Closing the festival — as a reminder that it’s not just the sons who go this cinematic route — will be “Ada– My Mother the Architect,” a documentary by Yael Melamede about Ada Karmi-Melamede, who designed the Supreme Court building in Jerusalem, among other notable projects in Israel.

The directors of these films may hope to put a tangible mark on the world the way their parents did with their buildings. Or to take some measure of the architectural personality, which can sometimes (not always! but not rarely!) concern itself more passionately with the arrangement of windows and staircases, or the whims of potential clients and turncoat critics, than with getting a small child off to school in the morning.

Or it may be something simpler: that the particular qualities of architecture as a creative pursuit (as opposed to, say, novel-writing) lend themselves to the screen, big or small. This can be as true in psychological terms as visual ones. The building, looming in front of the viewer, becomes a stand-in for the distant, distracted or intimidatingly brilliant father or mother. The director can scrutinize its facade, lingering over it with the camera, for some sign of explanation — or confession — not always forthcoming from the parents themselves.

Complicating the biography, perhaps, but enriching the film, Jim Venturi had as parents not one but two prominent architects. His father was Robert Venturi, born in Philadelphia and educated at Princeton; he died in 2018. His mother is Denise Scott Brown, raised in Johannesburg, trained in London and then the United States and still, at 92, a lively and cantankerous presence on the architecture scene. They met as young members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty and married in 1967, the same year Scott Brown joined the firm Venturi had founded several years before.

Together, in their buildings and their writing, they helped sideline the sterile, corporate-friendly brand of modernist architecture popular after World War II, replacing it with a new style, which later flowered into postmodernism, that found inspiration in architectural history and pop culture, Borromini and hamburger stands, in equal measure. In their best-known book, “Learning From Las Vegas” (written with Steven Izenour and published in 1972), they called for a radical change not so much in how buildings look as how we look at buildings.