Although the eminent architectural historian Vincent Scully famously called Robert Venturi’s 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture “the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s ‘Vers une Architecture,’ of 1923,” the story behind Complexity and Contradiction remains an enigma. No historian has yet probed beneath the surface of Venturi’s manuscripts, his own projects published in it, or the rich post–World War II cultural context in which it was written over ten years. I propose to uncover these and other issues by writing a book, enhanced by building studies research in Rome and Europe critical to Complexity and Contradiction, to understand how this book informed Venturi’s architecture. It will enable others to know the multidisciplinary method he forged between art and science and bridge the common disconnect between theory and building practice.