Spotlight on Women Architects – Denise Scott Brown

When the German politician Johannes Rau was asked whether sports facilities should also be named after women during a discussion about the naming of the stadium in Gelsenkirchen-Schalke, which was being built at the time, he answered with two questions of his own: “And what would you suggest we call such a stadium then? Maybe Ernst-Kuzorra-his-wife-her-stadium?” With such an answer he undoubtedly had the laughs of the predominantly male press corps (as is usually the case concerning football) on his side, but it also became clear just how little little importance even a man as well versed in politics as the former North Rhine-Westphalian minister president and Federal President of Germany attached to this issue.

For many years, Denise Scott Brown was simply “Robert Venturi's wife”. In 1991, Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize, arguably the most important award in the Western architectural world, and for the work they had done together his office partner Denise Scott Brown was described as follows: “Denise Scott Brown has been Venturi's collaborator in the development of architectural theory and design for 30 years. The two have been married for 24 years.” Venturi received the prize alone; it should have gone to both of them. Allegedly, according to those responsible at the time, the statutes did not provide for the prize being awarded to a team. Ten years later, however, such constitutive restrictions were quickly changed when Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were awarded the prize as equal partners – as two men.

The now well-known architect, urban planner and theorist Denise Lakofski was born in what is now Zambia on 3 October 1931. She began her studies at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, South Africa In 1948, where she met and fell in love with Robert Scott Brown. Denise moved to Europe, where she graduated from the legendary Architectural Association School of Architecture in 1955 and married Robert Scott Brown the same year. The two travelled around Europe, working in different places, and changed continents again in 1958. They moved to Philadelphia in the United States, where Denise began studying for a master's degree in architecture and urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although her husband was killed in a car accident only a year after arriving in the United States, Denise Scott Brown received a degree in urban planning in 1960 and began working as a lecturer at the university. During a faculty meeting she met the architect Robert Venturi, who was a fellow professor at the university, for the first time. The two gave a few seminars together before Scott Brown left Philadelphia to teach at the renowned universities California Berkeley and UCLA. It was during this time that her interest in the cities of the southwest United States developed, i.e. in Los Angeles, with its gigantic sprawl, and in the desert city of Las Vegas, with its casinos and hotels. She invited Venturi to be a guest critic at her seminars at UCLA, and in 1966 to take a joint trip to Las Vegas – Venturi had just published his epoch-making book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

It was an extremely eventful time for the two of them: They got married in July 1967, and Denise moved back to Philadelphia the same year to join Robert's office Venturi and Rauch, where she became a partner in 1969. The following year, Scott Brown began to teach again, this time at Yale, where together with Venturi she continued to deepen and process her impressions of the Las Vegas trip. The result – in addition to a large number of impressive photos and collages – was the book Learning From Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, written together with Steven Izenour. The publication can be read as a continuation of Venturi's 1966 book and is a final rejection of an elitist taste in architecture that feeds on an orthodox view of architectural modernism. Without her reflections on the “Duck” and the “Decorated Shed”, the development of postmodern architecture, in the form we've experienced it, would be inconceivable. Questioning the rules of design common at the time, emphasising the importance of analysis and the dubiousness of terms such as “beauty” and “ugliness” as well as their temporal contextualisation, the connections between architecture, everyday life and social responsibility; all of this was already shaping the couple's work here and would influence generations of architects to come.

In their analyses of a respective place, they included the daily routines of the local population, looked at who was where and when, and drew conclusions concerning their overall design. This was remarkable in the late 1960s. They called their systematic planning approach FFF studios, where form, forces and function all determine and help define the urban environment in question. This method was used in the Berlin Tomorrow
competition as well as in urban planning debates about Bryn Mawr College and the Dartmouth College campus. This was followed by a large number of master plans at various locations in the United States and other countries, as well as various other buildings well known in architectural history. For the Nikko hotel chain, they fused Far Eastern motifs with Western ones, and for the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, they set the standards for postmodern architecture. But the ideas of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi also came into their own on a smaller scale: The fine house at Barnegat Light on Long Beach Island was built as early as 1969. It wonderfully combines the spatial complexity and formal surprises that the architect couple repeatedly formulated theoretically and implemented practically at different scales.

Over time, twelve institutions conferred honorary doctorates on Denise Scott Brown; in 2016, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) honoured her with its Gold Medal together with husband Robert Venturi, and the following year Denise Scott Brown was awarded the Jane Drew Award, which is given exclusively to women. A multitude of prizes and awards add up to a long list. In September 2018, Bob, as Denise affectionately called her six-year-older husband, died at the age of 93. Only a few weeks later, the first exhibition dedicated solely to her, Downtown Denise Scott Brown, opened at the Architektur Zentrum Wien. The wonderful exhibition catalogue, created in the style of a travel guide, once again shows her upright and self-confidently collaged in front of the illuminated signs of Las Vegas. The video greeting she sends from home for the show in Vienna shows that, at 87, she is still agile and optimistic. And just last year, Frida Grahn paid tribute to Scott Brown's work on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Learning from Las Vegas with her beautiful book Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes. Portraits of an Architect, which was presented as part of Bauwelt Fundamente.

Robert Venturi himself once wrote “Denise Scott Brown is my inspiring and equal partner”. And Scott Brown, in turn, called his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture so relevant and influential that he deserved the Pritzker Prize for it alone, and long before 1991. Although a variety of parties have vociferously campaigned for the subsequent recognition of her contribution to their joint work – among other things with a large number of articles, appeals and a viral online petition – Denise Scott Brown has to this day been denied the Pritzker Prize. And although she is no longer able to easily travel, the ever-active architect stated not long ago that “They owe me not a Pritzker Prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony. Let's salute the notion of joint creativity”. She never tires of emphasising the communal nature of her work, as, says Denise Scott Brown, “Communication is part of function in architecture”.