Episode 99: Denise Scott Brown, Part 2
Denise Scott Brown had just graduated with a Masters in City Planning in 1960 and was offered an assistant teaching position at UPenn. She met Robert Venturi at her first staff meeting and they quickly became friends and taught complimentary theory classes at the school for the next 5 years. In 1965, Denise received her Masters in Architecture degree and took teaching positions at UC Berkeley and then at UCLA. While she’s living out west, she took many road trips across the desert and stopped in Las Vegas. She loved it, and thought it was a great place to be studied and analyzed. In 1966, she asked her friend Bob Venturi to come as a visiting critic at UCLA and to join her in a visit to Las Vegas. They were there for 4 days in 1966 and fell in love with Las Vegas and each other. A while after their trip, Denise asked Bob to marry her and they were married on July 23, 1967 in Santa Monica, CA. They moved back east and took teaching positions at Yale University in 1968. Denise also joined Bob’s architectural firm in 1969 as a partner and it was renamed Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown. During their Yale professorship, they ran a 12-week studio called ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ with their graduate assistant Stephen Izenour. They took 10 students to the Vegas strip for 10 days and had them map and analyze the city. In 1971, Denise gave birth to a son, James Venturi. In 1972, Denise and Bob published their book ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ which has become one of the most common required reading in architectural theory classes. This book and Denise and Bob’s ideas sparked a new architectural movement: Postmodernism. In 1969, Denise published a paper called ‘Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture’ about her experience as a woman in the profession. In 1991, Bob was nominated for the Pritzker Prize and Denise was left out. Appeals were made, but the committee refused to budge. She did not attend the ceremony. Denise and Bob retired in the 2000s and continued to work on research projects. Bob died in 2018 from Alzheimer’s at 93. Denise is 92 years old today.
Caryatid: Madelon Vriesendorp
Madelon is a dutch artist and a co-founder of Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Madelon was born in Bilthoven, Netherlands and attended Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She also attended classes at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. In 1975, Madelon along with her husband Rem Koolhaas, and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis, founded the firm OMA. Madelon was the artist of the iconic cover image, Flagrant Delit, for the book Delirious New York. She created graphics and visuals for OMA in the early years of the firm. Many of her contributions have been overlooked, or reprinted without permission under the caption ‘commissioned by OMA’. In 2018, she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable prize, and during her acceptance speech she talked about the ‘women written out of the script’ and talked about the many years that her contributions (and Zoe’s) to OMA were overlooked.
References
Bernstein, Fred A. “Denise Scott Brown, the Woman Who Taught the Design World to Take Las Vegas Seriously.” Architectural Digest, 12 Jan. 2018, www.architecturaldigest.com/story/denise-scott-brown-taught-the-design-world-to-take-las-vegas-seriously.
Czarnecki, John E. “Filmmaker Son of Scott Brown and Venturi to Set Record Straight?” Architectural Record, 2 June 2008, www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/4422-filmmaker-son-of-scott-brown-and-venturi-to-set-record-straight.
De Gomez & Alvarez. “Denise Scott Brown 1931.” Un Día | Una Arquitecta, 24 June 2015, undiaunaarquitecta.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/denise-scott-brown-1931.
Gillick, Ambrose. Denise Scott Brown: Becoming Denise. season 3, episode 1, Sept. 2023. Spotify, open.spotify.com/episode/7JYe7RxBQBNtwhRFV3HxxU.
Grahn, Frida, editor. Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes. Birkhauser, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035626254.
Lewis, Anna M. “Denise Scott Brown” Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers. 60-70. United States: Chicago Review Press, 2017.
Mars, Roman. Lessons From Las Vegas. episode 302, 9 Apr. 2018. Spotify, 99percentinvisible.org/episode/lessons-from-las-vegas.
Pogrebin, Robin. “Partner Without the Prize.” The New York Times, 17 Apr. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/arts/design/bid-for-pritzker-prize-to-acknowledge-denise-scott-brown.html.
Scott Brown, Denise. “Oral History Interview with Denise Scott Brown” by Peter Reed. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 25 October 1990-9 November 1990, https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_215692
Scott Brown, Denise. “Room at the Top? — Sexism and the Star System in Architecture.” R / D, www.readingdesign.org/room-at-the-top.
Wagle, Shalmali, and Alen Žunić. “Denise Scott Brown on the Past, Present and Future of VSBA’s Groundbreaking Theories.” ArchDaily, 7 Oct. 2016, www.archdaily.com/796821/denise-scott-brown-on-the-past-present-and-future-of-vsbas-groundbreaking-theories.
Wainwright, Oliver. “Snubbed, Cheated, Erased: The Scandal of Architecture’s Invisible Women.” The Guardian, 16 Oct. 2018, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/oct/16/the-scandal-of-architecture-invisible-women-denise-scott-brown.
Wikipedia contributors. “Denise Scott Brown.” Wikipedia, 9 Feb. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Scott_Brown.
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