DOWNTOWN DENISE SCOTT BROWN. Living legend, insider tip and icon - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

DOWNTOWN DENISE SCOTT BROWN. Living legend, insider tip and icon
Denise Scott Brown curated the show herself, together with her former collaborator Jeremy Tenenbaum, Angelika Fitz and Katharina Ritter. A catalogue written by J. Tenenbaum guides visitors through the exhibition. The setting resembles an urban piazza with a fountain, shops, a café and market stalls. In the facades and shop windows there are original objects, collages, photographs, project plans and videos of her life and work. All documents have been written by the architect herself.
Together with her husband Robert Venturi (1925-2018), Scott Brown (*1931 in Zambia) founded the architecture firm VSBA in the 1960s. The firm received numerous awards and was responsible for the planning of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury wing in London, the administration building of Toulouse and the Nikko Kirifurio hotel in Japan, among others. During the 50 years of their collaboration they have also worked for the cities of Philadelphia, Princeton, Miami Beach and Memphis.
They planned more than 200 buildings, Scott Browns legacy is based on her approach to architecture, inspired by the ordinary, playing with popular culture and commercialism and at the same time disclosing aesthetical and social conflicts.
Contrary to the sobriety of modernist architecture, Scott Brown and Venturi introduced the concepts of diversity, complexity, contradiction and ambiguity into the interpretation of architectural history and practice.
In their book „Learning from Las Vegas“, Venturi, Scott Brown and their co-author Steven Izenour developed a graphical urban description based on advertising signs and trademarks. Here, the symbol is the essence of urban space, the city is represented by means of graphical charts, as a collage of fragments, and the logos, signs and neon signs represent an important linkage between man and architecture. However, Scott Brown and Venturi also demonstrated the ambivalence of the contribution of US pop culture and the new culture of mass media.
For Scott Brown the shape of cities and buildings is derived less by their function but rather by social correlations. While Venturi concentrated on the architecture of signs, Scott Brown argued for a systemic urban planning in order to do justice to the complexity of cities. She was a pioneer for contemporary urban planning concepts like participation, cautious urban renewal and collective planning.
In the 1960s, Venturi’s architecture theories were complemented by the theories of Scott Brown. She brought in her interest for popular culture, the emphasis on elements of communal living, the analysis of American cities with their complex systems of communication and signs, and also the pleasure of ordinary sceneries. Venturi and Scott Brown defended an architecture of experience that eventually became very influential in urban planning and activism of the 1960s. This distinguished them from the postmodern formalism of other authors of the time.
During the 1980s they advocated the post-modern cyclical return of symbolism as a reaction to modernist functionalism.
In her long career, the architect and urban planner never enjoyed the recognition she deserved, partly because she preferred to work collectively. According to experts, her work is on a par the her husband’s work, yet only he was awarded with the prestigious Pritzker prize in 1991. She did not participate in the ceremony in protest.
In 2013 a group of Harvard students initiated a –failed- petition to get the prize awarded to Denise Scott Brown retroactively.
One of the signers was Robert Venturi. (written by Cem Angeli)

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