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Home , Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour

Denise Scott Brown: Wayward Eye

Betts Project Pigeons of Piazza San Marco, Venice 1956 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“Robert [Scott Brown] and his father had a hobby of doing photography together, with an old Leica. Robert had the skill to develop black and white photographs. When we went to Venice for CIAM Summer School we fell in with another American , Lou Sauer, and his wife Liz.

We were all in love with the pigeons and we have a postcard that says Coca Cola in pigeons. We used to go to Piazza San Marco with the elder from the conference, people like Franco Albini and Ignazio Gardella. Gardella could stand there, suddenly swoop down, pick up a pigeon and launch it. That’s a real Venetian skill.

I observed the pigeons with their wings out and thought they were marvelous. I had the idea of photographing them. In Piazza San Marco we got in the middle of those pigeons and photographed them, we had very fast film, you actually see their wing curling round. You could see a pigeon as a Perret Bridge, with its wings out, like an engineering structure. Then we accidentally inverted the image, getting the negative turned around as the positive slide was made.” Lagoon, Venice 1956 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“We were on a boat because gondolas were too expensive and so were gondalettos. The whole time we were there we didn’t ride anything but a traghetto. CIAM hired them to take us around so we went on them often. You would stand and wobble. So here we’re photographing as we’re going somewhere the school was taking us.

I love this view — you’ll see it in my photography showing the approach to and New York and other places. It’s also a comment on what became very important later: vast space. How do you design in vast space? Here is a vast space, and here are the lines defining where you should look in the vast space, and at the end is a vista. In Venice it’s San Marco. In it’s a sign twenty-two stories high that you can see from the air. And in Egypt it’s the Pyramids.” Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica 1966 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“I was getting to know my surroundings in Santa Monica, where I was living up in Ocean Park. I’d get going with my camera and just walk. Eventually you approach the main part of Santa Monica and Pico Boulevard is on this edge. It’s a long street that goes all the way into , a kind of everyday strip serving this village of Santa Monica. This photograph is about viewing the everyday landscape. We had later, in Learning from Las Vegas, many different ideas about how you map what you see. At this point, I was building up my data by photographing what I loved. I’d read The Image of the City and The View From the Road and all of those things about seeing, and I’d already written my article called ‘Meaningful City.’ What they all discuss is how you actually see. What I’m interested in — and I was made this way partly by Dave Crane — is what you perceive and understand from what you see. If you study Camillo Sitte and apply it to the Strip, it’s the same principle. You see things from afar and they guide you. Los Angeles freeways will sometimes have a line for a mile and at the end will be a billboard, which is like Sitte — like his church tower — pulling you to it to tell you something. Billboards are contraptions made for a purpose, and the purpose is to be readable. They’re set on steel supports and shaped so you see them differently from each side and you can see the supports inside. If you think of it not as oppression or persuasion, a billboard is as much a contraption as a camera.” Industrial Romanticism, Los Angeles 1966 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“This is Los Angeles, and it’s probably the Santa Monica Freeway. There’s a small red car in the forefront. I love to have a small red car in my photographs. There are also pylons, which are part of the industrial landscape, and then right under them, houses much smaller than you find in Philadelphia. Some of them are rural scale, like little farmhouses. And they live happily among all these pylons. Then you get this huge speed and scale of the whole thing. It is world-scale. They belong together, in Orange County, near an orange orchard maybe. I love that picture. ” Totemic Surfboards, Santa Monica 1966 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“When you exited my cottage, you turned right and got to the Pacific Ocean. I would do my supermarket shopping by walking along the beach barefoot. It was really very nice, this teeny little cottage. As I walked along toward Santa Monica Pier, I went by Muscle Beach and on Sundays families would go there. I was intrigued by these people throwing balls in the air, sometimes fathers with little babies, doing acrobatics together.

These are my totems, surfboards and sérci of the gondola facing that way and this way. I loved the blue and the beach and these totems, and then the people make a very good foil. Look at their positions and the way they’re focusing, and someone’s possessions completing the composition.”

Again, it’s forms that have meaning, and what are these forms, what do the forms of surfboards mean? They’ve been made as if they are totem poles. And the palm trees look like totem poles too.” Las Vegas, Architettura Minore on The Strip 1966 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“That’s one of my very favorite photographs from Las Vegas and it’s one of the first I took. The very permanent mountains are visible in back, and there is a blue Mediterranean sky that’s neither in Athens nor in Las Vegas.

I look at this and think, do you love it or do you hate it? Then I’m reminded that Greek , although I love the Pentelic marble, was brightly painted. So the picture recalls brightly painted, primary-colored Greek temples and their columns.

Look at the business of this. I’m sure if you’re looking for a motel you’ll find one in there — you won’t be mistaken and turn into a gas station. The road signs are really small but they’re repeated shapes. They’re square, intense, with strong white arrows. You sure as hell know some are road signs and others are inviting you in. So you understand this environment, even if people think you won’t. For me, it’s a photograph that pulls everything together. Do I hate it or do I love it? I just shoot it.” (No) Vacancy, Las Vegas Before end of 1968 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“That’s on The Strip in Las Vegas. It went along with some other signs, and it looks to me as if I didn’t quite get all I wanted there. The sign is quite small but look how bright it is, even though it’s very thin lettering. You get the back ends of cars sticking out and this big parking lot, so hot it shines. This blue sky faded, and this sign — it’s just perfect. The scale’s not really very big, and the No is turned off; they had vacancy.

I photographed all sorts of interesting signs. One said, Ask Us Anything — another said Aspirin Available — another, Wedding Chapel / Credit Cards Accepted. They’re full of irony.

Someone should do a doctoral dissertation on words in signs. The best sonnet I found was for a West Philadelphia car body shop: O. R. Lumpkin, Body and Fender Straightening, Wrecks Our Specialty, We Take The Dent Out Of Accident.” La Concha Motel, Las Vegas Before end of 1968 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“That is a Paul Revere Williams. He’s a modernist and he finds a way to make parabolic arches iconic. It’s clever and elegant. He doesn’t lose his probity as a modernist, though some people would say he did. Up above is another shell, a container for some rather spectacular self-made fonts. I love these curves; what modernist doesn’t? I love the way they’re used for another purpose, a very vulgar purpose: making a sign in Las Vegas.

In the photograph, I’m trying to show a group of signs and that there’s no space between them. I’m trying to show what happens at night. I took all of these to- gether to show that, at a certain point, there’s no sense of space at all. And that’s interesting in itself.” Signs, Las Vegas Before end of 1968 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“I’d been looking at art galleries and Tintoretto and Mannerist space. Traveling in Spain and various other places, I spent a lot of time studying the history of art, particularly as it developed into modern art. So it’s partly Tintoretto’s eye that’s guiding me here.

That’s Fremont Street. I like the geometry of that shot and the golden mean of it. I love these combined patterns -- like an urban land use map -- the movement of that train, the movement of the lights. This here with its bright pink — I’m a sucker for pink anyway. So you put it all together. But this is not what I really should be taking because it’s the old fashioned strip downtown, not The Strip out in vast space.” Mojave Desert, California Before end of 1968 Pigment print. Printed 2018 Ed. of 10 45.5 x 30.3 cm (framed) Hand signed

“Toward Las Vegas, photographed from a van, this is the Mojave Desert. In one book I show pictures of the Karoo Desert in ; they’re so similar. If you are born in Africa this is part of your DNA. I love it, and through it I learned about building in vast space.”

As a young South African, I often thought that I wouldn’t be allowed to travel. People were losing passports. You had to get up and do it quickly. South Africa was so far away and it would be very difficult to go back again to Europe, at least talking about 1948, 1949 and I left in 1952. Our professors told us: “You really must go see the real thing. It’s not good enough just seeing it in photographs and learning about it in class, you know, seeing slides.” You really have to be there. I’m not a photographer. I shoot for architecture — if there’s art here it’s a byproduct. Yet the images stand alone. Judge what you see.

In 1956, Robert Scott Brown and I photographed architectural set pieces of Venice as records to return to while practicing in Africa. But in the process, more than architecture crept into our photographs.

In 1965, after ten years of urbanism, my foci were automobile cities of the American Southwest, social change, multiculturalism, action, everyday architecture, “messy vitality,” iconography, and Pop Art.

Waywardness lay in more than my eye. Do I hate it or love it? ‘Don’t ask,’ said my inner voice. ‘Just shoot.’

For and me, these sequences from Venice to Venice, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas provided inspiration and they still do. And via them, architectural photography initiated a move beyond beauty shots and data. Over the last 60 years, by adding analysis, synthesis, recommendation, and de- sign, it has gone from tool to subdiscipline in architecture.

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Taken between 1956 and 1966, these photographs reveal Scott Brown’s formative explorations into urban systems, Pop Art, and the complexity of the American vernacular — interests that she and partner Robert Venturi would later develop in the pivotal Learning from Las Vegas. The photographs offer a glimpse into the social transformations of the 1960s as seen through the wayward eye of one of architecture’s most influential practitioners.

Scott Brown’s photography is more than a means of documenting buildings — it is a tool for observation and analysis, an exploration of culture, aesthetics, history, and society. Through photography, Scott Brown traces continuities from the geometric vistas of Canaletto’s Venice to the neon of the Vegas Strip. For today’s architects, artists, and social scientists, these images provide models for design research and visual thinking.

Photographs are available for purchase at Betts Project. Each photograph is 43 cm by 28 cm in a limited edition of ten, signed by Scott Brown and numbered. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a catalogue, published by PLANE—SITE and featuring texts by Scott Brown and Andrés Ramirez. DENISE SCOTT BROWN (from Wikipedia)

Denise Scott Brown (née Lakofski; born October 3, 1931) is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. Scott Brown and her husband and partner, Robert Venturi, are regarded as among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and theoretical writing and teaching.

Born to Jewish parents Simon and Phyllis (Hepker) Lakofski, Denise Lakofski had the vision from the time she was five years old that she would be an architect. Pursuing this goal, she spent her summers working with architects, and from 1948 to 1952, studied in South Africa at the University of the Witwatersrand. She briefly entered liberal politics, but was frustrated by the lack of acceptance of women in the field. Lakofski traveled to in 1952, working for the modernist architect Frederick Gibberd. She continued her education there, winning admission to the Architectural Association School of Architecture to learn “useful skills in the building of a just South Africa,” within an intellectually rich environment which embraced women. She was joined there by Robert Scott Brown, whom she had met at Witwatersrand in 1954, and graduated with a degree in architecture in 1955.

Denise Lakofski and Robert Scott Brown were married on July 21, 1955. The couple spent the next three years working and traveling throughout Europe, and in 1958, they moved to Philadelphia, , to study at the University of Pennsylvania’s planning department. In 1959, Robert died in a car accident. Denise Scott Brown completed her master’s degree in city planning in 1960 and, upon graduation, became a faculty member at the university. While teaching, she completed a master’s degree in architecture. At a 1960 faculty meeting, she argued against demolishing the university’s library (now the ), designed by Philadelphia architect Frank Furness. At the meeting, she met Robert Venturi, a young architect and fellow professor. The two became collaborators and taught courses together from 1962 to 1964. Scott Brown left the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. Becoming known as a scholar in , she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and was then named co-chair of the Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. During her years in the Southwest, Scott Brown became interested in the newer cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. She invited Venturi to visit her classes at UCLA, and in 1966 asked him to visit Las Vegas with her. The two were married in Santa Monica, California, on July 23, 1967. Scott Brown moved back to Philadelphia in 1967 to join Robert Venturi’s firm, Venturi and Rauch, and became principal in charge of planning in 1969. Denise Scott Brown later taught at , and in 2003 was a visiting lecturer with Venturi at ’s Graduate School of Design.

In 1972, with Venturi and , Scott Brown wrote Learning From Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. The book published studies of the Las Vegas Strip, undertaken with students in an architectural research studio course which Scott Brown taught with Venturi in 1970 at Yale’s School of Architecture and Planning. The book joined Venturi’s previous Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (, 1966) as a rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural tastes, and a pointed acceptance of American sprawl and . The book coined the terms «Duck» and «Decorated Shed» as applied to opposing architectural styles. Scott Brown has remained a prolific writer on architecture and urban planning.

Scott Brown & Venturi strove for understanding the city in terms of social, economic and cultural perspectives, viewing it as a set of complex systems upon planning. As part of their design process, the Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates firm studies the trends of an area, marking future expansions or congestions. These studies influence plans and design makeup. Such an approach was used for their Tomorrow Competition, putting the population movement and daily pattern in consideration. Similarly, the plan took into consideration the landmark of the early campus and the usages of campus space prior to planning. Scott Brown holds a systematic approach to planning in what is coined as “FFF studios.” In it, form, forces and function determine and help define the urban environment. For example, the Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates firm studied both the expansion of campus along with the wilderness surrounding the perimeter of the area.

The fusion of Eastern and Western ideas in the Nikko hotel chain are evident by merging the Western notion of comfort (62 Stanislaus Von Moos) with historical kimono patterns with their hidden order. The architecture applies a post-Las Vegas modern feel while projecting the traditional Japanese shopping street. Guest rooms are typically made with Western taste, with fabrics, wallpaper, and carpet exclusively from the Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates firm that reflect the scenery outside. In contrast, the exterior “street” complex reflects Japanese urban and traditional life.

With the firm, renamed Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown in 1980, and finally Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in 1989, Scott Brown has led major civic planning projects and studies, and more recently has directed many university campus planning projects. The beginning of the 1980s, Venturi and Brown had made huge success with their ideas and concepts. Critics characterized them as the most influential and visionary architects of the time and continued their path with a clear approach, with their radical theories of design. She has also served as principal-in-charge with Robert Ven- turi on the firm’s larger architectural projects, including the Sainsbury Wing of London’s , the capitol building in Toulouse and the Nikko Hotel and Spa Resort in .

Selected works - Undergraduate Science Building, Life Sciences Institute and Palmer Commons complex ; Ann Arbor, Michigan (2005) - Campus Life Plan; Providence, (2004) - Campus Plan Suggestions; , China (2004) - Baker-Berry Library, Dartmouth College; Hanover, (2002) - Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University Campus Plan; , Massachusetts (2002) - Campus Plan; Williamstown, Massachusetts (2001) - Frist Campus Center, ; (2000) - Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; Hanover, New Hampshire (2000) - Perelman Quadrangle, University of Pennsylvania; Philadelphia (2000) - Provincial Capitol Building; Toulouse, France (1999) - Gonda (Goldschmied) Neurosciences and Genetics Research Center, UCLA; Los Angeles, California (1998) - University of Michigan Campus Plan; Ann Arbor, Michigan (1997–2005) - Bryn Mawr College Campus Plan; Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (1997) - Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri Resort; Nikko National Park, Japan (1997) - Museum of Contemporary Art, ; , California (1996) - Civic Center Plan; Denver, Colorado (1995) - Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Library, ; Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (1994) - Children’s Museum; , Texas (1992) - Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London; (1991) - Art Museum; Seattle, Washington (1991) - Restoration of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania; Philadelphia (1991) - University of Pennsylvania Campus Planning; Philadelphia (1988–2000) - Center City Development Plan; Memphis, Tennessee (1987) - Lewis Thomas Laboratory; Princeton University, New Jersey (1986) - Gordon Wu Hall; Princeton University, New Jersey (1983) - Hennepin Avenue Transit/Entertainment Study; , Minnesota (1981) - Jim Thorpe Historic District Planning Study; Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania (1979) - Washington Avenue Revitalization Plan; Miami Beach, Florida (1978) - Best Products Catalog Showroom; Langhorne, Pennsylvania, (1978) - Allen Memorial Art Museum, ; Oberlin, Ohio (1976) - Basco Showroom; Philadelphia (1976) - Franklin Court; Philadelphia (1976) - South Street «Crosstown Community» Planning; Philadelphia (1970) - High-rise skyscraper office towers; Shanghai, China (2003) - U.S. Embassy Competition for U.S. Embassy in Berlin ; Berlin (1995)

Awards - Jane Drew Prize; 2017 - ECC Award; 2016 - AIA Gold Medal; 2016 (with Robert Venturi) - Edmund N. Bacon Prize, Philadelphia Center for Architecture; 2010 - Design Mind Award, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards; 2007 (with Robert Venturi) - Athena Award, Congress for the ; 2007 - Vilcek Prize in Architecture, The Vilcek Foundation; 2007 - Harvard Radcliffe Institute Medal; 2005 - Visionary Woman Award, Moore College of Art & Design; 2003 - Prize, ; 2002 (with Robert Venturi) - Topaz Medallion, American Institute of Architects; 1996 - , United States Presidential Award; 1992 (with Robert Venturi) - Chicago Architecture Award, 1987 - ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) Distinguished Professor Award; 1986-87 - AIA Firm Award, to Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown; 1985 Bibliography - Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour), Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972; revised edition 1977. ISBN 0-262-72006-X - A View from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953–1984, (with Robert Venturi), New York: Harper & Row, 1984. ISBN 0-06-438851-4 - Urban Concepts, Architectural Design Profile 60: January–February 1990. London: Academy Editions; distributed in U.S. by St. Martin’s Press. ISBN 0-85670-955-7 - Architecture as Signs and Systems: for a Mannerist Time (with Robert Venturi), Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-674-01571-1 - The art in waste (article), In:Distoriones urbanas / Urban Distorisions, Madrid: Basurama, 2006. ISBN 978-84-95321-85-5 - On Public Interior Space (with Maurice Harteveld), In: AA Files 56, London: Architectural Association Publications, 2007. - Miranda, Carolina A. (2013-04-15). «Architect Interview With Denise Scott Brown». Architect. ISSN 0746-0554. OCLC 779661406. Retrieved 2018- 03-09. The artworks described above are subject to changes in availability and price without prior notice. Betts Project is not VAT registered.

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