EXPRESSION

DENISE SCOTT BROWN:

BY CAROLINA VACCARO AND NOA MAILAR

LEARNING TO SEE

THIS SUMMER, TYLER SCHOOL OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESENTS AN

IMMERSIVE SHOW OF PHOTOGRAPHS, Learning to See: Denise Scott Brown. The show examines Denise Scott Brown’s defining views on architecture and urbanism understood through the volumes of snapshots she took of cities and landscapes throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition is open to the public through September 19, 2021.

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Learning to See documents Denise Scott Brown’s iconographic legacy as a parallel storytelling of her thoughts and ideas on architecture and the

environment. THE EXHIBIT CREATES A CIRCULAR VISION THROUGH THREE CONTINENTS

AND DEMONSTRATES HER PRACTICE OF “LEARNING FROM WHAT’S AROUND YOU.” The images not only track chronological relationships but also offer a cross-reading of social, cultural, spatial, symbolic, and dynamic architectural concepts.

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BIOGRAPHICAL AND EXPLORATORY

IMAGES ARE SHOWN SIDE BY SIDE: rural Africa and the vast veld of her youth, her European education at the Architectural Association in London, her encounters with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, and the Mannerist style of “breaking the rules” as a relevant way of approaching the complexity of life.

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Denise Scott Brown’s LIFE IN SOUTH

AFRICA HAD A DECISIVE INFLUENCE

ON HER INTEREST IN POPULAR AND MARGINALIZED CULTURES. The “Learning from Las Vegas” study aimed to understand the aesthetics of urban sprawl in its purest and most extreme form, then evolve techniques to handle this “New Form of the City.”

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THIS SEQUENCE OF LINKED IMAGES EXPRESSES SCOTT BROWN’S INTEREST IN THE “IMPERFECT WORLD AROUND US” — the edges of things, vast spaces and voids, wastelands as juxtapositions between urban systems and places of freedom, architectural patterns, and patterns of activity.

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IN THE LATE 1960S, DENISE SCOTT BROWN STARTED TO

DOCUMENT A “NEW FORM OF THE CITY” — ONE DOMINATED BY AUTOMOBILES — and its related architecture. America ‘s gas stations, billboards, roadside stores, signs, advertisements, and deserts offer Scott Brown fertile material to research American identity through the extraordinary and the everyday.

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Continuing from the larger gallery space, VISITORS MEANDER FROM LAS VEGAS INTO A MORE PERSONAL PHILADELPHIA SPACE containing an intimate room-within-a-room waiting to be discovered.

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While photographs play and overlay throughout the gallery space,

HERE THE INTIMACY OF PLACE AND HISTORY

FORM A SIMULTANEOUS DIALOGUE. Academic and professional work in Philadelphia echo Denise Scott Brown’s more personal narrative at the center, punctuated by the sound of her voice from her 2018 Soane Medal lecture.