COME ON WOMEN! GUTS! “The star system, which sees the firm as a pyramid with a Designer on top, has little to do with today’s complex relations in architecture and construction. But as sexism defines me as a scribe, typist, and photographer to my husband, so the star system defines our associates as ‘second bananas’ and our staff as pencils”.1
In the essay Sexism and the Star System, Denise Scott Brown addresses her experiences with sexism in the architectural practice. Scott Brown (1931) is an American architect, urbanist, writer and teacher. Together with her husband she founded the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. The couple is regarded as among the most influential architects of the 20th century, both in practice and academia. As a female architect working alongside her husband in their firm, Scott Brown has first hand experience of discrimination within the profession. She experienced people’s tendency to assign a firm’s work to a single (male) starchitect. These experiences range from not being referenced for her architectural or literary work to her husband receiving the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1991 for their conjoined work without her mentioning. Scott Brown consequently did not attend the award ceremony in protest. Scott Brown identifies a type of discrimination that is specific to the field of architecture and a direct side effect of the starchitect system introduced in the 20th century. Developers saw the benefit of signing top names and talents in order to
convince municipalities to approve large developments. To increase an architect’s credibility he (or she, but let’s be honest) had to design iconic and highly visible architecture: a type of architecture that invited media to report heavily on the project and the architect himself. This in turn increased the stardom of the architect creating a perpetual circle of misrepresentation. Sexism and racism consequently led the media’s focus to be white and male. Architects that fall outside of this category are either consumed by the body of the firm or serve as tokens for committees and events. In the essay, Denise Scott Brown describes the moments in which she wryly greets her fellow token at the table; the singular black man. One might wonder whether this issue is still relevant today. Have we outgrown the starchitect system? One quick Google search for MVRDV, one of the largest architectural offices in the Netherlands, conjures up a full portrait and the Wikipedia page of Winny Maas... Not Nathalie de Vries or a combination of all three architects that gave their name to the firm. Scott Brown speculates about the possible interesting effects of the rise of
