School News Excerpts from Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium
As she declared in 1981, Denise Scott Brown became a feminist mainly because of “experiences in my professional life,” and throughout her career — in her writings, practice, and teaching — she has actively campaigned to change the profession. Her own life, she said, was a quarry, and she has not been afraid to draw from her own struggles with discrimination, petty slights, and lack of recognition to write about what must be done to make architecture a more egalitarian, humane, and diverse profession. Sometimes this meant tackling the failure of architects to address the needs — even the smallest and most mundane — of women in their daily lives, as she did in her marvelous 1967 essay “Planning the Powder Room.” What woman, even today, has not experienced some of the frustrations she has so wittily described, despite our constant thinking about what bathrooms should be today? In other instances it meant confronting head-on the culture of the profession, as she did in a talk at the Alliance of Women in Architecture, in 1973, and then again in her 1975 essay “Sexism and the Star System,” a shorter version of which was finally published in the feminist anthology Architecture: A Place for Women, in 1989. Scott Brown attacked the blatant sexism in the profession, the notion of a sole designer on top, the cult of personality, the boys’ club atmosphere, the exclusion of women in professional gatherings, the press’s lack of coverage of women architects, and the glass ceiling that prohibited women’s advancement. … In so many ways she foreshadowed concerns that are still important to us today. Moreover, in contrast to many women architects of her generation, she did not take pride in being an “exceptional one.” Indeed she delighted in the rise of women in the field in the mid-1970s and how the talent and enthusiasm of young women, as she wrote, “has burst creativity into the profession.” But she was also a hard-core realist about their prospects, recognizing that they too would face discrimination, and she urged them to have a “feminist awareness” as they confronted professional obstacles. Mary McLeod Professor, Columbia University
Denise Scott Brown, 1978 ©Lynn Gilbert
Fifty years after the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, Frida Grahn has convened “Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium,” presenting new scholarship related to the groundbreaking studio methods developed by the architect in the 1960s. Building on the newly published anthology Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect, the symposium took place in Hastings Hall on February 8, 2023. Following are excerpts of papers, remarks, and discussions from the event. Half a century ago the now famous and oft-quoted, if not always completely understood, book Learning from Las Vegas was published. It grew out of, in part, a studio taught here at the Yale School of Architecture in 1968 by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. In the winter of 2009–10 the exhibition What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates was displayed at the school’s gallery in Paul Rudolph Hall. It included 100 photographs taken during the 1968 trip that would underpin Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s research on Las Vegas. In a recent New Yorker article Christopher Hawthorne wrote,
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“What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, Learning from Las Vegas argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be — and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.” Deborah Berke Dean and J. M. Hoppin Professor, Yale School of Architecture
I am incredibly honored and delighted to be here today to celebrate the life and career of Denise Scott Brown. It is the first opportunity to reflect on her work and continue to develop the ideas we explored together in the book Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes, after working separately on three different continents for two years. As Mary pointed out, the more common way to order things would be to organize a symposium first and publish the papers afterward, but this time we are doing it the other way around. It is wonderful to see so many of the authors in person. Nine of the twenty-four contributors are with us, and the subject of the discussion — Denise Scott Brown — is attending via Zoom. Although the symposium marks the anniversary of Learning from Las Vegas, neither the book nor the studio is the main topic of discussion today. An important reason for this is that it has already been done 13 years ago, in January 2010, at the three-day conference “Architecture after Las Vegas,” organized by Stanislaus von Moos and held here at Hastings Hall. Quite a few of you were present at that event, as were Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who as you know sadly passed away in 2018. The conference papers were published in the anthology Eyes That Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas, in 2020. We will talk indirectly about Las Vegas: how its lessons can be applied, not to build casinos but to save small towns, for instance. We will look at civil rights and social justice, taking Denise Scott Brown’s message to heart that the Las Vegas Studio was as much a social project as it was about form. Although the Las Vegas project was heavily indebted to her ideas, she has so far been the subject of only sparing scholarly attention. Her contributions have long remained
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unrecognized or wrongly attributed. In my conversations with Denise, as she prefers to be called, she has often struck me with amazement. Doors kept opening into unexpected fields, and I realized how little is commonly known about her. There are still unknown aspects to her thinking, and few commentators have gone beyond the wellknown catchwords. So today we will highlight Denise’s conceptual contributions, distinct voice, and incisive impact on architectural education, urban planning, and design. Frida Grahn Editor and PhD candidate, USI Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio
The Nonjudgmental Attitude: Learning from Three Continents In her landmark essay “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” to quote just one of many delightfully alliterative titles she devised, Scott Brown describes the creative impulse as an act of trying to like what one does not like, or what we refer to today as embracing a nonjudgmental attitude. Just as Claes Oldenburg and Pop Art had expanded the definition of art to include vestiges and echoes of the everyday world around us, Learning from Las Vegas would expand that of architecture, or rather the array of questions, concerns, objects, and places deemed worthy of the architect’s attention, fundamentally changing what it means to think and see and act in the world as an architect. … Learning from Las Vegas put forward a vision of architectural education as an essentially social, collectively driven activity embodying an understanding of architectural knowledge constructed not by appeal to authority — be that a person, precedent, method, or nugget of received wisdom — but through critical and creative engagement with a wide range of essentially different, potentially unlikable, others. It envisioned architectural education as an active and ever-changing process of inquiry by which students aren’t told what to think but rather shown — out in the desert, out on the Strip, camera in hand — how to think. Surry Schlabs (BA ’99, MArch ’03, PhD ’17) Senior Lecturer, Yale School of Architecture
On the Outside Looking Around: ‘Mine Is an African View of Las Vegas’ In contrast to the urbanism of Johannesburg, Scott Brown learned many important lessons from camping and fossil-hunting trips in the vast expanses of the veld in the Makapan Valley, a three-hour drive to the north: “Eventually I came to compare our wilderness landscapes with the city, feeling that both established complex laws with or without our intervention.” This geography and climate fostered a design approach that was mindful of environmental conditions as well as a touchstone for questioning cultural and colonial identity. From an early age Scott Brown noted the disjuncture between her physical reality and the colonial ideal shaped by the media. … On one hand, an African view describes a way of seeing, of valuing the objects, places, and spaces that exist in one’s everyday life and locale; on the other hand, her “African view” comprised a lived experience in Johannesburg as a White South African facing complex realities of race and ethnicity. Part of Scott Brown’s African view included her experience with the local folk architecture in the town of Mapoch, where the Ndebele people built mud houses with thatched roofs and painted the exteriors with colorful geometric patterns based on both indigenous and adopted motifs. … Scott Brown saw a strong correspondence between the boomtown desert urbanisms of Johannesburg and Las Vegas, just as her childhood trips to
