It is easy to forget that Las Vegas is desert country. When Denise Scott Brown first entered the deserts of the American West, she brought her childhood in South Africa to bear on her experience there, in reading the landscape. Perhaps best known for the seminal book Learning from Las Vegas written along with Robert Venturi, her long-time partner, she has lately been thrust into the spotlight as a symbol of women’s struggle to become accepted into the canon of architecture. Scott Brown is an architect who saw an element of the built environment so clearly and communicated it easily to the outside, but there's more to the story. Luise Rellensmann met with Denise Scott Brown in Los Angeles to learn more about the images behind the text, and the story behind it all.
Luise Rellensmann: When was the last time you visited Las Vegas?
Denise Scott Brown: In 2009.
How did you happen to visit Vegas in the 1960s?
Out of my family tradition: I had seen my mother’s home movies of its lights, taken in the 1950s. Coney Island, Disneyland, Las Vegas – generations of our family had loved theme parks. Study experiences in South Africa and England. And my urban planning teachers on the East coast, social scientists like Herbert Gans and William Wheaton, who said: “Architects believe they know what’s good for people, but this is arrogance: You can’t afford to call Los Angeles and Las Vegas ugly; you need to understand why people like them. Why don’t you go there and find out?” So in January 1965 I did. This was the first of four trips I took to Las Vegas before I asked Bob [Robert Venturi] to join me there in November 1966. We taught our “Learning from Las Vegas” studio in 1968.
You were born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, and you have stressed that your view of Las Vegas is an African one. Bob is an American with Italian roots. How important were your different backgrounds?
I am African and Jewish. My family came from Latvia and Lithuania. My mother’s parents were from Kurland, a German-speaking dutchy within Latvia. Although from different continents, Bob and I shared an immigrant history and we fitted well into each other’s families. Our educations, Bob’s in the US and Italy, mine in those plus England and Africa, brought us to shared conclusions - but ones perhaps different from those of other architects.
When did you first start taking pictures and how did you become interested in photography?
Bob and I started photography in South Africa. He learned as a child from his father and taught me. Architecture school emphasized the importance of travelling to see the buildings we had learned about and of recording our experience for our future practice. During World War II travel was not possible and after it our distance from Europe made getting there expensive. We were also not welcome in some countries, owing to South Africa’s rightly-hated political system. In addition, the Apartheid government often removed the passports of dissidents. So our conclusion was: go abroad as soon as you can, stay as long as you can, get the further education you will need for practicing in Africa, and bring back a photographic record. But as we photographed, we moved beyond documentation of buildings and into observation of 1950s and 1960s phenomena that interested us — cultures not Culture, pop culture, counter-cultures, pop art, commercial architecture and signs — and photography itself as an art.
What were your major influences?
Conditions influenced us: environmental, archaeological, historical, political, social and cultural issues in Southern Africa. Artistic influences were multicultural and included the reactions to Africa of refugees from Germany under Nazi Germany. But I was drawn particularly to the art of rural migrants, to African folk/pop art that adapted traditional crafts to city life. They applied for example, beadwork and its coded messages to soda bottles rather than vegetable gourds. In England and Europe, post-war social schisms conditioned the artists and architects who inspired us, Brutalists, the Independent Group, and Team 10.
Here class was a major concern. Popular culture, a nascent Pop Art movement, and the Brutalists’ critique of Modern architecture and urbanism played roles. From these we learned that photography can document concepts as well as conditions, and we applied their photo techniques to our analyses of Vegas and Levittown.
To me, your photos show a great resemblance to the work of Ed Ruscha.
I love his work. I discovered his books in 1965 in a bookshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, and was intrigued that he was doing what I was doing. Shortly thereafter I chose his photographs of parking lots to illustrate an article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning.” And seeing his photo-composite of the Sunset Strip, I felt he had perhaps learned, as I had, from the traditional accordion-folded photo guides for tourists travelling down the Rhine. In 1952 I bought one of those for my Rhine trip and perhaps he did too. During the LLV studio we called the composite we made of our Strip an “Ed Ruscha.”
Have the two of you ever met?
Yes. Our Yale studio trip started in Los Angeles and I took the students to visit Ruscha at his studio. He and they got on well together. Back then he was hesitant to explain what he was doing, so they ended up drinking beer together.
»Architects believe they know what’s good for people, but this is arrogance.«
Talking about your role as mother and partner in an architecture firm: what was it like to stand up for your rights when you and Bob started together, and how different was the public’s perception of you as a female architect compared to today?
In the 1970s, “that did not happen” was the response of male architects when I said that Robert Venturi and I worked together on design. I would reply “How do you know? Were you under the table when we were working?” That infuriated them! On a New York discussion panel, Frederic Schwartz, project manager for my Miami Beach project, reproached a New York architect for referring to it as “Venturi’s project.” This man became incensed and stalked off the stage. But by mistake he walked into a closet and had to come out again. Although this caused laughter his huge anger convinced me that I could endanger our firm by speaking out, and I stopped for a while. I had written “Sexism and the Star System in Architecture” in the early 1970s but did not publish it until 1989. However, it was circulated in the independent press and used in women’s studies programs before that, and it still is. And I have been talking out for years, and of course there is still hostility.
Would a quota for women in positions of power in architecture firms change this situation?
US “affirmative action” law mandates roles for minority and woman-owned consultant firms on projects for government buildings. But the law seems to exclude large projects and I suspect it pressures minority and women-owned firms to remain small to afford the budgets they offer. But ways must be found to encourage and support minorities and women in architecture. The world and our profession will be livelier for what we offer, and our experience has been that diversity is fun, not a moral hair shirt.
How do you feel about the petition to the Pritzker Prize started by Harvard students Arielle Assouline-Lichten and Caroline James?
It’s been wonderful for me in many ways, but particularly because those who sign it passionately want a better world in architecture for women and men. Yet others disagree, and argue in the comment sections of online articles on the petition. I call them the “sad old white men.” I love old men (and women) but these are very bitter. They say “we can’t all marry the boss to get ahead.” Bob was not my boss! He and I were associate professors when we married. We had worked together as colleagues, even taught together, but never worked for each other. Others say, “he received the Pritzker Prize for work he did before he knew Denise.” This means they can’t have read C&C, where Bob thanks me in the early pages for my help. Some architects’ wives say: “What’s wrong with Denise? I’m happy to support my husband.” Well, I support mine too, and he supports me.
Do you feel a special connection with any space you have designed? Which have met your expectations the best?
Of course I want my spaces to be beautiful — even if my definition of beauty may include “beautifully ugly.” And I’m more than happy when people tell us they find the atmosphere in our Sainsbury Wing helps them enjoy the art. But my heart jumps when I see people doing the things in my spaces that I had hoped they would do — when I have applied urban-derived concepts about relations between activities, and I see them working. As our project was nearing completion at the University of Michigan, the facilities planners sent me a message: “The students have torn down our construction fences. They have discovered your short-cut and are riding their bicycles across it.”
»My heart jumps when I see people doing the things in my spaces that I had hoped they would do.«
Denise Scott Brown (October 3, 1931) is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia, which she founded with her husband and partner Robert Venturi. Even after over fifty years as one of the most highly regarded architects, Denise Scott Brown still continues to publish and present her work.
Luise Rellensmann lives in L.A. where she currently works on issues of the conservation of Modern and Contemporary Architecture in Historic Urban Environments. Before moving to California, she lived in Berlin where she worked as an architecture critic for various media, and also at the Technical University in Cottbus, where her interest in the heritage and conservation of the contemporary past started.
If you could chose a place to conduct research today, would it be Vegas?
I keep thinking of research studios I would like to teach. One would investigate the train corridor from Philadelphia to New York, the landscapes you see along this 90-mile stretch. They are remnants of the biggest industrial center in the world — bigger than the Ruhrgebiet. These deserted early 20th structures have an elegiac beauty. But with Philadelphia’s population half the size it used to be, our economy can’t support them, and many contain hazardous materials. Yet you can learn much about architecture from them. And talented graffiti artists have made this stretch their museum. Shanghai is another rich opportunity. Its multicultural history is an obvious attraction, but its unusual building types would be interesting to consider for other locations. How would the lilong houses, derived from London mews, and the scholars’ gardens, small walled landscapes that suggest infinity, do in New York? There are many things I would like to consider but I am too old. So I set them down for others to investigate.
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