Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
A woman's place
Denise Scott Brown, ignored for a Pritzker
Patrick D. Hazard
When the Penn professor Robert Venturi was offered the esteemed Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1991, he did his darnedest to get his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown included in the award. Venturi wanted to refuse the award, but his wife argued that, given their financial situation, they couldn't walk away from a $100,000 award. So Venturi accepted the prize alone.
That was a notable exception to this couple's customary modus operandi. Venturi and Scott Brown did everything architectural together. They believed that modernism had sadly frozen into rectangular clichés. They hungered for freshness and diversity, like their Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery on London's Trafalgar Square.
Their postmodernist classics, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), urged their students to break the boredom of classic, first-generation modernism, and seek freshness.
My ethical dilemma
I loved the Sainsbury, but I blasted their Las Vegas celebration in a Welcomat review because I had such hateful experiences there. (I still despise its hysterically obsessive entertainment ethos.) But I was hardly an objective observer, because my father ran off with his secretary to Las Vegas when I was three, condemning me to ten years of isolation in Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City, Michigan.
Fifty years later, I was less bitter when my father died as a wealthy real estate czar. Like Denise Scott Brown, I didn't turn up my nose at the $150,000 Dad left me. That inheritance funded my second career of 30 years as a globetrotting alternative journalist.
Still, Denise definitively got the short end of her architectural career with Venturi. Her second-class treatment started early, long before she met Venturi at a Penn faculty meeting.
Would secretaries object?
When she was a youth in South Africa, Scott Brown's family pooh-poohed her architectural aspirations. Indeed, she was one of just five women in an architecture class of 65 students. Indeed, she signed all her architectural drawings with her full name so all viewers would realize they were looking at the work of a woman.
Later, in London, she recalls accompanying five men to an internship interview. When the architect Egon Riss finished interviewing male applicants, he turned to her and explained, "I am very sorry but I can't pay you as much as the men, because then the secretaries in my office would object."
Denise came to America in 1958 and met Robert at Penn, where they both taught. They swapped reading lists and grew deeper together. She joined his firm in 1967, the year they tied the knot. Two years later she was a partner in Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
Can she type?
Denise wrote an essay, "Sexism and the Star System in Architecture," in which she described how her hubby became a guru and she receded to a footnote. The two of them tried hard to explain that they were partners in the deepest sense, only to have their audience allude to Venturi's "work."
"They can't get that out of their heads," she complained recently to the New York Times. "Whatever you say to them, they say, "'Well, she must be something else. Maybe a planner, maybe a typist, maybe she takes photographs. It has to be something else'."
Philip C. Johnson, who founded the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art and corrupted the entire 20th-Century American professional conversation on architecture, threw black-tie dinners for his acolytes at New York's men-only Century Club. (He won the first Pritzker in 1979.) Johnson's intense gay convictions apparently didn't extend to equal treatment for women.
Global petition
Only two women— Zaha Hadid, an Iranian who grew up in Baghdad, and Kazuyo Sejima (with her male partner Ryue Nishizawa in 2010)— have ever won the Pritzker. This is due partly to the inherent sexism of the architectural profession, but also to the Pritzker's outdated conception of architecture as the work of inspired individuals rather than collaborative teams.
The Pritzker's executive secretary, Martha Thorne— yes, a woman— says the competition is eager to support two Harvard graduate design students, Arielle Assouline-Lichten and Caroline James, who have started a global petition to add to the sole female Pritzker. Denise Scott Brown is 81. So I hope Ms. Thorne gets busy— not only for the sake of Scott Brown's reputation, but also for the Pritzker's relevance.♦
To read a follow-up by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
That was a notable exception to this couple's customary modus operandi. Venturi and Scott Brown did everything architectural together. They believed that modernism had sadly frozen into rectangular clichés. They hungered for freshness and diversity, like their Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery on London's Trafalgar Square.
Their postmodernist classics, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972), urged their students to break the boredom of classic, first-generation modernism, and seek freshness.
My ethical dilemma
I loved the Sainsbury, but I blasted their Las Vegas celebration in a Welcomat review because I had such hateful experiences there. (I still despise its hysterically obsessive entertainment ethos.) But I was hardly an objective observer, because my father ran off with his secretary to Las Vegas when I was three, condemning me to ten years of isolation in Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City, Michigan.
Fifty years later, I was less bitter when my father died as a wealthy real estate czar. Like Denise Scott Brown, I didn't turn up my nose at the $150,000 Dad left me. That inheritance funded my second career of 30 years as a globetrotting alternative journalist.
Still, Denise definitively got the short end of her architectural career with Venturi. Her second-class treatment started early, long before she met Venturi at a Penn faculty meeting.
Would secretaries object?
When she was a youth in South Africa, Scott Brown's family pooh-poohed her architectural aspirations. Indeed, she was one of just five women in an architecture class of 65 students. Indeed, she signed all her architectural drawings with her full name so all viewers would realize they were looking at the work of a woman.
Later, in London, she recalls accompanying five men to an internship interview. When the architect Egon Riss finished interviewing male applicants, he turned to her and explained, "I am very sorry but I can't pay you as much as the men, because then the secretaries in my office would object."
Denise came to America in 1958 and met Robert at Penn, where they both taught. They swapped reading lists and grew deeper together. She joined his firm in 1967, the year they tied the knot. Two years later she was a partner in Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
Can she type?
Denise wrote an essay, "Sexism and the Star System in Architecture," in which she described how her hubby became a guru and she receded to a footnote. The two of them tried hard to explain that they were partners in the deepest sense, only to have their audience allude to Venturi's "work."
"They can't get that out of their heads," she complained recently to the New York Times. "Whatever you say to them, they say, "'Well, she must be something else. Maybe a planner, maybe a typist, maybe she takes photographs. It has to be something else'."
Philip C. Johnson, who founded the architecture department at the Museum of Modern Art and corrupted the entire 20th-Century American professional conversation on architecture, threw black-tie dinners for his acolytes at New York's men-only Century Club. (He won the first Pritzker in 1979.) Johnson's intense gay convictions apparently didn't extend to equal treatment for women.
Global petition
Only two women— Zaha Hadid, an Iranian who grew up in Baghdad, and Kazuyo Sejima (with her male partner Ryue Nishizawa in 2010)— have ever won the Pritzker. This is due partly to the inherent sexism of the architectural profession, but also to the Pritzker's outdated conception of architecture as the work of inspired individuals rather than collaborative teams.
The Pritzker's executive secretary, Martha Thorne— yes, a woman— says the competition is eager to support two Harvard graduate design students, Arielle Assouline-Lichten and Caroline James, who have started a global petition to add to the sole female Pritzker. Denise Scott Brown is 81. So I hope Ms. Thorne gets busy— not only for the sake of Scott Brown's reputation, but also for the Pritzker's relevance.♦
To read a follow-up by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
