Denise Scott Brown would probably hate it if I read Encounters as biography. As the book’s editor Izzy Kornblatt goes to lengths to explain, this collection of the architect’s photography is meant to offer a series of visual lessons in how to see the world from a perspective inflected by the generous teachings of the likes of sociologist Herbert Gans. Yet given such tantalizing archival materials, nearly 400 photographs taken between the 1950s and 1970s, the urge to parse the details of her life through them holds sway.
Our time loves to conflate image and identity. In recent decades, Scott Brown has been embraced in somewhat contradictory ways as a refractory voice for calling out longstanding bias in the field, as she does in lectures and writings such as “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture” (1989). She’s also become a mumsy avatar of postmodernism. Encounters enforces neither role.
