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.
Intent on separating the personal from the pedagogical, Kornblatt dug through thousands of images and categorized them into non-chronological thematic chapters. Some, carrying fugacious titles such as “Fleeting Moments,” “In Transit,” or “The Grand Tour,” attempt to build gravity by accumulation—rows of smiling cover girls at a newsstand, a car lot strung with pennant flags, bleached laundry hung over canals. Other sections like “Philadelphia,” “Ordinary Architectures,” and “Las Vegas” reflect familiar parts of Scott Brown’s professional life.
These research-influenced chapters take on a solitary air. Although she’s united in practice and marriage to Robert Venturi, he barely shows up in the collection. A spring 1969 snapshot of the Vanna Venturi house is tucked between photos of Philly’s urban fabric as if it was study in neighborhood typologies and not the home of her mother-in-law.
Maybe this nonappearance is due to the nature of photography: There is just a single set of eyes behind the viewfinder. One might imagine Venturi standing behind Scott Brown’s shoulder, just out of sight of her trusty Alpa SLR. Or, we could consider such absence as an intentional act, a recalibration of a life overshadowed by men, including the man she loved.
Surprisingly present, however, is Robert Scott Brown, Scott Brown’s first husband who died in a car accident in 1959. (She kept his name.) The appearance of his countenance is confusing at first: Who is this guy with a beard and decidedly lacking Venturi’s trademark button-collar Oxford shirt? His name and circumstance have long been banished to the footnotes, but in Encounters he is very much alive, wearing a wool turtleneck and gold wedding band in a Venetian water taxi. A touch bohemian, his eyes don’t meet the camera. Credits, unfortunately placed at the far back end of the book, confirm that the photo was taken in 1956.
Scott Brown’s Venice portrait of her first husband is technical: She captures crisp winter light on his ruddy face while the city behind is soft focus. He returns the favor with a series of touristy frames from Piazza San Marco: Scott Brown with pigeons perched on her arm and atop her wavy auburn hair. She also snaps a photo of Robert smiling among the birds and another, more arty: the flock aflutter—Brassaï-esque in black and white. These are the kinds of photos young lovers take. As the camera changes hands from Scott Brown to Robert and back again, these photographs form a preamble for two photos not included in the book that would be taken a decade later: ones of Scott Brown and Venturi each posed against the Las Vegas skyline.
Several plates depict moments of genesis, capturing early versions of what would become Venturi Scott Brown and Associates’ signature postmodern design decisions. Filed under the “Picturesque” chapter is Bill’s Car Hart Ave SM, a 1968 study taken in Santa Monica. Hand-painted swirls and florals adorn an ancient Oldsmobile in a pattern reminiscent of VSBA’s Best Products Catalog Showroom which was constructed in 1978. In his essay “In Search of the Ordinary,” Kornblatt offers a close read of a photograph taken in Philadelphia around 1964. The image depicts three Black children standing in the rubble of an empty lot. The tallest among them stares down the camera with his hands on his hips. Behind the trio is a brick party wall still covered in the remains of paint and wallpaper from what once was an apartment building. It is, as Kornblatt notes, “a perfect cross section”—pastel geometries reminiscent of home and palette of colors and shapes that later crop up in VSBA designs.
But the photograph is more than architectural fodder. Kornblatt doesn’t shy away from the tensions it reveals. Is Scott Brown, venturing into a Philadelphia neighborhood subject to urban renewal (or villages in her home country of South Africa) as a tourist or a documentarian? Kornblatt chalks it up to investigative curiosity while noting her privilege as a white academic to move between worlds—an “implicated subject” he claims, per scholar Michael Rothberg.
“Scott Brown had no choice but represent a discipline implicated in violence on multiple levels, from that of university-prompted ‘slum clearance’ in West Philadelphia to the broader role of planning and architecture in eagerly promoting and then willing executing such schemes nationwide,” Kornblatt wrote. “[T]he defiant gaze of the red-shirted boy is overshadowed by the vast apparatus of demolition, planning and rebuilding with which the photographer herself is associated.”
Perhaps what’s best about North Broad Street, Philadelphia, c. 1964 is that it, as a photograph, moves between two modes: compositionally compelling and demonstratively didactic. Not every image in Encountersis as good. Many are simply “okay,” the kind of grab shots of architecture, landscapes, and everyday interesting things that now fill our camera rolls and endless digital scrolls. Scott Brown isn’t the only to teach us to find beauty in the ordinary. Ed Ruscha’s deadpan style had a clear influence on her work, most visible across her Las Vegas studies. Similarly, the specificity of urban life fills the frames of past and contemporary photographers, such as Walter Evans and Catherine Opie. Encounters also cites photographer Stephen Shore, whose penchant for roadside Americana—Standard Oil, billboards, motel rooms—parallels Scott Brown’s own search for meaning in the sprawl.
Writer Geoff Dyer, in analyzing Shore’s work, remarks on how the camera renders stillness. “[It] shows a world in which there is nothing but the moment.” By contrast, Encounters is restless. Her world—her life—is in constant motion, be it travelogue or fieldwork.
Scott Brown, at 94, has perhaps slowed down, but this book reveals a persistent impatience. She has spent years advocating for a different approach to architecture and for her own visibility in the field. With Encounters, she entreats us to see through her eyes. In doing so we might finally perceive her creative life as independent from that of her Robert.