The only architects Denise Scott Brown knew as a child were women: “I thought architecture was women’s work!” she recently told ARTINFO. Because her mother studied the discipline twenty years prior to her own entry into architecture as a student at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand in 1949, Scott Brown had long known that she could be an architect. In fact, she went on to become one of the most influential architects of the 20th century at a time when female practitioners were nearly unheard of in the profession. After finishing her studies as “one of five women in studios of 60 men” at the Architectural Association School of London and the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Brown began a lifelong teaching career that complemented her work as an architect, planner, and theorist. “When I was a young professor,” she recalls, Scott Brown insisted on teaching her own studio, annoyed by the belittling remarks of a senior colleague she worked for. She succeeding in getting her own studio, but “one day…the dean’s secretary told me: No, we’re not giving you your classroom for the seminar, we’re taking your room away because we decided you talk too much.” Scott Brown, an expert on public space, was undeterred — she finished teaching her seminar in the bleachers of the sports arena.
That characteristic determination inspired two Harvard Graduate School of Design students, Arielle Assouline-Lichten and Caroline James, to launch a petition in March, 2013 to retroactively add Scott Brown to creative collaborator and husband Robert Venturi’s 1991 Pritzker Prize; he won the highest honor in architecture for work they largely completed together. In the ensuing debate, Scott Brown has been the center of virulent discussion on the place of women, minorities, and creative collaboration in architecture — does Denise Scott Brown deserve a Pritzker inclusion ceremony? Should her name be honored in the annals of architectural history with the same prestige the Pritzker Prize accorded to her husband? What role models do women and other underrepresented minorities have in a profession that has long venerated the perceived genius of singular white men? These concerns pertain to all architects, especially those who fall outside the privileged male demographic typically lauded by the old boys’ club known as the Pritzker Prize jury.
Peter Palumbo, chairman of the 2013 jury, failed to answer these questions when he responded to the petition on June 14, writing: “A later jury cannot re-open, or second guess the work of an earlier jury, and none has ever done so.” His dismissive tone seemed to highlight a still-prevalent sexism in the profession, in response to which the two recent GSD alumnae pressed Palumbo again on July 11: “Addressing these biases now is a moral and decent act to ensure that these injustices won’t happen again.” Correcting Scott Brown’s legacy is essential both because she deserves equal honor and because “it really impacts the way future women see their own position in relation to women over time…and the way future opportunities exist,” Assouline-Lichten told ARTINFO. In a profession still dominated by privileged men, Scott Brown has become a role model not only for her revolutionary work in architecture, planning, and theory, but also for her perseverance and outspoken insistence on receiving credit where it is due.
In the introduction to the 1977 second edition of Scott Brown’s era-defining treatise, Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, co-authored with Venturi, Steven Izenour, and a cadre of student researchers, she expressed “personal pique at the cavalier handling of my contribution and at attributions in general by architects and journalists,” analyzing the “social structure of the profession, its domination by upper-middle class males, and the emphasis its members place upon” the veneration of solitary creative genius.
However, her outcry against misattribution and sexism was disregarded by those it targeted: Scott Brown tells ARTINFO about an instance when one of the “big honchos in New York architecture offices” abruptly stormed out of a presentation upon being told that it was not “Venturi’s project” because she was the principal in charge of the proposal at hand. In the 1980s she was forced to acquiesce partly to sexist attitudes, even though she and Venturi have collaborated completely at their firm, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates: “I had to move over in the 1980s because of the fact that I couldn’t make our office lose…money,” she says of the firm’s move away during that decade from the planning projects that she carried chief responsibility for. When Pritzker called to congratulate Venturi in 1991 and he “said it should be Denise too,’” — Pritzker disagreed — “I felt very broken, very heartbroken,” Scott Brown recalls. “It takes away from your ability to be creative because it’s breaking you down. It took me a lot of time, a lot of building myself up in different ways,” to feel better.
Unfortunately, Scott Brown’s 1991 exclusion is not an isolated or outdated instance. When a similar snub occured in 2012 — Wang Shu alone was awarded the Pritzker for work completed in concert with his creative partner and wife, Lu Wenyu — the Pritzker Prize jury proved that it still does not properly understand the collaborative nature of design, nor is it truly interested in lauding practitioners who don’t mirror the class and gender of its own members. In an age when nearly half of architecture school graduates are women, but only 17 percent of female architects are managing partners or principals, this pattern of exclusion speaks volumes about the role of women in architecture. “You’ll still find the differences I saw,” remarks Scott Brown. “Women are discovering,” she explains — after years of insisting that they didn’t want to be known as ‘female architects’ and that gender equity has been achieved amongst architects — “that sexism is still prevalent.”
Caroline James and Arielle Assouline-Lichten / Courtesy Caroline James+Arielle Assouline-Lichten
Recognition of and reaction against the systemic gender and racial biases within architecture, Assouline-Lichten tells ARTINFO, are essential to “slowly creating change.” Thus far, the Harvard alumnae’s efforts appear to be working: whereas Venturi and Scott Brown were four times turned down for the AIA Gold Medal because they applied jointly, the American Institute of Architects voted last month to update the rules governing its highest honor, allowing two individuals who have worked together on a single body of architectural work to share the honor. Meanwhile, the Pritzker jury refuses to budge, which prompts another question: How can the Pritzker Prize remain a relevant and prestigious honor if it doesn’t respond to the changing values and demographics of the profession it represents? The 18,000 signatories — and counting — to the Scott Brown petition signal the beginning of the end for the hegemony of the old boys’ club.