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Izzy Kornblatt (ed.)

Encounters

Denise Scott Brown Photographs

For Denise Scott Brown, who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of design and planning projects. Through the lens of her Alpa camera she sought to penetrate the irreducible complexities of life around her – and to make a case for the architect and planner’s role in intervening within it.

“Encounters” presents, for the first time, an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s: the formative decades during which Scott Brown departed her childhood home of Johannesburg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which “Learning from Las Vegas” would emerge and joined her husband Robert Venturi in practice.

Moving thematically rather than sequentially through Scott Brown’s photographic oeuvre, “Encounters” opens up new ways of reading this body of work, presenting it less as a continuous historical record than as the product of a careful and studied practice of observation. Chosen in collaboration between Denise Scott Brown and Izzy Kornblatt and accompanied by an essay on Scott Brown’s conception of the ordinary, this collection of photographs offers a window into modes of thinking that continue to structure how designers perceive the world around them.

For Denise Scott Brown, who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of design and planning projects. Through the lens of her Alpa camera she sought to penetrate the irreducible complexities of life around her – and to make a case for the architect and planner’s role in intervening within it.

“Encounters” presents, for the first time, an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s: the formative decades during which Scott Brown departed her childhood home of Johannesburg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which “Learning from Las Vegas” would emerge and joined her husband Robert Venturi in practice.

Moving thematically rather than sequentially through Scott Brown’s photographic oeuvre, “Encounters” opens up new ways of reading this body of work, presenting it less as a continuous historical record than as the product of a careful and studied practice of observation. Chosen in collaboration between Denise Scott Brown and Izzy Kornblatt and accompanied by an essay on Scott Brown’s conception of the ordinary, this collection of photographs offers a window into modes of thinking that continue to structure how designers perceive the world around them.

Edited by Izzy Kornblatt

With photographs by Denise Scott Brown

Design: Integral Lars Müller

24 x 17, 9 ½ × 6 ¾

434 pages, 383 illustrations

hardback

2025, 978-3-03778-794-6, English
CHF 60.00
New

Izzy Kornblatt

Izzy Kornblatt is a critic, historian and designer based in New Haven, Connecticut. His writings have appeared in “Architectural Record”, where he serves as a contributing editor, as well as in other publications including the “Architectural Review” and the “New York Review of Architecture”, and in four books. He has completed several independent design projects and curated exhibitions at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale University School of Architecture.

Born in Massachusetts, he studied at Swarthmore College, National Taiwan University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture at Yale.

Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown is an architect, planner and urban designer, and a theorist, writer and educator whose projects and ideas have influenced designers and thinkers worldwide. Working in collaboration with Robert Venturi for more than fifty years, she guided the trajectory of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, serving as principal-in-charge of urban planning, urban design and campus planning, and playing leading roles in a number of the firm’s building designs. Scott Brown led planning projects for South Street and Old City in Philadelphia, Miami Beach and Memphis, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and Tsinghua University. Among the buildings she shaped are the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and the Département de la Haute-Garônne provincial capitol building in Toulouse, France.

Born in 1931 in what is now Zambia, Scott Brown grew up in Johannesburg and attended the University of the Witwatersrand before departing South Africa for London, where she received a degree from the Architectural Association, and then the United States, where she received master’s degrees in architecture and planning from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; and Yale University, among other institutions; and authored noted books including Learning from Las Vegas (1972, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour); Urban Concepts (1990); and Having Words (2009).

A recipient of honorary degrees from fourteen institutions, Scott Brown is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and an International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Among the countless prizes she has received is the AIA Gold Medal, which she and Venturi received jointly in 2015, the first time the prize was given to more than one architect.

CHF 60.00