Excerpts from Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium

Fifty years after the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, Frida Grahn has convened “Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium,” presenting new scholarship related to the groundbreaking studio methods developed by the architect in the 1960s. Building on the newly published anthology Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect, the symposium took place in Hastings Hall on February 8, 2023. Following are excerpts of papers, remarks, and discussions from the event.

Half a century ago the now famous and oft-quoted, if not always completely understood, book Learning from Las Vegas was published. It grew out of, in part, a studio taught here at the Yale School of Architecture in 1968 by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. In the winter of 2009 to 10 the exhibition What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates was displayed at the school’s gallery in Paul Rudolph Hall. It included 100 photographs taken during the 1968 trip that would underpin Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s research on Las Vegas. In a recent New Yorker article Christopher Hawthorne wrote, “What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, Learning from Las Vegas argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.”
—Deborah Berke, Dean and J. M. Hoppin Professor, Yale School of Architecture

As she declared in 1981, Denise Scott Brown became a feminist mainly because of “experiences in my professional life,” and throughout her career—in her writings, practice, and teaching—she has actively campaigned to change the profession. Her own life, she said, was a quarry, and she has not been afraid to draw from her own struggles with discrimination, petty slights, and lack of recognition to write about what must be done to make architecture a more egalitarian, humane, and diverse profession. Sometimes this meant tackling the failure of architects to address the needs—even the smallest and most mundane—of women in their daily lives, as she did in her marvelous 1967 essay “Planning the Powder Room.” What woman, even today, has not experienced some of the frustrations she has so wittily described, despite our constant thinking about what bathrooms should be today? In other instances it meant confronting head-on the culture of the profession, as she did in a talk at the Alliance of Women in Architecture, in 1973, and then again in her 1975 essay “Sexism and the Star System,” a shorter version of which was finally published in the feminist anthology Architecture: A Place for Women, in 1989. Scott Brown attacked the blatant sexism in the profession, the notion of a sole designer on top, the cult of personality, the boys’ club atmosphere, the exclusion of women in professional gatherings, the press’s lack of coverage of women architects, and the glass ceiling that prohibited women’s advancement. … In so many ways she foreshadowed concerns that are still important to us today. Moreover, in contrast to many women architects of her generation, she did not take pride in being an “exceptional one.” Indeed she delighted in the rise of women in the field in the mid-1970s and how the talent and enthusiasm of young women, as she wrote, “has burst creativity into the profession.” But she was also a hard-core realist about their prospects, recognizing that they too would face discrimination, and she urged them to have a “feminist awareness” as they confronted professional obstacles.
—Mary McLeod, Professor, Columbia University

I am incredibly honored and delighted to be here today to celebrate the life and career of Denise Scott Brown. It is the first opportunity to reflect on her work and continue to develop the ideas we explored together in the book Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes, after working separately on three different continents for two years. As Mary pointed out, the more common way to order things would be to organize a symposium first and publish the papers afterward, but this time we are doing it the other way around. It is wonderful to see so many of the authors in person. Nine of the twenty-four contributors are with us, and the subject of the discussion—Denise Scott Brown—is attending via Zoom. Although the symposium marks the anniversary of Learning from Las Vega, neither the book nor the studio is the main topic of discussion today. An important reason for this is that it has already been done 13 years ago, in January 2010, at the three-day conference “Architecture after Las Vegas,” organized by Stanislaus von Moos and held here at Hastings Hall. Quite a few of you were present at that event, as were Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who as you know sadly passed away in 2018. The conference papers were published in the anthology Eyes That Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas, in 2020.

We will talk indirectly about Las Vegas: how its lessons can be applied, not to build casinos but to save small towns, for instance. We will look at civil rights and social justice, taking Denise Scott Brown’s message to heart that the Las Vegas Studio was as much a social project as it was about form. Although the Las Vegas project was heavily indebted to her ideas, she has so far been the subject of only sparing scholarly attention. Her contributions have long remained unrecognized or wrongly attributed. In my conversations with Denise, as she prefers to be called, she has often struck me with amazement. Doors kept opening into unexpected fields, and I realized how little is commonly known about her. There are still unknown aspects to her thinking, and few commentators have gone beyond the well-known catchwords. So today we will highlight Denise’s conceptual contributions, distinct voice, and incisive impact on architectural education, urban planning, and design.
—Frida Grahn, editor and PhD candidate, USI Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio

In her landmark essay “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” to quote just one of many delightfully alliterative titles she devised, Scott Brown describes the creative impulse as an act of trying to like what one does not like, or what we refer to today as embracing a nonjudgmental attitude. Just as Claes Oldenburg and Pop Art had expanded the definition of art to include vestiges and echoes of the everyday world around us, Learning from Las Vegas would expand that of architecture, or rather the array of questions, concerns, objects, and places deemed worthy of the architect’s attention, fundamentally changing what it means to think and see and act in the world as an architect. … Learning from Las Vegas put forward a vision of architectural education as an essentially social collectively driven activity embodying an understanding of architectural knowledge constructed not by appeal to authority—be that a person, precedent, method, or nugget of received wisdom—but through critical and creative engagement with a wide range of essentially different, potentially unlikable, others. It envisioned architectural education as an active and ever-changing process of inquiry by which students aren’t told what to think but rather shown—out in the desert, out on the Strip, camera in hand—how to think.
—Surry Schlabs (BA ’99, MArch ’03, PhD ’17), Senior Lecturer, Yale School of Architecture

“On the Outside Looking Around: ‘Mine Is an African View of Las Vegas’”

In contrast to the urbanism of Johannesburg, Scott Brown learned many important lessons from camping and fossil-hunting trips in the vast expanses of the veld in the Makapan Valley, a three-hour drive to the north: “Eventually I came to compare our wilderness landscapes with the city, feeling that both established complex laws with or without our intervention.” This geography and climate fostered a design approach that was mindful of environmental conditions as well as a touchstone for questioning cultural and colonial identity. From an early age Scott Brown noted the disjuncture between her physical reality and the colonial ideal shaped by the media. … On one hand, an African view describes a way of seeing, of valuing the objects, places, and spaces that exist in one’s everyday life and locale; on the other hand, her “African view” comprised a lived experience in Johannesburg as a White South African facing complex realities of race and ethnicity. Part of Scott Brown’s African view included her experience with the local folk architecture in the town of Mapoch, where the Ndebele people built mud houses with thatched roofs and painted the exteriors with colorful geometric patterns based on both indigenous and adopted motifs. … Scott Brown saw a strong correspondence between the boomtown desert urbanisms of Johannesburg and Las Vegas, just as her childhood trips to the veld allowed her to see the complex laws and shared relationships between rural and urban. She found a similar rich contrast in Las Vegas and had the same urge to understand it.
—Craig Lee, Assistant Curator, Art Institute of Chicago

“On Camp, Revolutionariness, and Architecture”

The gaze of these two architects could be described as camp inasmuch as it seems to be nonjudgmental, depoliticized, and amoral. Indeed both made it clear on several occasions that they should not be bothered for a lack of social commitment. Steadfast in keeping the different concerns apart, they insisted that the morality of commercial advertising, gambling interest, and the competitive instinct was not at issue here. … They were more liberal than radical, but by questioning the founding of good taste and acknowledging popular culture they opened up a new front in the campaign for the democratization of architecture—not from the top to the bottom, but from the bottom to the top. For Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, being a revolutionary architect did not mean dreaming of utopia but simply showing empathy for people’s true expectations and for the existing city.
—Valéry Didelon, Professor, ENSA Normandie

“‘Strange’ Appearances: On Pop Art, Hamburgers, and Urbanists”

Venturi and Scott Brown’s pedagogical and published projects reveal sustained attention to and integration of Pop Art. Studio programs and work topics designed by Scott Brown reveal the significant influence of large object-sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and her perspicacious response to his career. In 1969, between the Las Vegas and Levittown studios, Oldenburg’s work became more accessible to a general audience in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In May, the same month Scott Brown published the article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning,” the sculpture Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks was installed in the heart of the Yale campus. It was commissioned by the Colossal Keepsake Corporation, an organization of students, faculty, and alumni formed to introduce revolutionary monuments to college campuses. With stylized vehicle treads and vibrant cosmetic pigment, whose original vinyl tip could be inflated (soon replaced by a fiberglass version), it suggested projection and progress in literal and symbolic terms as well as a radical recasting of the iconography of the adjacent World War I memorial. The final assignment turned specifically to hamburgers and clarified Scott Brown’s application of the artist’s growing influence, articulating “the shift in vision and understanding which an Oldenburg can induce.” The “Oldenburg Interpretation” asked students to “do for housing what Oldenburg did for hamburgers.” As Scott Brown has recently mentioned, she had in mind the artist’s 1962 Floor Burger, explaining that “if he had a way of artistically interpreting a hamburger, we as architects should be able to artistically interpret a suburban house.”
—Katherine Smith, Professor, Agnes Scott College

Panel discussion “Nonjudgmental Attitude: Learning from Three Continents”

Surry Schlabs: I was wondering if each of you might explore the question of politics in Learning from Las Vegas, in the work of Denise Scott Brown, and in this strain of architectural thinking.

Craig Lee: Revisiting the first edition of the book for the symposium, I found a footnote, a description of the studio that lists all the students, that I hadn’t come across before: “This has been a technical studio…Don’t bug us for lack of social concern. We are trying to train ourselves to offer socially relevant skills.” It comes to me now just because of the criticism you’re raising about the lack of politics in Learning from Las Vegas that Venturi, Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour had a sense of the limits of what they could do.

Valéry Didelon: I would like to remind everyone that when Venturi Scott Brown published Learning from Las Vegas Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States. What is also interesting is that the audience for the book was very political. Charles Moore was saying the book was embattled in a political sense. What I tried to explain today is that I think Learning from Las Vegas was a way to shift the ground where politics was happening. After 1968 the class struggle was fading away and cultural conflicts were taking on more importance—and Learning from Las Vegas is really at the forefront of the new cultural battle.

Denise Scott Brown: I do not agree. We’re very concerned socially, and that’s why we are looking at Pop Art and communication from Las Vegas. I was the one trying to help save South Street, and I was working with Black activists. … But for all of that, a lot of these social and physical and cultural questions are addressed by saying, these are things people like and want to use.
In another instance, as we were involved in these questions of Pop Art and what is ugly and what is not ugly, William Wheaton, the head of the planning department at Penn, then the dean of the architecture school at Berkeley, in his lecture on introduction to city planning, announced to us, “You architects design public space that no one uses. They stay away in droves. Why don’t you go to Las Vegas, and see what people really like?“ So that is what we did. One morning as I took the early bus to the casinos, it broke down, and a discussion started among us passengers. The casino workers turned angrily to me and said, “You think that all we live here for is one-armed-bandits. In fact, we don’t. We get our recreation at Lake Mead.” These working class people had no great love for Las Vegas, perhaps because being there all day, they got tired of it.
You can’t scorn them and we weren’t lacking of social concern; we were using what we were learning.

The title of our session is drawn in part from the name Scott Brown gave to the urban design studios she taught at UCLA and Penn. We have three excellent papers from scholars who have plumbed the DSB archives to retrieve narratives from Scott Brown’s mid-1960s pedagogy in urban design at those two institutions. The results are fascinating and revelatory. They reveal how indebted we are to Scott Brown’s synthesis of the work of her mentors and colleagues, as well as to her timelessness and work ethic as an educator formulating urban studies and design as an interdisciplinary inquiry into the social, political, and economic bases of city and regional development, and their changes over time. We also find here, in Scott Brown’s considerations of meaning in urban design and reckoning with functionalism, the intellectual antecedents of what would eventually become the groundbreaking work about Las Vegas and the basis of a multidisciplinary design practice that would fundamentally upend established modes of urban representation.
—Elihu Rubin (BA ’99), Associate Professor, Yale School of Architecture

“What Does 40th Street ‘Want to Be’?: Tracing the Pedagogy of Denise Scott Brown at the University of Pennsylvania, 1960–1964”

The studio course that advanced Scott Brown’s pedagogical methodology the most was perhaps “Studio FFF2: Form, Forces, and Function,” taught in Fall 1964. The first iteration of this course, taught the previous year, focused on a range of topics, such as Arlo Braun’s study for a highway hotel and Gerry Wolfe’s “Street as Space & Shelter Today.” By contrast, FFF2 was a semester-long case study on Philadelphia’s 40th Street, echoing the West Philadelphia study site from “Introduction to Urban Design.” Scott Brown’s guiding question to students was, “What should 40th Street* be?” That asterisk signaled a note that explained that, for the professor, 40th Street pertained to a zone four blocks wide between 38th and 42nd Streets, Woodland Cemetery, and Fairmount Park. At the time these blocks were a mix of residential, commercial, institutional, and industrial areas west of Penn’s campus. This “band of change,” as Scott Brown called it, was experiencing great shifts. Under the banner of federally backed “urban renewal,” Penn, Drexel Institute of Technology, Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science, and the Presbyterian and Osteopathic hospitals were all expanding their campuses to create “University City,” by demolishing residences and businesses—and displacing the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Black Bottom in the process. In her course notes Scott Brown pointed out that Penn’s expansion had “nothing to say of the existing, and thriving, commercial nucleus at 40th and Spruce.” By choosing this site Scott Brown was asking her students to engage the effects of urban renewal that were underway and to consider alternatives.
—Lee Ann Custer, NEH Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University

“Positioning Denise Scott Brown: Los Angeles, 1965–1966”

A relatively small selection of extraordinary images taken by Scott Brown showing what we would now call “the novel ecologies”—generated by freeways cutting through mountains, houses perched precariously on canyon edges, and agricultural land paved over for parking lots—have been widely reproduced. However the archive of her photographic corpus is comprised of an extraordinarily large number of relatively ordinary images taken from above: from planes and, most interestingly, helicopters that traveled through a specific airspace that belongs neither to the logic of the close and granular view from the ground nor to the omnipotent and totalizing view then being developed by satellite imaging. Scott Brown’s images are not merely taken from the helicopter; they are helicopter images: middle-distance views that offer neither individuals, nor singularities, nor comprehensive panoramas. Often hazy and unbounded, these images seek patterns and/or data. They are images for and of research—remote, detached, distanced. Helicoptering was becoming ubiquitous in Los Angeles during the 1960s and drew all sorts of things into its airspace. Visitors to the studio, including Herbert Gans and Philip Thiel, submitted receipts for helicopter tickets because copter fleets functioned as public transportation. Disneyland offered rides both as transportation to the park and as entertainment over the park. Most of the pilots were veterans, particularly from Vietnam, where the Huey had begun as a means of Medevac in 1958 and became a key component of the U.S military arsenal. Helicopters were also new and important features of the information environment, permitting live film footage of events unfolding below. The Watts Uprising was one event that brought the impact of urban renewal into suburban homes via the safe distance afforded by the Telecopter link. The middle-distance space created by helicopter traffic in the effort to visualize and manage urban information derived from a range of contradictory sources—sociological data, one-on-one interviews, news media, etc.—had its textual analog in the way Scott Brown’s syllabus organized discourse.
—Sylvia Lavin, Professor, Princeton University

“Functionalism as Fixation and Foil”

The question remains open: If Denise Scott Brown had published “Determinants of Urban Form,” could it have been her version of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, establishing her voice as an individual? As much as she resisted the model of heroic sole authorship, she also wanted very much to be heard. The chance to participate in important disciplinary social and conceptual conversations, along with accurate authorial attribution, were very important to her. One legacy of this critical juncture is clear. Forty years after her statement “The Function of a Table,” Scott Brown remained a defiant counter-reformation functionalist, calling this ethos “a glory of Modern architecture” and her “profession’s joy” in 2008. For her, functionalist designers paradoxically do not try to control what structures will do. They clarify needs, aesthetics, and principles, yes, but they also “recognize and respond to everything in flux that impinges upon them.” As she put it, “To face the ugly results of doing the right thing” produces an “agonized beauty … the kind I like—and it can change aesthetic sensibilities. That is my view of functionalism.” For Scott Brown, functional design accepts the ways dynamic systems of form and forces inflect one another, what Lee Ann Custer called “this complex and oscillating relationship.”
—Denise Costanzo, Associate Professor, Pennsylvania State University

Panel discussion “The City in Flux: Form, Forces, and Functions”

Elihu Rubin: One of the prominent elements in all of these papers is the way in which the archives have been brought to the surface and showcased in many ways. What were you looking for when you set off into these archives? Did you have a clear question, or did you let things develop as you discovered them? How did you decide on some of the wonderful artifacts you chose to present to us today?

Lee Ann Custer: I focused on Venturi’s class on the theories of architecture and how it related to Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. The 1964 syllabus has Scott Brown’s name at the top, so I wanted to know more about their collaboration during that year. I also just wanted to know a lot more about what Scott Brown had taught at Penn. So that was the kernel that opened up into this project.

Sylvia Lavin: I think about the archive in the way the Surrealists thought about the flea market, which is that they are always the same. What’s different is the perspective you bring on any given day. I’ve been in the Scott Brown archive many times, always concerned about slightly different things. On this occasion, I was thinking that the name Denise Scott Brown, the topic of this symposium and publication, was a problem because if you ask an archive a monographic question you are sure to get a monographic answer. Paradoxically, however, we have learned a great deal from Scott Brown about the importance of rejecting monographic models of authorship so I wanted to figure out how to address and not address Scott Brown at the same time. I began by looking in the archives for things that I thought might lead me both to and away from her. My hunch was that her tenure-review letters would serve this purpose, enabling me to avoid hagiography and presentism by focusing on critical assessments of her work made in 1966. What I found was a series of letters that she had solicited not as part of the formal tenure process but as evaluations of her studio teaching. I was struck by her decision to request them and even more struck by the fact that she kept them all, even quite unflattering ones. It seemed like a remarkable attachment to some notion of the objective integrity of the historical record, even if the record consisted of highly subjective, even personally snarky, statements. This first set of documents led me down a rabbit hole filled with people critiquing her. She asked for responses to her syllabus…and she got them! From my perspective on that day, her archive operated as a repository of how political discourse unfolded within academia as colleagues from different disciplines took each other to task for failing to learn from their different knowledge domains: the sociologist complained about excluding women as a category of urban subjects and the planner complained about neglecting to address the role of racial covenants as determinants of urban form. That Scott Brown exposed these “failures” suggests that, at least to me, such failures to communicate are precisely what interdisciplinarity achieved in 1966.

Denise Costanzo: I found the syllabus and comments incredibly fascinating as well. If anything, I think it’s a demonstration of a commitment to radical honesty. It’s something we do all the time in academic writing when we get these anonymous peer reviews. But there’s something so bracingly transparent about saying, I’m not only going to make sure this idea is included; I’m going to make sure you know that I did not think of it first.

Sylvia Lavin: Maybe we could also call it radical positioning because it’s important to think about the impact of using the phrase “I have a dream” in a syllabus in 1966. That was a line that didn’t need attribution but did that make it available to be appropriated?

Denise Costanzo: About ten years ago I grappled with the question of what Venturi and Scott Brown actually mean when they call themselves functionalists. And given that this signals the moment when they became much more closely bound, it was a way to tease out which voice is whose. I think there’s an incredibly important conversation to have about the impossibility of that on one level, but it’s also part of a larger question about erasure and attribution. When someone is dealing with the professional conditions she was working in, there is a tendency to elide her presence and voice. There is clearly a legitimate project in figuring that out.

Daniel Burnham said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and work remembering that a noble logical diagram once recorded will never die but long after we are gone will be a living thing asserting itself with an ever-growing insistency.” … Scott Brown wrote of her admiration for Burnham’s conception of the city as a set of urban systems, a plurality, and an ordered complexity, but planning for that plurality had by her time become a far more fraught affair, as questions of the exercise of power and the construction of taste complicated the notion of the public good upon which Burnham unquestioningly relied. These three papers help illuminate how she probed these difficult questions in the 1960s and ’70s and the resulting nondoctrinaire approach that she put forward in her own work.
—Izzy Kornblatt, PhD student, Yale School of Architecture

“With Lots of Love: South Street, 1968–1972”

Opposition to the expressway in public hearings in May 1964 came mere months before the revolt of Black citizens to counter police violence in North Philadelphia, the first in a series of actions across the United States that rose to a zenith in the long hot summer of 1967. That year, in fact, objections to a store owner’s discrimination against Black customers on South Street were met with injunctions to obstruct their protest. Police commissioner Frank Rizzo oversaw the deployment of 500 police officers in riot suits to quash nascent unrest in the streets. In one of Scott Brown’s photographs the watchwords Black Power writhe across a vacant storefront in aerosol paint. The viewer senses the invisible presence of Black assertion, under peril of abuse and obliteration, rendering the air electric. Scott Brown later wrote that on South Street and in other early projects “social change and the unrest that went with it dogged my steps in every place. Fortuitously the lessons learned in one tied neatly to the next, and many questions resolve themselves in planning school … during the Civil Rights Movement.” … Evident in Scott Brown’s prose is a clear and alternative conception of the country’s bicentennial as an occasion to celebrate Black histories in Philadelphia. The very first page of her counter-plan asserts, “We recommend that South Street’s importance historically and culturally to immigrant groups and particularly, today, to Negro culture be spelled out for the Bicentennial in a manner that matches Society Hill.” She also calls for measures to ensure residents access to health care, education, recreation, and commerce. The document proposes the institution of a “Museum of Slavery,” a “Museum of Immigrant Culture,” and a “Promenade of Negro Culture and History.” Scott Brown’s research shows the consideration of historic-preservation tactics and mechanisms to formalize them just at the cusp of the development of academic preservationist disciplines in American graduate programs. The text of her counter-plan prioritizes the involvement of South Street residents in the rehabilitation efforts, with specific reference to Black business owners.
—Sarah Moses (BA ’10), PhD candidate, Harvard University

“Learning from Co-op City, or What Price Aesthetics?”

Denise has said that the thesis of the duck and the decorated shed occurred to her and Bob as they were commuting up to New Haven from Philadelphia, looking out the train window at vernacular industrial buildings before arriving at the A&A Building. The contrast between High architecture and the everyday built environment suggested the metaphor of the duck and the decorated shed. For me half a century later, also commuting from Philadelphia to teach at Yale, the view from the train window—in my case of Co-op City, visible on the left going north—initially prompted my interest in revisiting the rather surprising and controversial article by Denise and Bob that appeared in Progressive Architecture in February 1970, “Co-op City: Learning to Like It.” …The article, which brazenly went against orthodox architectural opinion, elicited outraged letters from a number of the magazine’s readers. The editors chose to publish two of the more indignant ones in the April issue, under the heading “Co-op City Controversy.” The first came from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, who was then teaching at Columbia University. Not mincing words, she pointed out the article’s contradictions with Venturi’s argument in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which had appeared four years earlier, declaring it “profoundly shocking that an architect whose primary inspiration would seem to have come from the urban facades of Italy should so cleverly ignore the deadly anti-urbanism of this project.” The second letter came from architect Ulrich Franzen, who likewise expressed shock. Couching his response in terms of recent political events, he denounced the authors’ endorsement of “status quo doctrine,” declaring that “one year after the election of the Nixon administration” the defense of “Co-op City’s coarsely scaled and lifeless community on grounds of lowest cost and the implied endorsement of existing subsidy policies” raised “the ghost of a silent majority architecture.” Several months later Scott Brown responded to both Moholy-Nagy and Franzen with her own broadside. Dated September 1970, the six-page letter, addressed to editor-in-chief Forrest Wilson, went unpublished but a carbon copy is conserved in the Penn archives. It begins by complimenting Moholy-Nagy for her previous “sensible and refreshing” critiques of “the latest architectural and planning dogma.” Scott Brown then goes on to castigate Moholy-Nagy for endorsing “architect-designed social housing” that “cannot be afforded by the majority of the urban workforce.” As to Franzen’s “currently fashionable Nixon-silent-majority critique,” Scott Brown notes that “there seems to be a very fine line between liberalism and class snobbery.” She concludes with a pointed comment on “the question of ascription.” After initially referring to “Venturi and his wife,” Moholy-Nagy had used the masculine pronoun throughout her letter to the editor, while Franzen had ignored Scott Brown’s contribution altogether. So Scott Brown undertook to set the record straight: “I wrote the article. It contains an inseparable amalgam of our shared opinions but owes as much to my planning experience and research in housing, here and particularly in development areas, as to either of our architectural theories. For the record, one of us writes the first draft, the other adds, criticizes, and edits; whoever is named first wrote the first draft. This is a fairly standard academic procedure. Missing its implication implies a male chauvinism which can be expected from the Franzens of the profession but hardly from the wife of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.”
—Joan Ockman, Vincent Scully Visiting Professor, Yale School of Architecture

“‘Make Little Plans’: Scott Brown at the Fiftieth Anniversary of CIAM”

The balancing act between critique and celebration at La Sarraz 1978 was received with mixed emotions. Yet Scott Brown remembers the event fondly as the first time she and Venturi “went public in Switzerland.” Judging from comments and media accounts, her contribution must have been one of the most consequential, even though she was treated as the “wife of the speaker.” Scott Brown extended the discussion about meaning in architecture to the scale of the city and its inhabitants, offering a viable alternative to CIAM-inspired tabula rasa urban renewal. Presenting her work and ideas at La Sarraz, Scott Brown took part as a practitioner and innovative thinker in her own right. Her opposition to the Athens Charter would be a constant throughout her work. Scott Brown’s strategy of “little plans,” her advocacy for keeping existing structures, is an early example of dealing with the given, which combined her social, economic, and functional concerns. Her ideas remain relevant today—especially in light of the ongoing climate crisis. Denise, the floor is yours.
—Frida Grahn, editor and PhD candidate, USI Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio

Response by Denise Scott Brown

The planner of Co-op City wanted to be heard for his social concerns. He was a Russian immigrant. And later we heard an account by Sonia Sotomayor of going as a child into public housing with her family and being delighted by its size and views, and from there arose the notion that you cut away certain things to provide other things that may delight certain people. So it’s not to exclude one for the other, but to recognize a range of preferences. In working with people on South Street I found a range of people and values, but what most people wanted was the same thing Sotomayor described, whereas I wanted to save some of the more beautiful 19th century stores, and so did the historians. People wanted houses that were in good condition that they could afford. Also, I found Alice Lipscomb very much preferred the Italian and racist Rizzo to the upper class and liberal Richardson Dilworth and felt that Rizzo heard and listened to her problems and tried to help her better than the circle of liberals.

Yes, it is puzzling, and no, I haven’t solved it, but I was amazed with the sharing values of all these groups I worked for. Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Black people had similar opinions about living on South Street. But the White people didn’t want the Black people there. That was the only difference.

There’s a tragedy in our lives now: we are about to lose the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. It’s going to be so altered and ruined that it will not be the same. And we know that something is going to happen to Wu Hall as well. Also I think there’s another that’s going to be altered. A lot has been written about that, and I would like to ask you as an audience to look it up and inundate them with complaints. … But then there’s another point that has to do with the CIAM. I began to realize that we architects need a bag of tools for dealing with urbanism in ways we can understand. Le Corbusier was right to want to formulate what I would call not a charter but a bag of tools. Let’s make it a workable, not a scary, thing: a small bag of tools. And let’s say, “You need this kind of information before you can do anything about a city, in the same way as you need to know what supports a beam before you can design a building.” … There were two gurus at Penn around architecture: one was Louis Kahn and the other was Walter Isard, who invented this way of approaching the pattern-making that forces—natural, social, and economic—impose on city form. They can be the natural forces of change we know about so well now. They can be the unyielding stone physiognomy of rocky areas, but also social forces, the behavior and the structural development of populations. Knowing enough about them to understand the patterns and paths they make has served us for years in establishing the first partis of many of our complex projects. … I should tell you one other thing: Deborah, it’s not your fault. It’s that last meeting at Yale. There was a show of our work, and also a conference, a lot like today’s conference. And it was a pretty nice conference, and I helped a lot with the show. I’d done all the descriptions and designed a little seminar area in the show so people could hold a seminar there. And we came to the conference. But it turned out I wasn’t going to be in it. Thank you, Bob Stern. What happened was he said, “Yes, you’ll be in it on Saturday,” and everyone left on Friday. So I gave the talk to the students, and they made sure to tell Stern that I gave them the best lecture of all. I am so very grateful indeed to the spirit, expertise, and goodwill with which the contributors here and Frida approached my work.