This photograph was taken by the architect Denise Scott Brown in Venice in 1966. It captures many of the themes that would come to define her practice throughout her career: the space of the automobile, the life of the city, and the vernacular architecture of the American commercial strip. These ideas were subsequently explored in the book ‘Learning from Las Vegas’, written with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, published in 1972.

Scott Brown was appointed co-chair of the Urban Design Program at the University of California Berkeley in 1965, where she became interested in the newer cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. About this photo, she has said: ‘I was getting to know my surroundings in Santa Monica, where I was living up in Ocean Park. I’d get going with my camera and just walk. Eventually you approach the main part of Santa Monica and Pico Boulevard is on this edge. It’s a long street that goes all the way into Los Angeles, a kind of everyday strip serving this village of Santa Monica. This photograph is about viewing the everyday landscape. We had later, in Learning from Las Vegas, many different ideas about how you map what you see. At this point, I was building up my data by photographing what I loved.’

Taken six years before the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, and the same year Scott Brown had invited Venturi to join her in that city, this photograph captures a curiosity for the commercial kitsch of the American roadside architecture. This non-judgemental approach to everyday spaces is one of the major contributions of Scott Brown’s practice.

About Denise Scott Brown
Denise Scott Brown (née Lakofski; born October 3, 1931) is an American architect, planner, writer, educator, and principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, based in Philadelphia, USA. Scott Brown and her husband Robert Venturi (1925 – 2018), are regarded as among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their design work in architecture and planning, and their contribution to theory, writing and teaching. They are most closely associated with the movement of postmodernism, building most prolifically in the 1980s and 1990s.

Scott Brown first studied architecture in South Africa from 1948 to 1952, and then in London at the Architectural Association from 1952 to 1955. She and her first husband Robert Scott Brown moved to Philadelphia in 1958 to study at the University of Pennsylvania’s planning department. Robert died in a car accident in 1959. Scott Brown completed her studies in 1960, and married Robert Venturi in 1967, when she also joined Venturi’s firm Venturi and Rauch, later becoming a principal.

The issue of authorship between Scott Brown and her husband has been one that has plagued her career. When Venturi alone was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1991, Scott Brown did not attend the award ceremony in protest. A petition organised by Women in Design, based at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, collected 20,000 signatures, arguing that Scott Brown be recognised for the Pritzker, a demand that has yet to be met.