| 1 | Name: | Ms. Denise Scott Brown | |
| Institution: | Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates | ||
| Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1931 | ||
As an architect, planner, author and educator, Denise Scott Brown has helped to redirect the mainstream of modern architecture since the mid-1960s. No architect studying or in practice can have avoided her work or missed her call to broaden architecture to include ideas on pluralism and multiculturalism; social concern and activism; Pop Art, popular culture, and the everyday landscape; symbolism, iconography and context; the uses and misuses of history; electronic communication; the patterns of activities; the doctrine of functionalism; the relevance of mannerism; the role of generic building; and uncomfortably direct and uncomfortably indirect design--all these, in the making of architecture and urbanism today. Ms. Scott Brown feels she owes her views to a childhood and first architecture training at Witwatersrand University in South Africa in the 1940s and early 1950s, followed by London and the Architectural Association, 1952-55, and the University of Pennsylvania, 1958-1965. She received masters degrees in city planning and architecture from Penn and spent five years on the faculty while the social planning movement was being initiated there. She has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA and Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities and has lectured and advised world wide on architecture, urbanism and education. When she joined Robert Venturi in practice, she was well known for her contributions to theoretical research and education on the nature of cities. The early fruits of their collaboration were the research studies, "Learning from Las Vegas" and "Learning from Levittown." These projects and the book "Learning from Las Vegas (1972 by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour) challenged architects to study the human use and social context of architecture, the role of perception and memory in architecture, and the communicative possibilities of architecture. A primary focus had to do with symbolism and iconography. This turned the authors once again to history, to rediscover facets of architecture forgotten by the Modern Movement. Since 1967, as a leader of the firm now called Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Denise has participated in a broad range of the firm's projects, including the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, the Conseil Général complex in Toulouse, and the Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri hotel and spa near Nikko, Japan. As principal-in-charge for urban planning, urban design, and campus planning, her work has included urban planning for South Street, Philadelphia, Miami Beach, and Memphis, Tennessee; programming for the National Museum of the American Indian; and a plan for the Bouregreg Valley in Morocco. Today, Scott Brown focuses on urban university planning and design, where she employs tools evolved by melding the methods of planning and architecture. Her projects have included campus planning for Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard and the University of Kentucky. She directed the University of Michigan campus master plan and plans for several of its sub-campuses. In this role, she evolved the design concepts for the Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth, the Perelman Quadrangle precinct at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Life Sciences complex at the University of Michigan, and was able to exert guidance over these projects from campus planning, through design and construction, to successful use. Scott Brown has recently written on urban planning and design for the World Trade Center site, Philadelphia's Penn's Landing, and New Orleans and has a new book of collected essays out: Having Words. She has worked on a campus life plan and campus center for Brown University, a master plan update for Tsinghua University in Beijing, and a proposal for rehabilitating the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Among her awards are the Anne d'Harnoncourt Award for Artistic Excellence from the Arts & Business Council of Philadelphia (with Robert Venturi, 2010); the Vilcek Prize, awarded to a foreign-born American for outstanding achievement in the arts (architecture) and for contributions to society in the U.S., from the Vilcek Foundation (2007); the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's National Design Mind Award (with Robert Venturi, 2007); the ACSA-AIA Topaz Medallion for distinguished teaching in architecture (1996); the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts' Benjamin Franklin Medal (1993); the National Medal of Arts (1992); the Republic of Italy's Commendatore of the Order of Merit (1987); the Chicago Architecture Award (1987); the AIA Gold Medal (with Robert Venturi, 2016); and the Jane Drew Prize (2017). | |||