Encounters

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” for the first time presents an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s: focused on 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.