Forms, Forces, Functions - (Ekphrasis) by Denise Scott Brown (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This vibrant collection of essays by the iconic architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown captures the visionary mind that has transformed our understanding of contemporary aesthetics, semiotics, and experience.

Denise Scott Brown is a preeminent figure in twentieth-century architecture and urban planning, but her influence extends far beyond these fields. Her groundbreaking, deeply humanist approach to design considers the built environment as a shared, lived-in space, shaped by cultural, social, and historical structures and forces. She is widely known for her seminal 1972 text Learning from Las Vegas, coauthored with her partner, Robert Venturi, which gave form to knowledge that fundamentally changed how we understand the spaces we inhabit. Scott Brown's writing, like her architecture, is eclectic, witty, and compelling, drawing upon theory and her own life experiences to reorient our attention toward the needs of everyday people.

This new addition to David Zwirner Books's ekphrasis series brings together approximately ten essays by Scott Brown that exemplify her spirit of inquiry. Together, these essays offer us an invitation to really see and think--and then to act through writing, designing, and building. An introduction by Elizabeth Schambelan situates these essays within Scott Brown's extraordinary career and underscores their continued relevance today as we seek to both determine and grasp the unfolding new worlds around us.

The first title in the ekphrasis series to focus on the built environment, this volume expands the series' driving inquiry into reading the social, cultural, and architectural landscapes around us with renewed attention.

About the Author

Denise Scott Brown (born 1931) is an architect, planner, writer, educator, and former principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. Denise Scott Brown and her late husband and partner, Robert Venturi, are regarded among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and their theoretical writing and teaching. Her advisory, master planning, and design projects span work for international cities, universities, museums, and other important sites, including work on the Sainsbury Wing of the British National Gallery in London, the Seattle Art Museum, the Children's Museum of Houston, Franklin Court of Philadelphia, the Nikko Kirifuri resort in Japan, and the provincial capitol building in Toulouse, France. She has held architecture and planning professorships at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Harvard, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Yale, and visiting positions at Rice, Oberlin, UC Santa Barbara and Princeton.

Elizabeth Schambelan is a writer and editor in New York. She has written for publications including Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Triple Canopy. She was an executive editor of Artforum from 2019 until 2023. She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.