Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs - by Izzy Kornblatt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first publication dedicated to the perceptive photographic oeuvre of one of the most important postwar architects and co-author of the influential Learning from Las Vegas

For Denise Scott Brown (born 1931), 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 gathers an essential collection of Scott Brown's photography from the 1950s to the 1970s, presented here for the first time.
The book focuses 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, met her partner Robert Venturi and eventually developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which her most famous work, Learning from Las Vegas, would emerge. 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.

Review Quotes

Now that we have a large sampling of her pictures, we see this approach dovetailing naturally with her photography. Her pictures are routine, systematic, and unflashy, sustained with a self-contained logic, and existing independent of grand theories. If Brown's pictures were buildings, they might be a gas station on the Vegas strip or a bridge over the Delaware River. Perfunctory, captivating, and worth a moment of attention.--Blake Andrews "Collector Daily"

[A] pleasure to hold and carry.--Mark Feeney "The Boston Globe"

Deeply committed to community and arts education, [Ruth Asawa] approached making as an extension of living, seeing creativity in every act. This retrospective honors that vision, inviting viewers to experience the quiet radicalism of an artist who found infinite variation in the simplest of means.--Kat Barandy "designboom"

Just as her sculptures teased a supple elegance from coarse materials, at times drawing inspiration from hardy desert plants, Asawa's career embodied a sort of defiant hospitality. A child of immigrants persecuted for their national origin and a practitioner of an abstract idiom that could have signalled placelessness, she instead forged an art of connection--one that expressed a flinty determination to be, and to make others feel, at home in the world.--Julian Lucas "The New Yorker"

The exhibition features more than 370 works, dating back to the artist's studies at Black Mountain College in the 1940s. From there, we follow her ongoing adventures in looped wire - breathtakingly beautiful and meditative aerial sculptures adorn almost every room - encounter everything from her calligraphic ink paintings to her designs for public monuments, and discover the myriad artworks that adorned her San Francisco home, created in collaboration with her six children. The cumulative effect is a striking testament to Asawa's belief that living and making art are inseparably entwined.--Daisy Woodward "AnOther Magazine"

Together with her late husband Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown created some of the most familiar and influential works of postmodern architecture, from the house for her mother-in-law outside Philadelphia to London's National Gallery Sainsbury Wing. But this book of her photos reveals her to have as sharp an eye for social and human issues and townscape as she ever did for architecture. Street photography through an architect's humane and quirky lens.--Jackie Wullschlager "The Financial Times"

These photographs invite you to sit down and look closely at the everyday around you with fresh eyes.--Karen Gu "The Brooklyn Rail"