Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs

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. AUTHOR: Denise Scott Brown has taught at the University of Pennsylvania; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; and Yale University, among other institutions. SELLING POINTS: . Denise Scott Brown is one of the most prominent architects of the postwar era, known for her significant contributions to the postmodern movement via projects including the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery and the Seattle Art Museum, as well as her 1972 manifesto Learning from Las Vegas, a deeply influential (and controversial at the time) critique of modernism. She worked in collaboration with her husband, Robert Venturi, for more than fifty years at their Philadelphia-based firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now known as VSBA Architects & Planners). . Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown has always taken photographs for research, teaching, design planning and fun during her work and extensive travels. Featuring 385 color images, this landscape hardback showcases Scott Brown's insightful photographic work from the 1950s to the 1970s for the first time, moving thematically rather than sequentially through her carefully observed vignettes. . Book launch events are being planned at both this year's Venice Architecture Biennale and at the University of Pennsylvania. 385 illustrations