The retrospective that does justice to the architect Denise Scott Brown

BilbaoThe architect Denise Scott Brown was born in 1931 in Nkana, Zambia, with the surname Lakofski, which she changed upon marrying her first husband, the also architect Robert Scott Brown, who tragically died in an accident in 1959. As seen in the exhibition that the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is dedicating to her until August 16, her architectural training began in South Africa and continued in London and Philadelphia, where she met the architect Robert Venturi, whom she would marry in 1967. Their studio was one of the most influential of the second half of the 20th century. Together with Steven Izenour, Venturi and Scott Brown wrote the essay Learning from Las Vegas, which marked a turning point in architecture. However, Venturi received the accolades. The most significant grievance suffered by Scott Brown is being excluded from the Pritzker Prize that Venturi received in 1991. In 2013, she stated in a speech that they did not owe her the prize, but rather "a ceremony of inclusion." In fact, Scott Brown did not accompany Venturi to the Pritzker ceremony. Thus, this exhibition, the first retrospective of Scott Brown, is an act of justice.

"Venturi and Scott Brown are considered a very successful architectural couple, who did everything together, who were very relevant and who changed the course of architectural history with two major books, Complexity and Contradiction and Learning from Las Vegas. She has a prior career before meeting Venturi, but many of the merits of their joint work have been attributed solely to Robert Venturi; therefore, this exhibition is very important," states architect Maria Pia Fontana, curator of the exhibition along with Miguel Mayorga. "It is very difficult to establish a division in a couple that worked in such an integrated way," points out Mayorga. For the museum's chief curator, Guillermo Zuaznabar, Scott Brown's pioneering ideas are found at the roots of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. "In 1972, Scott Brown brought to architectural critical analysis words known to everyone, such as sign, monumentality, and popular, but she projected a new light on them that illuminated the paths that urban design would take in the following decades. For many architects, such as her respected friend Frank O. Gehry – author of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao – these words allowed them to design new forms and functions that, built in Bilbao, profoundly mark the days of our city and our lives," states Zuaznabar.

The exhibition is titled Denise Scott Brown. City. Street. House and is sponsored by Petronor. It includes more than a hundred pieces, including artworks, plans, drawings, photographs, and work documents, many of them unpublished. The furniture and artworks by architects and artists such as Venturi himself, Antoni Gaudí, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha come from the architect's house in Philadelphia and are a reflection of her life and how she coexists the new, the old, the valuable, and the kitsch. As the exhibition title indicates, the tour is organized into three areas, the result of her "gaze that works on different scales," says Fontana. "There are a few key concepts for understanding Scott Brown's contribution: travel as a way of life and learning, and learning by observing without prejudice to extract knowledge from everything that can offer it."

Scott Brown was also fundamental in introducing context into projects. "At that time everyone was talking about form and function, and she incorporated environmental, economic, and social forces as intangibles, a series of elements that were not taken into account, but which were fundamental," says the curator. "Scott Brown and Venturi thought that architecture was made from the outside in". In total, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi completed around 400 projects, of which more than 120 were in Philadelphia. Among their best-known works are the Seattle Art Museum, Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton University, and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London.

The importance of social fabric in street life

Scott Brown had a special interest in urbanism. In fact, he was the one who drew Venturi's attention to Las Vegas. "Focusing on the analysis of a street through symbolic elements and signs was surprising at the time," says Mayorga. For Scott Brown, the street appears as "the ultimate expression of urban life"; therefore, it cannot be on the sidelines of architecture. In the case of South Street, the architect fought with the neighbors so that highways would not impose themselves on the social fabric and community ties.

Another case study by Venturi and Scott Brown, Learning from Levittown, was a pioneering suburb where Scott Brown analyzed people's eagerness to inject life into the banality of their homes. One of the last works exhibited, with which Scott Brown and Venturi analyzed the relationship between the city and the house, is The ghost house: they were commissioned to reconstruct Benjamin Franklin's houses as a monument, but they only reconstructed the skeleton and placed it in a large public space within a block of houses on Market Street, one of the most important in Philadelphia, according to the exhibition curators to "reconnect the house with heritage and memory". The tour closes with a documentary by Pablo García Canga and Manuel Asín, which recreates a day at Scott Brown's house.