In the early 1970s, when she moved to New York with her husband, Rem Koolhaas, she began to paint a series of images inspired by the architecture of Manhattan. The global success of Daniel Libeskind, meanwhile, owes a huge amount to his wife, Nina, a fearsome political negotiator who has handled every aspect of the company’s management.ĭutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp has been long accustomed to the lack of credit to the wives of maverick male architects. Patty Hopkins, co-founder of Hopkins Architects, was quite literally erased from history when she was Photoshopped out of a group of male hi-tech architects to promote the 2014 BBC series, The Brits Who Built the Modern World. A deeply institutionalised invisibility cloak has long obscured the women in successful architectural partnerships, whether it’s MJ Long’s work on the British Library, a project usually credited to her husband Colin St John Wilson, or Su Rogers and Wendy Foster’s work on early projects with their husbands, Richard and Norman (though Rogers feels she was always equally credited for her work and says she’s never suffered any discrimination from being a woman working in architecture). Her letter was printed under the title “Less is a Bore”, a quotation from her husband. Scott Brown once wrote to an editor to correct the attribution. The term has been popularised over the decades, often now referred to as the “Venturian duck”. She also coined the term “duck” to refer to buildings that act as sculptural, symbolic objects (in reference to a duck-shaped egg-stand on Long Island), set in opposition to the “decorated shed”, a functional box with ornament applied independently of what’s going on inside. Scott Brown chose Las Vegas as the subject she would teach at Yale with Venturi and Steven Izenour in 1968. Composite: Alamy/Rolfe Kentish Long & Kentish architects It also resonated with ideas she had learned in London from Alison and Peter Smithson, while studying at the Architectural Association, the Strip in effect being a very large “as-found” object.Ĭo-creator … MJ Long, whose husband is often credited for the British Library. She had already made several pilgrimages to the Vegas Strip by the time she took Venturi there in 1966, drawn by a fascination with roadside vernaculars and pop culture that she had developed growing up in South Africa. However, it is clear that Learning from Las Vegas, the “gentle manifesto” published in 1972 that championed billboards and hot dog stands as worthy of architects’ attention, would never have happened without Scott Brown. The individual contributions of creative partnerships are always difficult to disentangle. It was the most unanimous decision of any such deliberations I have witnessed. I was part of the jury this year, and as soon as Scott Brown’s name was mentioned, all the other competition fell away. She is the second recipient of an annual award given to architects who have made a major contribution to their field. This month marks a small righting of past wrongs when Denise Scott Brown, now 87, will be awarded the 2018 Soane medal. Only a year earlier, his jury had awarded the gong to Chinese architect Wang Shu, overlooking the fact that his practice has always been a joint partnership with his architect wife, Lu Wenyu. “A later jury cannot reopen, or second-guess, the work of an earlier jury,” he wrote in response, before thanking the petitioners for “calling directly to our attention a more general problem, namely that of assuring women a fair and equal place within the profession”. “Let’s salute the notion of joint creativity.” Lord Peter Palumbo, chair of the prize, politely declined. “They owe me not a Pritzker prize but a Pritzker inclusion ceremony,” Scott Brown said. In 2013, two students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design began an online petition to demand that her contribution be recognised. Photograph: George Pohl/Courtesy of Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.Īs she recounted in her 1989 essay, Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture, there would be celebratory dinners where she was left out “because we’re not inviting wives” job interviews where she was excluded because the presence of “the architect’s wife” distressed the board countless meetings that began “So you’re the architect!” to Venturi, followed by: “And you’re an architect too?” To crown it all, when the 1991 Pritzker prize jury described how their body of work had “expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this century, as perhaps no other has”, the accolade was awarded to Venturi alone. ‘We’re not inviting wives’ … Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in 1968.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |