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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

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9783037787946

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DENISE SCOTT BROWN is an architect, planner and urban designer, and a theorist, writer and educator whose projects and ideas have influenced designers and thinkers worldwide. Working in collaboration with Robert Venturi for more than fifty years, she guided the trajectory of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. Among the buildings she shaped are the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London and the Provincial Capitol Building for the Département de la Haute-Garônne in Toulouse, France. She has taught at various universities and authored influential books including Learning from Las Vegas  (1972, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour); Urban Concepts (1990); and Having Words (2009). IZZY KORNBLATT is a critic, historian and designer based in New Haven, Connecticut. His writings have appeared in Architectural Record, where he serves as a contributing editor, as well as in other publications and in four books. He has curated exhibitions at the Athe- naeum of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale University School of Architecture. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture at Yale.

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