Building Culture: An Interview with Denise Scott Brown

JR: Before we discuss your museum buildings, I’d like to talk about your connections to visual art. The idea of architects learning from artists is nothing new, but it’s typically been a matter of architects taking art as an aesthetic model, and this has tended to limit architects’ interest to the kinds of art that are easiest to translate into architectural form—for example, abstract painting or sculpture. You, on the other hand, were one of the first architects to take pop art seriously. This was a revolutionary shift from form to content; you recognized that art and architecture could be connected not just by aesthetics but also by a broader set of cultural strategies, and this has opened a whole range of new possibilities for both fields. How did you first become interested in pop? Was it during your time in London as a student in the 1950s, when you encountered the groundbreaking work of the Independent Group?

DSB: No, no, much earlier. It started with my birth in Africa, or rather with my grandparents’ move there, and the two generations of rich cultural influences that I absorbed in my first twenty years of life there.

JR: Well, let’s start at the very beginning, then, and we can come back to your student years. When did your family settle in Africa?

DSB: In the 1890s, three of my grandparents left Latvia, and one (my father’s father) Lithuania, for Africa. They settled in the Rhodesias, two British colonies, now the nations of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Willie Hepker, my mother’s father, bought a one-thousand-acre farm fifteen miles from the town of Bulawayo. Beckie, my mother’s mother, was sent as a mail-order bride to marry Willie. Years before, her father had set out for South Africa to prepare a new home for his poverty-stricken family. But yellow fever quickly killed him, and relatives assumed responsibility for the children. So Beckie emigrated at eighteen, a soignée young woman with social grace and domestic skills, whose mettle would soon be tested. Willie, meeting her boat at Cape Town in 1903, fell in love with the poised and beautiful person descending the gangway. Beckie and Willie spent their early life farming, and raising and homeschooling four children.

My pop origins lie in this place, but so does everything else, and isolating it is like parting curds and whey. The fifteen miles of lion country between Bulawayo and their farm meant that visitors were rare, and Beckie was a homemaker and mainstay. She even served as family doctor. And she taught herself Jewish cooking in Rhodesia, much as I, as a foreign student at Penn, studied African housing, or Bob [Venturi], at the American Academy in Rome, read up on the American shingle style. She cultivated, cooked, and made almost everything my family had, including clothing. And, in the “pop” line, she covered paraffin cans with frilled floral chintz fabric to make an elegant bedroom dressing table. What a grand makedo artist!

JR: So there was an ethos of adaptation and reuse in your family that influenced how you later thought about art and architecture?

DSB: Yes, but even more influential was the incredible range of cultures that were mixing and colliding in the South Africa of my youth. Beckie herself, for example, brought a mixture of Jewish, Baltic, and European cultures with her, but she also consciously acculturated to the British way of life. So, whereas she would serve wine to guests as a Latvian, as an English colonial lady she served tea from a silver Georgian teapot made in the late nineteenth century (we still have it) with milk. To give you another example, our piano was one of our prize possessions. It represented the centrality of music in our lives, but it was also a link to Jewish and Eastern European culture that remained important wherever we went. I remember someone saying, “Every Jewish household should have a piano in it.” So whether it was Africa, Israel, or anywhere else my relatives settled, there was always a piano to be used by the women of the family. The one in my grandparents’ house came by train to the railhead in Bulawayo, then made its final lap to their farm in a wagon drawn by oxen along a riverbed. Shortly thereafter, a storm blew the roof off their house, leaving this prized possession open to the rain.

JR: It sounds like your family has a fascinating background, but I’m interested in hearing more about how this range of influences affected your own development.

DSB: Well, it made me into a thoroughly cross-cultural individual. I was raised in an environment of jarring combinations, contradictory feelings, and many languages. My grandmother knew German, Lettish (her name for Latvian), Russian, English, and French. And in line with upper-class practice in Russia and Courland, where she grew up, she demanded that the English governess she hired for her children also speak French. Both she and my mother also spoke Northern Ndebele, a Bantu language related to Zulu—I, too, speak a few words. When I was young, my mother raised me with French and English nursery rhymes paralleling each other. Plus, my childhood was full of melodious Afrikaans folk songs, mixed with a few Yiddish and German ones from my grandmother, later to be joined by Zionist and Hebrew songs and, when I entered primary school, a slew of Anglican hymns. Similar cultural mixing was going on all around me. My most vivid impressions derived from local African craftspeople who adapted Western commercial and industrial artifacts lying around them—empty Coca-Cola bottles, for example, that they covered in traditional beadwork.

JR: Pop art is usually discussed in terms of tension between high and low culture. But your example suggests another opposition: between the global and the local, Indigenous craft meets the commodity object. Would you say that is part of what pop means to you?

DSB: Again, my version of pop comes from all these different cultures and legacies. And you might think my discovery of pop was about moving away from modernism, but it’s not quite that simple because all these influences came alongside another one that may surprise you: very mainstream modernism.

JR: That does surprise me. What do you mean?

DSB: You see, my mother studied architecture in South Africa, and she was part of this little group of disciples of Le Corbusier. She never got her degree, but one of her classmates, Norman Hanson, became a successful architect, and he designed a house for my parents. My family moved there when I was four, in 1935. It was probably the second international style house in Johannesburg. And even at a very young age, I could tell how different it was. In a traditional house, the door handles are about three feet high, which means you can reach them as a three-year-old. But I had to wait until I was five, because in our house the doors had steel lever handles up at four-foot-something. And although I had no attic to play in, I had an enormous flat roof to explore.

JR: I have to admit I’ve never thought about Le Corbusier’s obsession with flat roofs from a child’s point of view, but it sounds wonderful. Modernism wasn’t an abstract idea for you, then; it was something concrete and personal, something that you lived with. Can you explain how this early connection to modernism influenced your subsequent architectural education?

DSB: It certainly did impact my architectural education, but there were stepping-stones between the two. My mother, my sister Ruth, and I shared an interest in art in all forms—music, dance, and especially painting. I would spend hours paging through my mother’s coffee-table books, mainly of impressionists and postimpressionists. My mother took us to exhibitions, too, and I noticed that many European refugee artists who painted African subjects were producing picturesque scenes that looked just like the European impressionists. But there was a Dutch Jewish refugee, Roza van Gelderen, who held classes for children that I joined. She was a social realist, and she said, “You will not be artists if you don’t paint what’s around you.” That was a very important lesson.

JR: And then you went on to study architecture at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg?

DSB: Yes, the same university where my mother had studied in the 1920s.

JR: Was it unusual for a woman to be enrolled in architecture at the time?

DSB: In retrospect, yes. But to me, because my mother had done it, it wasn’t unusual. I grew up thinking architecture was women’s work. When I entered the first year, there were only five women in my class. And I remember looking around the studio and thinking, What are all these men doing here?

JR: It’s extraordinary that you had such an example to follow! When you moved to London in 1952 to continue your studies at the Architectural Association (AA), what new influences did you encounter there?

DSB: None at the beginning. England, as the head of the British Empire, had already deeply affected me as a South African. The BBC had been our chief source of news during the war, which we, too, were fighting, and our school textbooks and most other books sold in South Africa were published in England. But at the AA, I began to look more deeply into the history of architecture. I took the course John Summerson offered on classicism twice, because I was learning so much from it, and I met the great historian Nikolaus Pevsner through him. I was particularly fascinated by mannerism, which Pevsner had written about. After I graduated from the AA in 1955, I traveled in Europe with Robert Scott Brown, my first husband, carrying a copy of Pevsner’s An Outline of European Architecture (1943) and a long list prepared for us by my friend Robin Middleton, who was doing his dissertation under Pevsner, of every mannerist building and painting we would pass between England and Rome.

JR: I imagine you were learning not only about history, though, given the radical developments in London’s art and architecture scenes at the time. I know you met Peter and Alison Smithson, the trailblazing advocates of new brutalist architecture who were key members of the Independent Group. Did you encounter other members of that group as well?

DSB: Absolutely. The Smithsons’ housing studies of London were very important to me. And from the Independent Group I also got to know Reyner Banham very well—he invited me to call him Peter, as his close friends did—and Eduardo Paolozzi, who had been doing his collages since the late 1940s, so that was very early pop art.

JR: Given that you’ve used exhibitions so effectively to present your own research—I’m thinking particularly of Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City, which you organized at the Smithsonian in 1976—I’m curious to know if you saw the Smithsons’ famous exhibitions, Parallel of Life and Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1953 and This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1956?

DSB: Yes, I saw both, and they helped me see how new perspectives on urbanism were needed to rebuild Europe after the Second World War. But you have missed an important group also connected to new brutalism, which was Team 10, made up of young members of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) who were in revolt. They were very young and idealistic like us. At this time, almost everyone in architecture faced its problems via urbanism, and many wanted to study in the United States, where urbanism was considered to have been given more thought than in Europe. So Robert and I planned to go to the United States. Peter Smithson, while not employed by the AA, was frequently in the studio and took a liking to Robert. He recommended that if we were to study in America we should go to Penn [University of Pennsylvania], because Lou Kahn was there.

JR: But you studied both architecture and planning at Penn, correct?

DSB: Yes, I got full master’s degrees in both architecture and planning. Robert and I felt it was crucial to study planning because we thought we were going to go back to South Africa to participate in building a more just nation. Lou was not teaching planning, but he could see why I was going to study it if I was going back to South Africa. But Robert was killed in a car accident in 1959, and that changed everything. All my advisers encouraged me to finish my degrees, so I did, and the next semester I stayed at Penn and began teaching. I got the students thinking about the way urban patterns were formed by social, economic, and physical forces. And my required readings were also generously laden with works by the Smithsons and Team 10, neither of which were known by the student body or the faculty. There were many social movements beginning then, and everyone fought and learned and fought and learned. Herbert Gans was teaching at Penn during that time, and he was so important for giving me a proper view of sociology. My connection to that field continued with people like William L. C. Wheaton, who founded the Institute for Urban Studies at Penn and later was head of the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley. He said to us one day, “Why do architects design public spaces that people don’t use? Why don’t you go to Las Vegas and try to understand why people like it there?” So our entry into pop was also based on social questions, not only love of art.

JR: You conducted your research in Las Vegas with Robert Venturi. Did you meet him while teaching at Penn?

DSB: Yes. At one of our faculty meetings, the topic of demolishing Frank Furness’s Fine Arts Library building came up. There was a lot of argument back and forth, but I made a very passionate case to save the building, and eventually the whole architecture school faculty voted against demolition. Bob came up to me afterward and said, “I absolutely agreed with what you said about the Furness building. My name is Robert Venturi.” So the first thing I said to him was, “Well why didn’t you say something then?”

And that became sort of a joke between us, because Bob never used to speak. He was very, very shy early in his career, although eventually he got so keen on what he was doing that he stopped being shy.

JR: Obviously you shared an interest in historic preservation from the start; was pop art also a common interest? There is some discussion of pop in both your and Venturi’s writings from the 1960s, and it comes up in Learning from Las Vegas, which you wrote together with Steven Izenour and published in 1972.

DSB: Bob and I used to play a game called “I Can Like Something Uglier than You Can Like.” That was part of how we started to think about learning from things like storefronts and signs and Main Street. Looking at pop art was part of that. It was about taking popular culture and the everyday American landscape as seriously as Herbert Gans did.

JR: Can I hear more about your encounters with American pop art? I see how your friendship with the Smithsons would have led you directly to the British pop of the fifties, but in the early sixties American pop art was far from mainstream—it’s not like you could just stroll into the Philadelphia Museum of Art and see a pop show. I know that one of the first group exhibitions of pop art in America—including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg, among others—was at the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association in downtown Philadelphia in 1962. Did you see it?

DSB: Yes, although I’m surprised you know about that show because I think not that many people remember it. But I had been going to the Venice Biennale since the 1950s and first saw American pop art in an Italian government exhibition of emerging pop artists from various countries.

JR: There wasn’t a single formative encounter, in other words.

DSB: My really formative encounters were with African folk pop. The Smithsons’ interests in English and American pop and in mannerism caused me to take my first photographs of billboards, in Natal, on a visit home to South Africa in 1957. Long before I got to America I was already interested in the everyday, and in Philadelphia I had been photographing vernacular architecture and advertising and things like that since I arrived. I had a small single-lens reflex camera that I learned to use while traveling in Europe in the 1950s. Photography had become part of my way of seeing the world.

JR: Speaking of photography, how did you discover Ed Ruscha? You illustrated your 1969 article “On Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning” with images from three of his now-legendary books—Thirtyfour Parking Lots (1967), Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), and Some Los Angeles Apartments (1965). Your text appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners, and I’ve always been fascinated by the collision between this buttoned-up, academic publication and Ruscha’s avant-garde work. Particularly given that he was still relatively unknown, using his work in that context seems, for lack of more scholarly terminology, very cool.

DSB: Well, I started teaching at UCLA in 1965, and there was a nice bookstore on my way to the university from Santa Monica where I lived. I used to stop there, and I found those little books of his. And by the way, they’re worth a fortune now! I’m glad I kept them.

JR: It’s a good thing you did! So you looked him up after coming across his books?

DSB: When Bob Venturi and I taught the Learning from Las Vegas studio at Yale in 1968, we and our students stopped in Los Angeles before going on to Las Vegas. And I called Ruscha and said I’d like to bring my students to meet him.

JR: Was it a productive visit?

DSB: He was very friendly and nice, but quite young and didn’t really know what to say to them. I think he liked playing the dumb artist. Eventually they solved it with a large quantity of beer. They all drank beer, and I left.

JR: Another well-known artist that you had an early collaboration with is Stephen Shore, who took the photos for your 1976 Smithsonian exhibition. Shore was undeniably precocious—he was taking photos in Andy Warhol’s factory at age sixteen. But, when you worked with him, he still hadn’t exhibited widely, and he hadn’t yet published any of his famous books. How did you find him?

DSB: By the time we were working on that exhibition, I had gotten so involved in our architectural projects that I couldn’t do photography. Steven Izenour, who had been our teaching assistant for the Yale studio and coauthored Learning from Las Vegas with us, was very interested in photography, and he started looking for people to work on the exhibition. He’s the one who found Shore, and he also found John Bader, who does paintings that look very photographic. We had both of them traveling around the country, paid for by the Smithsonian—or really paid for by us because the Smithsonian money ran out very soon.

JR: Were you interested in the work of people like Shore or Bader—or Ruscha—as pop art in itself, or did you see it primarily as a form of documentation? In other words, were you more interested in the images or the things they depicted?

DSB: Well, I certainly saw it was art, but it was also very much in a long documentary tradition. I love the American photographers of the Depression era—people like Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans—and I saw the new work we were exhibiting in Signs of Life as connected to that.

JR: The year that your Smithsonian exhibition opened, 1976, was also the year you completed your first museum building: a major addition to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, a 1917 neo-Renaissance design by Cass Gilbert. There’s a good case to be made that your project was the first-ever postmodern museum, in that you incorporated historical references that connected your addition to the existing structure. To my knowledge, it was years before any other architect tried something similar.

DSB: But I think you may be misunderstanding, because the piece we added on was a modernist box, more or less. It was a great big, long shed.

JR: Well, I’m thinking specifically of the oversize column you placed at the back corner—the “ironic ionic,” as it’s been dubbed. But I take your point that the design is not explicitly historicist. I suppose what I’m really getting at is that your design seems to make a concerted effort to harmonize with the classical style of the existing building. Your stone facade incorporates decorative patterns that reference the original building in terms of color and texture, for example. That marks a clear shift from the approach taken by someone like, say, Gordon Bunshaft in his 1962 addition to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He slapped down a sleek box of black glass next to a 1905 Greek revival building clad in white stone—the contrast could hardly be more extreme, and that was often the modernist approach to dealing with historical structures.

DSB: There is a great big Greek column clad in wood, which you see at the back of the new gallery we added. It’s outside, but you see it through a window—very bold. That was the gallery where they put their contemporary art, which included some pop paintings and sculpture, so the column was sort of in conversation with those works. I was not so involved in that aspect of the design. I was very much involved in trying to work out how we wanted to get these two structures clashing but also relating; we wanted to get a pattern on the one that was like, but also not like, the other. You see, the program was quite complicated. As well as the new gallery, they needed a fine arts library, a conservation lab, and studio space. So it was quite a feat to get this new building, which was by necessity quite large, to fit together with the old. We had this big problem with the roof, because it was going to be terribly, terribly complex to interrupt the sloped terra-cotta roof of the existing building. I’m proudest of the contribution I made when I saw that we could take the roof of our new gallery and lift it up above the eaves of the existing building, but still keep our height lower than the crown of the old roof. So the two structures are kind of interlocked, and it’s quite wonderful.

JR: The curator of modern art at the Allen Museum, Ellen Johnson, was a well-known art historian who became something of a legend for her early support of many pop artists who would become internationally famous. Did you meet her while working on the project?

DSB: Well, yes—our contemporary art gallery is named in her honor! But she had also commissioned an important work from Claes Oldenburg, Giant Three-Way Plug (1970), and they decided to put it on the pathway to our building. It’s a nice place for it.

JR: Your next major museum was the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London. That project presented a problem similar to the one you faced in Oberlin—combining a new building with a historical structure—but with much higher stakes: it’s one of the most visited museums in Europe, located in the heart of London. How did you get involved?

DSB: Well, there was a whole competition for an expansion of the National Gallery in 1982, and the winning entry was in a high-tech style that was quite a sharp contrast to William Wilkins’s neoclassical building from 1838. Prince Charles, as he was then, had what the English call a wobbly, which means a temper tantrum. He looked at that steel-and-glass thing and said, “What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.” And then the whole world fell apart. There was a huge uproar and endless discussion about what should be done—should the design go ahead, should a new one be chosen, and so on. Someone wrote an article comparing how different architects would tackle it, saying so-and-so would do this, so-and-so would do that, but of course they didn’t mention us. I remember reading it and thinking, Hold on—I studied under Summerson, I know a lot about classicism and mannerism, we’ve already designed a museum, and we’ve done several museum exhibitions: the Smithsonian show and also 200 Years of American Sculpture, which we did in 1976 for Tom Armstrong when he was director of the Whitney.

JR: Which was another project that involved some complex historical juxtapositions. You had artists like David Smith and Donald Judd alongside everything from Hopi artifacts to New England weather vanes.

DSB: Exactly. And so I began to think, They just don’t know what we can do. I was getting crosser and crosser, and eventually one of my former students asked, “Why don’t you call Jacob Rothschild?” At that time he was the chair of the National Gallery’s board of trustees. So I did. I was visiting my parents, who had moved to Switzerland, and I was thinking about stopping in London on my way home. Rothschild told me that he wouldn’t be there but that the director and the assistant keeper would be, and that I should talk to them. I did, and it was a great success. They told me that they happened to have a team in New York interviewing architects and asked if Bob and I would come up from Philadelphia to be interviewed. We did that, and then eventually they held a second competition, an invited one, and we produced something they liked very much.

JR: In addition to your experience with museums and exhibitions, you had a deep connection to London from your time as a student. Did that influence your approach to the National Gallery?

DSB: Of course! When I got to England, I had to be in school all week. I used to go to museums on Sundays, and they were terribly crowded; I would be trying to look at paintings while I was being swept along in a phalanx fifteen people abreast. So when we were working on our design, we educated the board. They didn’t know what it was like to see the museum on a busy weekend, and I don’t know if they understood the importance of urban outreach.

JR: It sounds like you saw the museum in part as an urban design problem. Did your experience in planning influence that perspective?

DSB: Certainly. It’s a public building, so the question is how to shape it so that the public can flow through it. We thought of it as a kind of transportation problem. In the fall of 1967, Bob and I had taught a studio at Yale together that analyzed the New York City subway. And that was inspired partly by what we had seen at the Expo in Montreal that spring. I wrote an analysis of the Expo for the Journal of the American Institute of Planners (“Planning the Expo,” July 1967), and I talked about how most of the shows were designed so that you couldn’t see them at all, because the pavilions simply weren’t planned to deal with such masses of people. We learned quite a few things from looking at crowds, and that’s how we came up with the circulation system for our design. We called it a people freeway going through the building.

JR: The Sainsbury Wing was designed to house the National Gallery’s early Renaissance paintings, including very famous works like Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, from 1437–1445. That’s a far cry from Oldenburg and the other contemporary artists you were designing space for at Oberlin. Do you see the National Gallery as connected to this pop trail we’ve been tracing through your work? Is it a pop building?

DSB: Yes, and it is many other things as well. It’s a pop building in the sense that it considers the populace—it’s a building that takes usage, connectivity, and necessity into account, as any great museum should. We wanted people to use the building in many different ways—to spend a whole day there or to down a quick lunch, then view their favorite painting. We wanted Trafalgar Square to assert its new identity in relation to the museum and what they offered each other. And, in the galleries, we wanted the sky outside and its changes to register, and Lord Nelson and his column to be visible from within and without. And I love the way our building’s motherly arms welcome the crowds in Trafalgar Square. Recently, there was a protest against Trump and the whole square was full, with people pressed right up against the museum.

JR: What about the historical references incorporated into your design?

DSB: Well, in many ways the design reflected our personal experience with the history of architecture. We learned lessons in lighting from the Dulwich Picture Gallery by Sir John Soane. And we were thinking about Palladianism, both in Italy, its country of origin, and in Europe, America, and parts of the British Empire. We were especially influenced by Italian palazzos we had visited that had been converted to galleries, where intriguing parts of the city peeked out between window curtains. This amalgam of national styles was influenced as well by my two months of living and photographing in Venice when I was there for a CIAM conference in 1956. From the young Italian architects I met there, I learned about the great palazzos, which had formal entrances reached by gondola on the Grand Canal and working entrances served by sandoli, smaller boats for the delivery of services. I saw, too, how the Venetian floods caused the piano nobile to be well above the water, and I studied the stairs that connected the ground floor, where merchandise was often stored, with the living areas above.

In the Sainsbury Wing, Bob and I tried to imitate the skill with which the relationships of scale and circulation were handled in these buildings. We also studied the joining of the spectacular front facades to more workmanlike buildings behind. The broad stair that connects the Trafalgar Square entrance to the elevated walkway linking the Sainsbury Wing to the Wilkins Building—which we called, in another Venetian reference, the Bridge of Sighs—was the trickiest part. It stumped us until Bob had the idea of borrowing a baroque device that Edwin Lutyens had used for a bank in the City of London, giving the stairway a diagonal shape in plan that produces a trompe l’oeil deception as you climb it. Unfortunately, the board has recently supported changes that scratch away at our design, and since the Sainsbury Wing is one of my best-known works, I feel this is a sad end to my career. I’m still fighting hard to save it.

JR: But surely your legacy goes far beyond your buildings: You’ve produced an incredible range of writing and thinking about architecture. And many scholars and critics are continuing to explore your pioneering role in the field. Looking back over the press coverage of the National Gallery opening in 1991, I was shocked to see the building almost universally described as designed exclusively by Robert Venturi, despite the fact that your name is right there in the name of the firm hired to create it: Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates! I can’t see anyone describing the National Gallery in this way today. Certainly, our understanding of your work has shifted, and indeed the whole field of architecture has shifted, thanks in part to you.

DSB: My legacy is showing now. The architectural historian Frida Grahn recently put together a beautiful book called Denise Scott Brown in Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect, a collection of twenty-two perspectives on my works. It covered my architecture, planning, and education projects and was published in 2022 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Learning from Las Vegas. I’m happy that so many people want to continue the conversation.