Learning from Philadelphia

I was told as a child by a loved art teacher that you could not be creative unless you learned from what was around you.¹

Philadelphia as a Destination: Where Denise Came to Stay

The young architect Denise Scott Brown—born Denise Lakofski in the former African country of Rhodesia—arrived in Philadelphia in 1958 with her first husband, Robert Scott Brown. She finally settled down in that American city, which has been the backdrop to most of her personal, professional, and academic life ever since. Philadelphia was the destination chosen by two recent architecture graduates who had started out in South Africa and, after traveling across Africa and Europe, decided to study in the city where Louis Kahn was teaching urban planning, doing so on the advice of Peter Smithson. And so Denise—who had studied Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and later, in 1952, moved to London to work and attend the Architectural Association—opted to round out her education in Philadelphia, where she earned a master’s degree in Urban Planning and another in Architecture, eventually joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1960.

In 1959, Robert Scott Brown tragically died in Philadelphia. In 1960, Denise Scott Brown met Robert Venturi at a debate in which she argued against the demolition of the Fisher Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania, where they were both young professors. Between 1962 and 1964, Venturi and Scott Brown collaborated on several Theory of Architecture courses, and she also taught Urban Design classes that turned Philadelphia into both a laboratory and a space of exploration.

Denise Scott Brown left Philadelphia in 1965 to teach Urban Design on the West Coast, initially at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the UCLA School of Architecture. It was while teaching in Los Angeles that she made her first trip to Las Vegas, and in 1966 she invited Venturi to visit that surprising city with her. They were married in Santa Monica in 1967 and returned to the East Coast that same year. Between 1967 and 1970 she was a visiting professor at Yale University, alongside Venturi. That experience gave rise to three academic projects which were pivotal in their careers: New York City Subway (1967), the ultrafamous Learning from Vegas, or Form Analysis as Design Research (1968), and, finally, Learning from Levittown (1970)—three studio programs of tremendous impact and relevance focused on the contemporary city. The couple were also invited to teach at Rice University, Houston, as visiting professors in 1969.

After 1970, Philadelphia became her permanent base once again. Scott Brown was a young architect and photographer with a distinctive African perspective; a tireless traveler influenced by Brutalism and socioplastics with a keen interest in folk art and popular culture who saw the American city as a source of new stimuli and opportunities for learning and discovery. After a decade of moving and living on two coasts, she settled down in a city alive with energy—a political, economic, and social battlefield with its downtown ghettos, outskirts, deserted run-down neighborhoods, abandoned industrial areas, and fragmented zones alongside signs of potential modernization.

Scott Brown and Venturi lived and worked in and for the city, occupying several very different residences between 1967 and 1972. Initially, they had a twelfth-floor apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered views of downtown Philly and the river. It was located in Society Hill Towers, a condominium complex of three 31-story skyscrapers designed by I. M. Pei as part of the redevelopment of the Society Hill neighborhood. They later moved into the house that Venturi had designed for his mother in Chestnut Hill, a low-density area with plenty of green spaces, not far from Louis Kahn’s Esherick House (1961). But their cohabitation with Venturi’s mother was short-lived and, in 1972, they finally took up residence in Adelbert Fischer House, designed by Milton Medary in 1909, which Denise Scott Brown shared with Bob Venturi and their son Jimmy, born in 1971, and where she still lives today. Located in northwest Philadelphia in a neighborhood of single-family homes beside Wissahickon Gorge, it was originally designed for the German manufacturer Adelbert Fischer at the end of a cul-de-sac with a spacious back yard.

As for Venturi, he opened his first studio with Paul Cope and Mather Lippincott on North 17th Street in Philadelphia in 1958. In 1960, he formed a partnership with William Short, and they set up an office on South 16th Street. That same year, they were joined by John Rauch, and in 1964 the firm relocated to Pine Street and changed its name to Venturi and Rauch. Although Denise Scott Brown became a partner in 1969, it was not until 1980 that the business was renamed Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown and relocated to Main Street in Manayunk, an industrial area on the northwest edge of the city. After John Rauch resigned in 1989, the firm became Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (VSBA), an architecture studio that continues to operate in Philadelphia today.²

Philadelphia as Denise Found it: Debates on Critical Urban Design

The 1960s were great years for planning at Penn. Money from Washington for urban renewal brought social scientists into the department, creating havoc among the physically oriented planners trained in architecture. Sitting in the middle of the debate, I learned much of what I know about pedagogy in architecture and planning.³

Founded in 1683 by William Penn, Philadelphia is, from an urban perspective, an example of a “fair” city, with streets laid out on a grid plan and delimited by five parks. And even though that plan only corresponds to a small area of the present-day city, it is a symbol that has guided growth over the years. Philly has preserved most of its seventeenth-century layout and the five original parks. There are still colonial and federal-era buildings standing in Society Hill and Old City—more than anywhere else in North America.⁴ Modern Philadelphia has maintained many of the places and spaces where the idea of the United States took shape. Unlike many other American cities, after World War II it did not drive residents out of the city center by implementing ambitiously destructive “urban renewal” programs or building all sorts of highways and high-rise public projects. Philadelphia tried to preserve its residential areas, choosing to rescue and restore a considerable number of badly dilapidated buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁵

When Denise Scott Brown arrived in Philadelphia, the urban debate was influenced by a number of ideas about architecture and the city circulating in both academia and the professional world. Flourishing from 1951 to 1965, the Philadelphia School defined a period of convergence and renewal at the University of Pennsylvania under the leadership of Dean G. Holmes Perkins, marked by a lively debate about innovation in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture education.

The Philadelphia School approach was characterized by a critical view of functionalist and rationalist modernism; a desire to find an architecture more attuned to the needs of its social and cultural context; a concept of design that paid more attention to history and the local; and greater flexibility and experimentation with forms. Several professors stood out for their innovative, critical, and generally interdisciplinary vision: Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi revised modern architecture in light of history; Romaldo Giurgola linked architectural theory to philosophy; Robert Le Ricolais experimented with new structures; Ian McHarg questioned Western urbanization and advocated urban and regional ecology; Herbert Gans studied life in Levittown; and Denise Scott Brown, who joined the school in 1959, began to incorporate Mannerism, the ordinary, and popular culture in urban planning and design.⁶ And all this was happening with Edmund Bacon at the helm of the city’s remarkably active Planning Commission.

Philadelphia also hosted the Conference on Urban Design Criticism, whose primary aim was to facilitate an open discussion of the value of this critical exercise. It was held in October 1958, initiated by Chadbourne Gilpatric of the Rockefeller Foundation in partnership with Dean Holmes Perkins and organized by William Wheaton and David Crane with the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts. Participants included Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I. M. Pei, among many others. The event brought together top thinkers in the field of urban design to debate and analyze the built environment and played a significant part in defining this new discipline at a time when urban renewal initiatives were becoming increasingly relevant. It was a landmark conference that helped give form and substance to urban design in the twentieth century.⁷

In this dichotomy between renewing and/or preserving the existing city, the projects and personalities of two individuals were highly influential: Louis Kahn (1901–1974)⁸ and Edmund Bacon (1910–2005).⁹ Their personal and professional lives, closely connected to Philadelphia, offer vital insight into the debates of this period. Louis Kahn defended the need to preserve the historic Center City, and his vision for that area (1939-1962) stands out among the series of plans he developed over more than two decades. From the late 1930s to the early 1960s, Kahn advocated “urban design” based on an architectural principle of integrating building designs and the urban system so that both could exist coherently with the built and natural environments already in place. This transdisciplinary approach to design paved the way for the development of several new ideas—some of them quite radical—in urban studies.¹⁰

Edmund Bacon, on the other hand, embodied the debate surrounding the city’s modernization. His biography could just as easily serve as an urban history of modern Philadelphia; in fact, Gregory Heller’s chronicle of his life presents Bacon as the third pole in the mid-century struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses for the soul of the American city, highlighting his interactions and tensions with real estate developers, politicians, and architects that also involved his friend and colleague Louis Kahn.¹¹

The Crosstown Expressway, a project developed in the early 1960s that consisted in building a loop road around the city center, had been included among the ideas presented at the 1947 exhibition A Better Philadelphia under the supervision of Bacon, head of City Planning at the time. Officially announced in 1955, the plan threatened to demolish South Street—a run-down yet vibrant commercial area with a unique personality that also happened to be the heart of the city’s African American community. Somewhere between heroic undertaking and pragmatic solution, the project was riddled with nuances and contradictions, as a significant number of residents would be displaced by the construction of the expressway and other factors.¹²

In 1967, the City Council of Philadelphia contacted the owners of the properties it intended to acquire, prompting a discussion about the lack of options for rehousing uprooted residents as well as a racial debate.

This, in turn, inspired vocal activism and proposals for change in which Venturi and Scott Brown participated, as we will see.

Philadelphia Transformed by Denise: Teach and Protect

So when social planning faculty members invited us to join them as advocates for a low income community threatened by an expressway, we jumped at the opportunity. This was in 1968 and for the next four years we worked in parallel on South Street in Philadelphia and The Strip in Las Vegas.¹³

The atmosphere at the University of Pennsylvania encouraged exploration in the field of urban design, and Denise Scott Brown was very close to social planners like Paul Davidoff, Herbert Gans, and others whose ethical vision of the city was aligned with Jane Jacobs’s discourses. According to her, the school could have been even more open, with social planners and architects sharing classes and perspectives, but Dean Holmes Perkins did not permit it.

In the courses she taught at Penn, architecture, urban planning, and social interests were all connected. The Form, Forces and Function studios offered in the fall semesters of 1963 and 1964 (FFF1 and FFF2, respectively) were all about researching and analyzing the interdependence of the three Fs and drawing critical conclusions about a place based on a profound understanding of its existing reality. Students observed a wide range of spaces, topics, and projects in Studio FFF1, whereas in Studio FFF2 they focused on a single case study: 40th Street in Philadelphia, west of Penn’s campus, which was undergoing major changes as part of an “urban renewal” process.

Denise Scott Brown believed that urban studies needed to intersect with the perspectives of other disciplines, and to this end she devised a method and practice that she continued to develop later at Yale, becoming the basis of the highly successful and influential studio (released in 1972 in the form of a book) titled Learning from Las Vegas. Scott Brown launched her innovative—albeit nascent—approach to planning in the classroom, inviting her students to view Philadelphia as a fertile field of experimentation. Following her experiences outside the city and the consolidation of her personal and professional relationship with Robert Venturi, Scott Brown came to regard Philadelphia as a very solid, spacious place of work and exploration.

Of the more than four hundred inventoried projects (built and unbuilt designs, studies, plans, etc.) signed by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates between 1957 and 2003, over one hundred are located in the city of Philadelphia.¹⁴ They encompass a wide variety of types and scales of work: interior renovations and apartment buildings; corporate and office buildings; health centers, schools, and research facilities; the city’s zoological gardens; public spaces and ephemeral interventions to celebrate special occasions; institutional commissions or monuments related to the Italian American community; feasibility studies and urban plans for developing areas or to revive the historic city center; and a series of commissions from a single client, like the Museum of Art, for which they did a variety of jobs on at least seven occasions between 1976 and 1997.¹⁵

Within this wide variety of proposals for Philadelphia, several created after 1967—when Venturi and Scott Brown entered a new era of professional collaboration—stand out because they illustrate the evolution of the couple’s shared interests, modus operandi, and close ties to the city. Specifically, these are The Philadelphia Crosstown Community Planning Study (which aimed to preserve and transform South Street from 1968 to 1972) and their multiple projects (competitions, buildings, plans, and studies) for the University of Pennsylvania between 1973 and 2000.

The Philadelphia Crosstown Community Planning Study, a commission partially implemented, was an assessment of South Street and a strategic proposal for it carried out for the Citizens’ Committee to Preserve and Develop the Crosstown Community. As mentioned, this came about in response to Edmund Bacon and his City Planning Commission’s plan to build the Crosstown Expressway, which stood to completely transform South Street.¹⁶ “South Street spans Philadelphia’s two rivers at the southern edge of William Penn’s plan. It is a commercial strip street at the scale of Main Street. It could, in fact, be called the main street of Philadelphia’s center-city black community.”¹⁷ This project is of paramount importance for understanding Denise and Bob’s evolution and way of working together for several reasons: the strong sense of community service and activism, the emphasis on preserving the city “as it is,” the inter-scalar approach, and the personal connection, as Bob Venturi’s father owned and operated a fruit distribution and retail business at 1430 South Street, which his son personally remodeled between 1967 and 1972.

Years later, in 1993, Venturi and Scott Brown had the chance to do a study for transforming the area of Penn’s Landing, revitalizing the riverfront, and opening the city up to the Delaware River. In the project notes for this ambitious proposal, Denise referred to South Street and the strategic value of its transformation. “Unsuccessful efforts to develop the site since the 1970s suggest a change of philosophy is needed. [...] And compare Penn’s Landing with other Philadelphia ‘lost areas’ that seem to have recovered, for example, South Street and Main Street, Manayunk. Granted they are different, but the essence of finding success for each was to attract multilayered patronage, beyond the local users who were once their support. What might this mean for Penn’s Landing?”¹⁸

Her African perspective, her experience with socioplastics and the Smithsons in London (1955), her studies and transdisciplinary learning experiences at the University of Pennsylvania, the FFF1 and FFF2 studios, and her research of 40th Street converged in this plan for the Crosstown Community in South Street. “The primary focus was on the rehabilitation of housing for low-income owners and renters, with corresponding neighborhood improvements and with minimum relocation of households. Second came economic and social advancement through increase of local employment, local business ownership, and home ownership. The plan proposed placed control of local planning in community hands, enabled the community to receive income and profits from land development, and rehabilitated South Street as the ‘strip center’ of a vital commercial, cultural, and civic life.”¹⁹

It is not hard to see the direct connection between these applied experiences and the theories that Denise Scott Brown perfected and consolidated in Las Vegas the same year she was working there with Venturi, Izenour, and her Yale students: the street is a strip, but streets are also communities, architectural forms, urban forms, and signs. Her approach was a blend of “analytic imagination” and “holistic thinking,” understood as processes that stimulate architectural creativity, applied to different studios.

One of Venturi and Scott Brown’s longest and most productive professional relationships in Philadelphia was with the University of Pennsylvania—which became an enormous laboratory of urban and architectural exploration that materialized in fourteen initiatives between 1973 and 2000.²⁰ The project notes for the 1989 campus master plan included these main recommendations:

1. Shifting the focus of development from a pattern of westward and northern expansion to purposeful development of land immediately adjacent to the campus on its eastern and southeastern borders.
2. Making the Penn campus a visible link between Center City and West Philadelphia, stressing the importance of the Schuylkill River as the University’s eastern boundary.
3. Continuing the campus’ development as an “urban park,” including expansion of its pedestrian core and pattern of green spaces and reduction of vehicular traffic within its precincts.
4. Ensuring school and precinct plans provide for strong campus-wide linkages, using pathways and shared facilities and systems to explicitly connect research with instruction and undergraduate with graduate and professional education.
5. Maintaining the dominant cityscape scale of the campus, featuring buildings of medium height relating to the grid systems of both the campus and the city of Philadelphia.²¹

The campus needed to become just another part of the city, and the various projects consider everything from the scale of its master plan to the preservation, reuse, and design of new buildings, public spaces, and signage. A later project for the area known as the Perelman Quadrangle (1993–2000) was instrumental in consolidating a central space that connects various buildings to each other and their urban environment, a space whose relevance and vitality remain evident today. This campus is just one of the many on which Venturi and Scott Brown left their mark in the United States, turning them into spaces of exploration and establishing universities as new central hubs open to the cities around them.

Although the firm designed more than one hundred projects for Philadelphia, a strip and a campus stand out as representative examples of their approaches, methods, and tools—and, above all, as a legacy for the city. Concepts like architectural conservation, urban community work, reuse, walkable cities, urban life, and the connecting power of educational spaces are all highly pertinent to today’s contemporary cities. Denise Scott Brown did more than just design projects; she became actively involved in defending the existing city and developing a more inclusive, sensitive approach to urban planning in Philadelphia, which she learned from and transformed. Denise’s gaze revolutionized the way we look at our environment and urban space through Learning from Las Vegas, and she used the same eyes to observe and learn from Philadelphia, where she was able to see without bias or prejudice—for only then can the existing city reveal itself and open up to transformation.

Denise Scott Brown. 21 Structures on Wissahickon Lane

Documentary by Pablo García Canga and Manuel Asín and produced for the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum exhibition Denise Scott Brown. Hiria. Kalea. Etxea = Ciudad. Calle. Casa = City. Street. House