Whose "Wife"? Who is She?

Quote by Gareth Cook - The New Yorker

In 1991, the Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi was honored with the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize...

When Venturi got the Pritzker phone call, though, his surprised reaction was to ask: What about Denise? “Denise” is Denise Scott Brown, who had been Venturi’s intellectual collaborator since the early nineteen-sixties, and a partner in the firm since 1969, deeply involved in everything it had done. Scott Brown was the one who’d been drawn to Las Vegas, who set in motion the project that culminated in “Learning from Las Vegas,” who created the studio class, which led to the book that influenced a generation of architecture students. (“Learning” was co-authored by Scott Brown, Venturi, and Steven Izenour.) More importantly, the ideas at the heart of Venturi, Scott Brown—the notions that bucked modernism and reconnected American architecture with older traditions—were developed by the two as a team, or, as Scott Brown has put it, as “a joint creativity.” But Scott Brown was a woman and, worse still, married to Venturi. (When it came to the perception of outsiders, “architect’s wife” trumped “architect.”)...

Scott Brown came to America in 1958, and in 1960 she met Venturi at a University of Pennsylvania faculty meeting. They shared many interests: social responsibility, maverick thought, Italian culture and architecture, especially mannerism. Two years later, they were teaching courses together. He told her about insights from Princeton’s Donald Drew Egbert; she encouraged him to go deep into Edwin Lutyens. They scanned each other’s reading lists, critiqued each other’s writing and drawing, argued with and inspired each other. Their work became the joint product. Scott Brown joined his firm in 1967, the year they were married, and became a partner in 1969.

In an essay titled “Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” Scott Brown describes how, from the very beginning, the couple struggled against a strong pressure to turn the husband into a guru, and the wife into a footnote. They took pains to describe their individual contributions to new work, only to watch critics refer to it as “Venturi’s.” Journalists, students, and others often insisted on talking to Venturi; the two would try to explain that they were equal partners, but the attitude seemed unshakable. “They cannot get that out of their heads,” she told me. “Whatever you say to them, they say, ‘Well, she must be something else. Maybe a planner, maybe a typist, maybe she takes photographs. It has to be something else!’ ”