I Put Him There

[Calming, 8-bit piano fades in; reminiscent of Gameboy sounds]

UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Liz, we’re going to serve some lunch, and some soup and a quiche.

DENISE SCOTT BROWN: The three of you should be…

[Conversation continues in the background]

ELIZABETH GREENSPAN (NARRATION): I went to see Denise Scott Brown in early 2020 at her home in Philadelphia. It was my second visit in two years, so we picked up where we had left off the last time. 

GREENSPAN: Okay, great. Yeah. Where should we sit? What’s comfortable? 

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise’s house is spacious and light-filled and packed with stuff. 

[shuffling sounds in the background]

GREENSPAN: I remember the pillows-

BROWN: Yes.

GREENSPAN [laughs] From last time too. They’re still there.

BROWN: I need a system-wide set of small comfort events.

GREENSPAN: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

BROWN: And that is a pillow.

GREENSPAN: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

[Conversation continues under narration]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): In the living room, stacks of books fill side tables; a few vintage Coca-Cola cans, what Denise considers “decorative Cokes,” adorn a large, round coffee table. We sit on the sofa, where throw pillows feature cartoon superheroes, like Batman and Wonderwoman.  

[Melodic, videogame-like piano fades in]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise is turning 90 this year and finishing what she imagines will be her final book, which she has titled, Wayward Eye. It’s a collection of never-before-published photographs of the buildings, streets, billboards, and signs that caught Denise’s eye as she began forming her ideas about cities and architecture in the 1950s and ‘60s. 

GREENSPAN: These were you and Bob together when you were taking these?

BROWN: Yes, I went about 4 times to Las Vegas before I invited Bob to come.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Most of the photos showcase regular middle- and working-class neighborhoods and commercial strips, many of which have declined and even disappeared from the American landscape over the last 50 years. We see modest front stoops with flowerpots and bright neon diner signs. 

[GREENSPAN and BROWN talk in the background]

As we settle in, I notice on her sweater a small pin of a full-skirted, tight-waisted feminine silhouette. 

GREENSPAN: I notice your pin on your sweater.

BROWN: I've got lots and lots of little pins-

GREENSPAN: Okay.

BROWN: And the one I was looking for, it’s red as well and it says on it “F-O” and F-O says [foreign language], which means it’s the French Communist Party button, but I can’t find it-

GREENSPAN Oh, okay.

BROWN: So, this one looks feminist enough.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Besides being the first time her photographs will be published, this book is also an opportunity for Denise to tell her own story. 

[Calming, video game-like music fades in]

Throughout her life her work has always been tied to her late husband, Robert Venturi, and their firm, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

Both Denise and Bob are among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, but Bob is the one who has always been recognized. When he won the prestigious Pritzker Prize, in 1991, the selection committee said, “he has expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this century, as perhaps no other has, through his theories and built works.”

But Denise developed many of these theories and buildings with him, and, in 2013, she complained about not being equally recognized. This protest brought new attention to her work and spurred an international petition to retroactively add her name to the award. But what it did not do was fundamentally alter the story told about them, which casts her as the muse and him as the artist. A story Bob was attached to.

[music fades out]

GREENSPAN: That’s interesting that Bob was reading Tom Wolfe but hadn’t been to Vegas until you took him.

BROWN: When Bob signed the petition, he said, “my partner, my inspiration." But what he didn’t say is my co-designer. Which he didn’t want to face. Because you can be afraid, then, that something will happen and you’ll lose it. If I died, would he lose it? So, he didn’t want to talk about that.

GREENSPAN: Did you talk about it, privately?

BROWN: Yes. But you know, in the end, he’s an old man and people in the office were saying, “we can see where the bright design idea are coming from now.” I didn’t want to rub all that in.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): It’s perhaps more often that husband-and-wife teams run into this narrative conflict. Which one, we ask, is the “real” artist? The truly brilliant one? As if it must be only one. Even when it’s impossible to know, we’re compelled to parse the contributions, to determine who did what. 

This compulsion to split and separate often left Denise’s contributions unacknowledged and unseen. If she was seen at all, it was typically as ‘the wife,” supporting her husband, along for the ride.   

BROWN: When I complained about the Pritzker and all of that, people say, “what is she talking about? She didn’t get there until—” what did they say? “1969.”

Well, I've been working with Bob since 1960. And, in fact, that’s when our great ideas came together, and we got practice of putting them together, which we could then use for Learning from Levittown. The truth is that Bob and I—it’s not that he does this and I do that. We do this. But his experience and my experience about this part here makes a very rich combination. Not just one person’s head, two heads. So, it makes us a very efficient design team. And then, this is the material, and I go this way, and he goes that way. Beyond. It’s like lacing up a very great shoe.

[Calming, video game-like music fades in]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): One of the most recognized results of this partnership is the groundbreaking book, Learning from Las Vegas. When it was first published in 1972, it was so radically ahead of it’s time that many people in the architecture world considered it blasphemous. It challenged the reigning Modernist philosophy and style, which was obsessed with clean lines, oversized buildings, and stripping design of any ornamentation. Denise and Bob argued that modernism was so focused on simplicity that its buildings were “mute and vacuous.” 

BROWN: You see, the Modernists had to say, “yes, traditional architecture is lovely and wonderful, but we’ve had a terrible war. We have terrible problems. We have a great many new problems and opportunities.” You really have to think of another way of building now. And you really have to face the issue that it’s changed, and how do you respond to it?

Modernism has had to do that same facing of issues and upgrading about four times over the 20th century. We were one of the times.

[Calming, video game-esque music fades in]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Learning from Las Vegas showed that one of architecture’s essential functions is, in fact, communication. Denise originated the book’s ideas during multiple trips in the mid-60’s to document Las Vegas’s signs, buildings, and billboards. Most architects and city planners saw Vegas as a sprawling “non-city,” unruly and unsophisticated. But Denise loved the color and saw beauty and patterns amidst the chaos. In 1966, she invited Bob to join her on a visit to see the Strip, a trip which kindled romance and led to their famous 1968 Yale research studio on Las Vegas.  

BROWN: Bob was the most excited person in the world when we were looking at Las Vegas. “Denise has helped me so much,” and all of that. And then, as he got older, some senility starts. Who knows when or where? But there came a point where he wanted to feel he’d done it all, and he hadn’t, and he knew he hadn’t. 

[Conversation continues under narration]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): After we have lunch, we sit in front of her computer, set up on the dining room table, and she shows me the images she’s selected for her forthcoming book.  

BROWN: I began to realize that photography was a very good medium. This whole book is set up in such a way that you put your nose right into it because anything to do with planning that’s published by an architect journal is the size of a postage stamp, and you can’t see anything at all.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Looking at her photographs, it’s clear that her art stemmed from her ability to see what was, for so many others, unseen. In the ‘60s, Vegas was the most extreme and intense example of a new kind of city, one being designed to catch the attention of drivers. Denise saw how big signs atop little buildings were, in fact, a sophisticated architectural choice for the Strip’s unique needs, giving the city definition, and making it legible to everyone zipping by in their little cars. Today, we think of this phenomena as part of the “attention economy.” Fifty years ago, Denise was among the first to conceive of it.   

BROWN: But again, it’s a scale things, like, these people in relation to these people.

GREENSPAN: Right, and then like the sword here. [laughs]

BROWN: I love this kind of roundness of this human being and the roundness—

GREENSPAN: Right

BROWN: They look like you could lick them.

GREENSPAN: They do.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise says her obsession with lights, colors, and urban environments began when she was a young girl growing up in South Africa. She remembers being awed by the first neon signs she saw in a theme park. 

[BROWN’s voice fades in]

BROWN: There was a certain park in Johannesburg and we’d go play there and all that. I think the first neon I saw was at the Juveniles celebration of Johannesburg. I was taken out at night, first time ever. I was four years old. There were all these lights and I thought that was a celebration. I’m now convinced that was just neon.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise, whose parents had immigrated to South Africa from Latvia and Lithuania, stayed in Johannesburg until her early 20’s, when she moved to London to study architecture. It was there that she became interested in commercial spaces and signs, and another idea that she would return to again and again: the imagery of “Main Street.” It was also in London that she began to take photographs.

BROWN: And suddenly we saw on high street, as it’s called, steel and glass stores, with also nice modern signs and things. So, I got into looking at commercial architecture that way, through their modernism. 

In the beginning, the signs I was talking about were ones about finding your way, marker signs, and things like that. 

[Calming, video game-esque music fades in]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Her interest in signs continued through her move to Philadelphia, where she received Master’s Degrees in city planning and architecture. It was in Philly that Denise met Bob, and they began to collaborate. 

They were both intensely interested in pop culture, vernacular design, and the ways these intersect with ordinary life. 

The Las Vegas Strip’s big billboards and neon signs were a natural extension of these interests, the epitome of how architecture can tell us stories about ourselves through symbolic forms and decoration.

As we continue flipping through her archive, Denise says their collaboration allowed Bob to see even his most familiar corners of the world differently. 

BROWN: That’s South Street, which is where Bob’s dad had his fruit and produce. So, Bob saw this every Saturday morning.

GREENSPAN: Right, but he was seeing it, so he was noticing it every day. But it sounds like, at this particular moment, you looked at it differently, would you say?

BROWN: Well, he said, “things I’ve passed by every day, and I didn’t see their significance until you came along.”

GREENSPAN: I mean, how would you characterize what you helped him see?

BROWN: Eyes that will not see, helped see the things that eyes that will not see. He was very, very ready in terms of his philosophy to see, but hadn’t thought of applying it to the rest of Philadelphia.

[Calming, video game-like music fades in]

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): In Wayward Eye, Denise is only including images that she herself took. There will be no ambiguity over who the artist of this work is. Ironically, this means that one of the images for which Denise is most famous will not appear. 

It’s a photograph Bob took of her on their first trip to Vegas together. She stands with hands on hips, and a big Cheshire cat smile, with two buildings and one big sign in the background. In her book, Denise will include a nearly identical photo that she took of Bob standing in front of that same background.  

GREENSPAN: And you staged, I mean you...

BROWN: I put him there.

GREENSPAN Put him there, yeah.

BROWN: And I put myself in the other one and I said, “please, take it.” So, whose picture is that? His finger, my composition.

GREENSPAN (NARRATION): With her gallery shows, and a recent lifetime achievement award from London’s Sloan Museum, Denise is receiving the kind of recognition today that she never did while she and Bob ran their design firm together. The story she tells through her photographs builds upon this attention, but it also establishes Denise as a creator and centers her vision.

GREENSPAN: Did you think of yourself as a photographer? Was that part of your—

BROWN: No, no, no. 

GREENSPAN: No? But even though you were thinking of photographer—

BROWN: And I was also thinking of myself as an artist. 

I was going to be an architect, and they all seem to come together. If you like modern art, you want to get these photographs. You like modern architecture; you want to learn from these photographs.

[Calming, videogame-esque music plays until fadeout]