Positioning Denise Scott Brown: Los Angeles, 1965–1966

People have stopped visiting Los Angeles. They know if they wait long enough Los Angeles will come to them. So, watch for Los Angeles, appearing shortly in your neighborhood.

Denise Scott Brown arrived in Los Angeles to join the three-person faculty of UCLA’s newly established School of Architecture and Urban Planning in 1965. She included this statement above by an applicant to the program in her syllabus for the inaugural planning studio she taught in the Fall of 1966.1 The epigram proleptically offered a condensed formulation of Scott Brown’s aims for the course: to teach students that cities, even apparently formless ones like Los Angeles, were the physical manifestation of what she called “underlying forces” that could be made evident through close and penetrating observation but that could not be described in the traditional languages of architectural and urban theory and visualization. As the student anticipated, Scott Brown would argue over the course of the semester that an emerging city form was sneaking up on an unsuspecting audience sitting at home, an arrival to be witnessed like an event unfolding on the evening news. No mere metaphor, however, Los Angeles had in fact suddenly appeared on TV screens across the United States at the very moment Scott Brown arrived in the city. The Watts revolt, which began on August 11, 1965, triggered by the impact of “underlying forces”—covenanted neighborhoods and real estate policies, the divisive and segregating intrusion of freeways, and newly established systems of urban communications—was one of the first such events to be widely televised.2

Scott Brown came to Los Angeles to teach Urban Planning at a moment when the failures of urban planning were spectacularly on view.3 As a result, Scott Brown’s method of analytic observation, what she called “town watching,” is best understood as both a deliberately crafted research and pedagogical tool that she actively deployed in her studio and also as evidence of the largely passive and distanced way most inhabitants of the West side of Los Angeles witnessed the violent actualities unfolding across the East side of the city.4 This conjunction of unrelated phenomena—academic technique and televisual spectatorship—is one of many such meetings and overlaps that shaped her 1966 syllabus. She was a young, white, unmarried, South African woman, an academic trained in new approaches to urban planning informed by the social sciences, a recent arrival to a rapidly developing metropolitan form organized around loosely agglomerated sanctuaries that resisted conventional tools of analysis, and an untenured faculty member teaching for the first time in a public university undergirded by the consolidating forces of the just then dubbed “military, industrial, academic complex.”5 The impact of these markers of position ripple across virtually every one of the remarkable pages of Scott Brown’s teaching materials, defining the ways in which the “underlying forces” that determined city form were made visible by her work but also constituted an underlying force that produced the conditions of possibility of her own work as well.6

Denise Scott Brown, Urban Design 401, Form Forces and Functions in Santa Monica, UCLA, Syllabus, 1966.

While the fundamental features of Scott Brown’s biography are well established, how her biography shaped the relatively unknown work she did in Los Angeles and how that work shaped both her better-known work produced elsewhere and its complex reception warrants attention.7 Insofar as it has been studied, Los Angeles has been attended to as the place where the Scott Brown and Robert Venturi collaboration was cemented and from whence they launched their study of Las Vegas.8 However, Los Angeles was also where Scott Brown spent a unique period of time during which she was detached from the forms of determination that undergirded her before and after, an interlude between the structures of family and student life that had defined her conditions of possibility before 1965 and the requirements of professional and personal partnerships that structured her life after 1967. Her time in California unfolded during a hairpin turn in a long arc of migration that began in South Africa via the late nineteenth century pogroms in Latvia and Lithuania, followed a path established by the British Empire to London, paused in Philadelphia attracted to the presence of Louis Kahn, another Eastern European Jewish immigrant to the US, moved quickly through Birmingham, New Orleans, Houston, Phoenix, and Arcosanti, via Los Angeles to Berkeley, down to Los Angeles again, only to double back to Philadelphia in 1967, after a pitstop or two in Las Vegas.9 These spatio-temporal coordinates shed light not only on her biography but more importantly on the forms of authorship and intellection available to a Lithuanian/Latvian/South African/Jewish/woman/urban planner and architect during those years of both radical and yet unfulfilled possibility in American history.

Architecture operated for Scott Brown as a disciplinary Ellis Island, a structure of entry into the United States but also of assimilation into American liberal democratic culture. For Scott Brown, this process began in South Africa where she attended a grade school modeled on American progressive education: she still credits the Dewey method of “learning by doing” for her project-based pedagogy, driven by activities rather than by the transfer of traditional forms of knowledge, and for her interest in developing “scientific” methods rather than exercising moral judgement.10 The school was Christian: although South African Jews were less pressured to divest themselves of Jewish markers then they were elsewhere at the time, Jews were initially “united” with Christian Afrikaners both in their whiteness and in their shared resistance to British imperialism, particularly the British use of concentration camps as tools in their land appropriation campaigns against the Boers. By the time Scott Brown was a university student, however, the rise of Afrikaans nationalism and the arrival of a new generation of Jewish refugees put this unity into crisis: Apartheid linked the Jew and the black in a landscape of violence and trauma.11 At Witwatersrand, the resistance movement was strong, but it was also largely male. As a result, a student such as “Denise Lakofski” was entangled in a logic determining that to be Jewish was to be white, to be white was to be part of the apartheid state, to be “progressive” was to resist, but to be female was to be excluded from organized action.12

Photo: Denise Scott Brown, Los Angeles, 1966. Courtesy of Denise Scott Brown.

The very utopian claims of modern architecture that Scott Brown would come to critique made it appear, in 1952, to be a means of managing these incompatible identities. Its “promise” led Scott Brown away from Johannesburg and to London, where post-war reconstruction was in full optimistic swing and where figures such as Alison Smithson made it possible for women to imagine becoming architects who would help build a more just world.13 At the Architectural Association, Scott Brown discovered wide interest in architectural developments in the United States, particularly in Louis Kahn’s urban design proposals for Philadelphia. As a result, her final step of passage through architecture into American liberal democracy was the completion of her Urban Planning degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Her professors and mentors included men such as Herbert Gans, whose scholarly innovation was precisely to use “scientific” methods to unmark European immigrants and to argue that despite variations in taste, they too shared in America’s democratic values.14 By 1965, in fact, each of Scott Brown’s steps had rendered her markers of identity less and less legible: now married, she no longer had a Jewish name, did not look African to American eyes, and was even instructing architects to view women’s bodies, which is to say her body, through the lens of scientific disinterest.15 It must have seemed that architecture had successfully earned her a place among the American liberal arts.16

But of course, the deficiencies of American liberalism were also operative and the teaching appointment Scott Brown briefly held upon the completion of her degree among the all-male faculty at Penn was not renewed. As a result, she set off on a journey across the United States, spending long hours on the train town watching, listening to residents of Birmingham tell her that “what you read in the papers about us was exaggerated,” to isolated towns in what seemed to her an African desert “communicate,” and to students as they mobilized for free speech at Berkeley.17 She arrived in Los Angeles, unmarried, untenured, and untethered from any of the tribal identities that once might have both marked but also secured her.18 Her response was to immerse herself in her course preparations through which she sought to anchor her students and herself within a complete and total intellectual order, a goal she was well aware could not be reached but that she thought should be mustered with the “gaiety of despair.”19 The principal record of this effort was a syllabus that sought to construct an all-inclusive pedagogy that would provide a comprehensive explanatory mechanism for urban life.

Photo: Denise Scott Brown, Los Angeles, 1967. Courtesy of Denise Scott Brown.

Certain components of the course reflect the studio structure she developed at Penn, under the influence not only of Gans, but also of David Crane and William Wheaton: a cartographic understanding of urbanism, a sociological view of urban life, and a team-work approach to studio production.20 What changed when she taught in and about Los Angeles was the studio’s fullness and intensity, an amplitude derived not only from the syllabus’ extraordinary length but also from the course’s extensive interdisciplinarity, the large number of participants she included, and the array of techniques designed to capture comprehensive views of the city she presented to students. Where she had previously argued that urban form was legible to those reading underlying determinants, the number of these factors multiplied. Her courses had always been interdisciplinary, but the degree and range of engagement with other disciplines exploded across the academy. And field work modeled on what Gans called the participant/observer technique was not new to her teaching, but the field shifted from a single city block in Philadelphia to the entire region of Los Angeles, ranging from Disneyland to the beach, downtown, and much in between. In order to help her students “watch” this town, she gave countless lectures illustrated by slides, most of which she had taken herself, that show her stepping back from the focus on individuals and singularities seeking instead to encompass the widest possible angle of vision: taken from the air or a car, these images show freeways cutting through mountains and neighborhoods, houses precariously perched on canyon edges, and agricultural land paved over for parking lots.21 Challenged by the extreme and radically varied conditions of Los Angeles, what had been a nine-page syllabus when teaching at Penn became a one-hundred page total-design pedagogy.22

Form, Forces and Function in Santa Monica was divided into sections including introduction, bibliography, studio organization, research on “definition and determinants of urban form,” and multiple design phases to develop creative suggestions “for emerging forces and forms.” Tellingly, Scott Brown felt Los Angles raised questions about urban rather than civic design, the term used at Penn, and she asked her students “What should an Urban Design Studio in Los Angeles be? What will become of our theories and philosophies as we match them against this urban extremity?”23 She focused the studio on Santa Monica because it contained these extremes, from topographical to class and race variation, and because the aviation and information industries had made their headquarters there. Santa Monica thus offered students both “a catalog of typical urban glories and pathologies” and also, particularly because of its growing minority populations, a prototype of future urban trends.24 She provided students with a history of Santa Monica she wrote herself from “discovery and settlement” in the sixteenth century to more recent but equally “aggressive” policies, especially the freeway completed just a few months before the start of the semester that had “ravaged the historic Negro settlement in Santa Monica.”25 She expected students to study land use patterns, legal frameworks, demography, economics, governmental forms, technologies, and transportation systems. Every one of the 132 class sessions had multiple readings, often guest lecturers, and detailed assignments. She instructed students to begin with various forms of data collection and in situ “town watching” (finding maps, “discriminately scanning” copious amounts of literature, and conducting interviews) and to conclude with “experimental graphic techniques” designed to move from specific data points to generalized problematics.26 While some of the assignments were rooted in the practices of urban sociology developed at Penn and MIT, she asked students to be attentive to whether or not forms of analysis like Kevin Lynch’s “categories for descripting perception and imageability” were useful in the Los Angeles of boulevards and freeways.27 Instead she encouraged students to “experiment with techniques and methods of drawing and photography which give some feeling of the multiplicity and complexity of patterns of activities and structures in the city and of their changes of intensity in space and time.”28

Photo: Denise Scott Brown, Los Angeles, 1967. Courtesy of Denise Scott Brown.

Scott Brown’s emphasis on the need for students to actively participate in the invention of new modes of urban representation was not merely a way for them to learn by doing but was itself a performance of Scott Brown’s theory of urbanism and of the planner. “The problem, and possibilities of cities are so wide and deep that it is impossible for one man to span them… We need specialists and their depth of knowledge: what we lack is connection.”29 She conceived of the studio, in other words, as she did an aerial photograph; she considered both tools for revealing epistemic nodes and for constituting connective tissues undergirding networks of disciplines and social groups. She drew an extraordinary number of specialists into this web; no fewer than thirty-eight people passed through the studio as jurors, guest lecturers, critics and resources. Some were old colleagues from Penn, such as Venturi, Crane, and Gans. Others were newer friends, such as the writer and critic Esther McCoy, Scott Brown’s neighbor and the only other woman in the group, and LA-based architects like Quincy Jones.30 Two categories of visitors were among the most consequential for the 1966 studio: one with expertise in representational developments within the architectural profession, and the other engaged in political discourses brought from other disciplines.

Philip Thiel, Movement Notation, 1961. Source: “A Sequence-Experience Notation for Architectural and Urban Spaces,” Town Planning Review 32, 1 (April 1961): 33–52. Originally published by Liverpool University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Philip Thiel, Duration Line and Space-Form Notation, 1961. Source: “A Sequence-Experience Notation for Architectural and Urban Spaces,” Town Planning Review 32, 1 (April 1961): 33–52. Originally published by Liverpool University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Philip Thiel, Movement Notation, 1961. Source: “A Sequence-Experience Notation for Architectural and Urban Spaces,” Town Planning Review 32, 1 (April 1961): 33–52. Originally published by Liverpool University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Visitors whose work focused on visual strategies included Philip Thiel and Peter Kamnitzer. Thiel, an architect who had spent a short time at Berkeley before taking an appointment in University of Washington, presented graphic techniques that incorporated elements learned while studying under Lynch and Gyorgy Kepes with notation forms used in dance to capture what he considered to be the time-based character of urban experience. Thiel argued that the rapid and dispersed urbanization of cities like Los Angeles had left designers “embarrassed by the lack of both a theory of form and of tools useful in representing the experience of form.”31 Acknowledging that the motion-picture might be such a tool but was still too costly, he offered instead a low-tech system “for the continuous representation of architectural and urban space-sequence experiences” that was “parametrically” adaptable to differences in the rate and direction of movement.32 While he described this technique as related to Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of vertical montage, he also argued that cities, unlike films, could not and should not control the attention of the audience as a film director did and therefore required representational tools that were not predetermined by a single director/planner. His manually calculable system for parametric notation was instead intended to privilege precisely a horizontal approach to urban planning.

Peter Kamnitzer, Onandaga Freeway Interchange, 1969, book plate. Source: UCLA Library, Arts Library.

Peter Kamnitzer used radically different tools to pursue similar goals. A colleague of Scott Brown’s on the small UCLA faculty, Kamnitzer was then just starting work with NASA and GE on what would become “City-Scape,” a high-tech digital simulation of urban experience intended to enable planners creatively to manage the complexities of modern buildings and cities.33 Like Thiel and Scott Brown, Kamnitzer focused on the freeway as the principal means of, in this case digital, participatory “town watching,” deploying a “joystick” rather than camera or pencil as the user’s means of navigation. The goal was to enable planners, also conceived of as stand-ins for city-dwellers, to make real time decisions about urban mobility. Although they each worked through different visual media, Scott Brown, Thiel, and Kamnitzer all took students on simulated drives through the city, optimistically imagining that these new tools could “provoke the ‘next creative leap’” and “offer a new kind of planning process that may one day lead us … towards a truly participatory form of planning.”34

UCLA Institute for Transportation and Traffic Engineering, collision photograph, nd.

The second set of especially consequential participants in the studio were from other departments across the UCLA campus, including law, sociology and engineering. With them Scott Brown discussed a range of methodological rather than visual questions. For example, she asked sociologists for feedback on interview techniques, because, as she warned students, some interviewees would be understandably wary of urban planners having suffered at the hands of urban renewal and its “good intentions.” Eventually, treating the syllabus like a manuscript in a prepublication phase, she invited these colleagues to comment on the draft. William Mosher, a transportation engineer—who also focused on participatory planning and freeways, using photography to study the impact of movement and individual decision making in automotive safety—consistently prodded Scott Brown to further expand her point of view and to more explicitly address the politics of good intentions. He pressed her to avoid thinking regionally and to develop what he called a world view. He insisted that the scope of urban consideration should include issues of war, emancipation, and civil rights. He added notes on the growing importance of working mothers and the rights of women to urban planning, and on the problematic nature of planning for public happiness: “this is not necessarily achieved by elimination of public squalor. Some subgroups of society have NO desire to live in the manner those in power plan for. Classic examples are the attempts to change living habits of the American Indians and the attempt to change the living standards in our Appalachian Region.”35 The sociologist Peter Orleans was even more pointed about the need critically to examine the mechanisms controlling things like land use. He underscored that students should consider how “values expressed in physical form [are] constrained by existent opportunities,” and told Scott Brown that “constraints on market allocation through … racial prejudices make our system more like the tribal one than you suggest.”36 Given that Orleans co-edited the monumental volume Race, Change, and Urban Society just a few years later, it comes as no surprise that when Scott Brown instructed students to make comparative analyses of Century City and Santa Monica, Orleans asked, “how about Watts.”37

Denise Scott Brown, Urban Design 401, Form Forces and Functions in Santa Monica, UCLA, Syllabus, 1966. Source: Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

What is, however, surprising is that not only did Scott Brown solicit this robust feedback but that she included the most critical comments as marginalia in the final syllabus, making them extra visible with red ink. Her explicit goal in doing so was to avoid presenting “a spurious and dull unity” but it also implicitly transformed the syllabus itself into a demonstration of the multiplicity and complexity of patterns that she was seeking to present as constituting the city and the dialogic and participatory structure of good urban planning.38 Scott Brown kept her teaching materials in oxford Pressboard Report binders with metal prongs and multiple tabs, enabling her to add, delete and reorganize materials, and to ensure that the pedagogy was as plastic and performative as the city being taught. Students too were required to produce “reports” containing text and copious photographs and drawings in this same format and to submit them in fifty ditto copies. The studio’s entire output was, in effect, a collectively produced, polyvocal publication. Scott Brown’s course triggered an expansive debate, identified new channels of discourse, and relied on duplicative media as a mode of dissemination, making the studio output into a “little magazine” of the very kind she wrote about in one of her first published essays.39 Although her “book” on urban planning was largely written but did not find a publisher, what she could do in the Fall of 1966 was clip and ditto her Form, Forces and Function in Santa Monica into provisional existence.40

What other existences were altered by Scott Brown’s year in Los Angeles may never be fully known because by 1967 she had returned to Pennsylvania, where the University was still committed to civic design and to a rapidly conventionalizing model of planning and its allied disciplines; to Philadelphia, a city that bore the imprint of an urban tradition alien to Los Angeles; and to married life rooted in both professional and personal partnerships. While this context opened new opportunities for Scott Brown, it also closed others in ways that make clear the specific constraints and possibilities in which she operated during her short but pivotal California sojourn of 1966. For example, the structural differences between her activities as co-author and informal publisher of Form, Forces and Function in Santa Monica and those available to Venturi at the same historical moment are worth underscoring: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was also published in 1966, but with the support of MoMA, the Graham Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, and a host of assistants. Furthermore, elegantly understated in its self-referential and highly “authored” rhetoric, Complexity and Contradiction inserts Venturi’s work into a long lineage of famously heroic architects and attends almost exclusively to high culture despite his later interest in popular tastes.41 Form, Forces and Function in Santa Monica, instead, is participatory and horizontal in its authorship, informal in its modes of production, self-critical, and polysemous in its engagement with different social groups and cultural forms. Finally, rather than cynically ironic or naively hopeful, what historians now commonly consider pervasive misjudgments made by architects during the 1960s, Scott Brown’s text is tinged with the gay despair of a woman with much to say and none of the institutional forms of support through which to say it.

Photo: Denise Scott Brown, Los Angeles, 1967. Courtesy of Denise Scott Brown.

Lack of certain kinds of opportunity is only one of the many historical forces that came together to shape Scott Brown’s work and that continue to shape its reception. In 1966, she did not receive approbation from Vincent Scully, who wrote the introduction to Complexity and Contradiction and became a key force both in maximizing Venturi’s claims to having become the seminal author of architectural postmodernism and in minimizing Scott Brown’s contribution to their collaboration for decades. Instead of their support, Scott Brown was harassed by many of her male colleagues, particularly during the time she spent in Los Angeles.42 On the one hand, while women are still harassed in the workplace, some have managed to use the institutional power that women like Scott Brown worked to generate in order to make sure that “Venturi” is never again used as a shorthand for their co-created work. On the other hand, some scholars have argued that because she was South African, she should have done more to address race and blackness in architecture.43 These revisions are welcome but also have important limitations. What Scott Brown did in 1966 does not live up to current standards of accountability for the racialized structure of the architectural academy and profession. For example, in a way that would be recognized as highly objectionable today, she appropriated the language of Martin Luther King when she changed the name of an assignment that had been “personal utopia” when teaching students in 1963 Philadelphia, to “I have a dream” when teaching in post-Watts revolt LA.44 Nevertheless, assessing this history of appropriation and indirection using only contemporary metrics anachronistically occludes the context informing the actions that were available to her and that she indeed took. Scott Brown made space for male colleagues, less vulnerable (if only by virtue of their gender) than she, to critique both the academy and the profession. She underscored Orleans’ explicit address to the racialization of urban planning in her syllabus and embedded the problem in her pedagogy. It is worth noting, in fact, that Orleans, the most outspoken of her colleagues about the failures of architectural design and planning, responded to the experience of collaborating with Scott Brown by deciding that the best way he could contribute to the question of race and urban society was to become an architect.45

It may, however, not be the critics but those with the very best intention of giving credit where credit is due who risk overwriting the most characteristic, and potentially still transformative, aspect of her work and working method. During this anomalously unfettered period of time, Scott Brown strove tirelessly to be collaborative and polyvocal, to engage critique and avoid what she feared was the intrinsic vanity of the single architect. She insisted that her students produce workmanlike drawings and avoid over-aestheticized design: “no false art,” she exclaimed.46 And she showed them how to do this by backing away from single objects beautifully represented in order to see the collective terrain in its often-grim reality, to town watch in ways that inevitably forced the abstraction of visual analysis to bump up against the violence of the nightly news. She was nothing if not workmanlike as the labor she invested in her teaching materials attests, and she used photography in a similarly workmanlike way. She recognized that her mode of operating through maps, detailed histories, and long conversations would appear to others as dull, particularly duller than the spectacular register of TV.47 She may not have anticipated, however, for how long these deliberately and necessarily unspectacular modes of operating would limit her own visibility to future historians of architecture still looking for spectacle and valuing only “influence.”

Photo: Denise Scott Brown, Los Angeles, 1965. Courtesy of Denise Scott Brown.

Although a handful of iconic photographs have been repeatedly extracted from the body of research that they constitute, they prove something self-evident; that Scott Brown was a woman cultivated by progressive education in the liberal arts who could use her well-trained eye to produce images dense with appeal to other similarly well-trained eyes. But this mutually affirming rapport overlooks the fact that, as an archive, her photographic corpus is largely made of an astonishing number of unformal images taken from a train, on a road, or in a plane; images that move away from framed views of things and that instead seek patterns within the messy overlap of human activity and the surface of the earth. These are images for and of research rather than display, evidence of Scott Brown’s commitment to studio as a collective knowledge producing instrument and of her investment in the broad view that gave rise to interdisciplinarity as a method and a value. Town watching was a strategy that inevitably entangled the passive academic observer with the violence televised on the evening news and actively risked the appeal of eidetic clarity and singularity in pursuit of comprehensiveness and participation. Though efforts to give credit are certainly overdue just as are calls for accountability, both risk pressing Scott Brown’s work into molds of authorship and artistic value that were simultaneously unavailable to her and that she worked hard to resist. New scrutiny reveals that aspects of her contributions do not meet today’s standards, but it also succumbs to ideological overdetermination when it ahistorically turns her into the type of heroic figure she chose not to be and that, given her positioning, she could not have been in 1966 Los Angeles.