Positioning Denise Scott Brown: Los Angeles, 1965–1966

There are copies of the syllabus for UCLA course 401, Fall, 1966, Form, Forces and Function in Santa Monica in the University archives at UCLA, Berkeley and in Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Only the latter is complete and associated with all of Scott Brown’s teaching materials for the course, including student work and a binder of letters evaluating the course, seemingly in support of a tenure review. This and all further citations will refer to the binder at Penn, which has not yet been fully incorporated into the finding aid but that I use courtesy of "The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.” Some sections of the binder are paginated and others are not. All references here will give section title and page number where possible. The anonymous student comment appears in UCLA 401, Introduction, p. 7. UCLA course 401 was an elaboration of courses Scott Brown had taught before at Penn and at Berkeley, and would teach again at Penn and Yale. The latter courses, and particularly the Las Vegas studio co-taught with Venturi, have been given wide attention: my focus here will be on what was unique to UCLA course 401 (1966). George Dudley was made dean of UCLA’s new program in 1964. The other two full-time faculty were Peter Kamnitzer and Henry C.K. Liu. (For more on Kamnitzer, see below. Liu, born in Hong Kong and educated at Harvard, was working on regional development while at UCLA but does appear to have had much substantive interaction with Scott Brown). Additional part-time instructors and lecturers were drawn from professionals working Los Angles and from other departments in the University. On the Vegas Studio, see, Las Vegas Studio: Images From the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, edited by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli in collaboration with Peter Fischli (Zurich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess Ag, 2008); Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument: On Learning From Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Aron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec, Relearning From Las Vegas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Martino Stierli, Las Vegas In the Rearview Mirror: the City In Theory, Photography, and Film (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013).

See Elizabeth Wheeler, “More Than the Western Sky: Watts on Television, August 1965.” Journal of Film and Video, 54, 2/3 (2002): 11–26. On the role of TV in the coverage of the race revolts in Philadelphia and the Guild House, designed by Venturi, before Scott Brown joined the firm, see my “Oh My Aching Antenna: The Fall and Rise of Postmodern Creativity,” Log 37, The Architectural Imagination United States Pavilion (Spring/Summer 2016): 214–227.

Scott Brown wrote a series of letters to “friends and family” documenting her journey to the West coast and while at Berkeley. In one, dated August 21, 1965, she wrote “early in September, I shall be moving to Los Angeles and hope to start work there soon after.” She began teaching at UCLA in the Fall of 1966. These letters are reproduced in my Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture In Los Angeles (Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg: New York, NY, 2013), 82–90. These letters also include descriptions of her first visits to Las Vegas.

“Town watching” first appears on page 5 of UCLA 401, “Introduction,” but reappears throughout.

Scott Brown describes Los Angeles as in the process of “nucleating,” a condition of multi-centeredness that Bernard Tschumi, just a few years later and working with similar planning documents but using them to produce a radically more overt political critique, described as organized around bounded sanctuaries. See his “Sanctuaries,” Architectural Design 43, 9 (1973): 575–590. This quality made Los Angeles the primary exemplar of post-metropolitan urbanism and eventually the shared focus of the so-called postmodern geographers, many of whom, like Edward Soja, also taught at UCLA. Scott Brown’s remarks about LA are part of a section entitled City of Change, in UCLA 401, “Phase III, Part A,” 9. Scott Brown was particularly interested in why Douglas Aircraft and the Rand corporation chose Santa Monica for their HQs. On the military complex see Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to underscore the multiple forms of inequality that operate simultaneously in determining the conditions of possibility for women of color, including the experience of their own identity. Because the conditioning factors of race, immigration status, gender and class that shaped Scott Brown’s possibilities in 1965–1966 were not all rooted in oppression and discrimination, I use positionality as the better term for situating her within her historical context. See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color,” Stanford Law Review 43, 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299.

Scott Brown has given many interviews on her personal and intellectual history in which she describes her appreciation for Santa Monica, particularly the beach culture and because she and Venturi were married at her Ocean Park home. She has not written about her time at UCLA in particular. While her interviews are scattered among a wide variety of publications and websites, the best source for her account of herself is her collected essays, Having Words (London: Architectural Association, 2009).

Although disentangling their respective contributions to what eventually became a lifetime of collaboration is futile, it does seem to be the case that Venturi’s interest in popular culture and Americana grew stronger once they started to work together. Similarly, although they both recognized that contemporary communication systems were transforming American society and architecture, his interest in the early 1960s was more metaphorical where hers was more operational. For example, while presenting the Guild House in a lecture to students at Yale, he described the windows of the rear elevation as like an IBM punch card while Scott Brown described the illuminated signs of small towns in the desert as acts of communication: “Then there were the towns. All you notice is a series of bright billboards, neon signs & TV antennae… The buildings are nondescript, sunk into the landscape. The towns appear, then as nothing other than communication.” “Letter to Friends, April 26, 1965,” in Everything Loose Will Land, 88. On Venturi’s lecture at Yale, see my Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects, Montréal (Québec: Canadian Centre for Architecture; Leipzig, Germany: Spector Books, 2020), 95–99.

The details of this itinerary can be reconstructed through her letters, cited above.

Some of the following discussed is based on two extensive interviews I conducted with Scott Brown on July 24 and August 14, 2021. Ayala Levin’s essay on Scott Brown and the southern settler-colonial conditions that shaped her views of architecture in the United States appeared after this essay was in press. See Ayala Levin, “Learning from Johannesburg: Unpacking Denise Scott Brown’s South African View of Las Vegas,” in Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century, Aggregate eds., (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), 235–248.

On South Africa, see Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africe, 1820-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gideon Shimoni, “South African Jews and the Apartheid Crisis.” The American Jewish Year Book 88 (1988): 3–58; Andrew Caplan, South African Jews in London (Capetown: University of London, 2011). See also Andrew Caplan, South African Jews in London (Capetown: University of London, 2011), and Ayala Levin “South African ‘know-how’ and Israeli ‘facts of life’: the Planning of Afridar, Ashkelon, 1949–1956,” Planning Perspectives 34, 2 (2019): 285–309. On Witwatersrand, see Mervyn Shear, WITS: A University in the Apartheid Era (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), and Bruce K. Murray, “Wits, the ‘Open Years: a History of the University of Witwatersrand, 1939–1959” (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand Press, 1997).

When I asked directly if she had participated in the resistance movement while a university student and if not why, Scott Brown stated, “I was afraid.”

Scott Brown now describes her early interest in architecture as generated by her desire to participate in “building a just South Africa.” This specific vocabulary, now a common descriptor of anti-Apartheid goals and used by Scott Brown in Having Words, for example, is, as far as I have been able to determine, an ex post facto turn of phrase with respect to her move to London. As is well known, the interest in American pop culture was widespread among English architects at the time, and was particularly strong among the Independent Group and their circle, which of course included the Smithsons and Reyner Banham.

See David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Gans eventually discussed this issue in his own work. See Herbert J. Gans, “Racialization and Racialization Research,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, 3 (2017), 341–352. For introductions to planning history and to the history of architectural pedagogy, see The Profession of City Planning: Changes, Images, and Challenges, 1950–2000, ed. Lloyd Rodwin and Bishwapriya Sanyal (New Brunswick: Center for Urban Policy Research and Rutgers University Press, 2000), and Joan Ockman and Rebecca Williamson, Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 2012).

In her essay “Planning the Powder Room,” published in 1967 but conceived earlier, Scott Brown acknowledges that the design of women’s restrooms is a “delicate” subject requiring the “delicacy of a lady.” However, and despite the fact that the essay was written in order to invite men to look into such spaces, she assumes what she calls the position of an “unrecalcitrant functionalist of the1930s type,” a type known to be deliberately gender neutral. The essay is republished in Having Words, 128–135. Scott Brown, who had married Robert Scott Brown in 1955, was suddenly widowed when he was killed in a car accident in 1959. The unimaginable trauma of this event was be exacerbated by the way becoming unmarried increasingly made her a target of sexual harassment by her colleagues. This appears to have been especially the case in Los Angeles, where few of her colleagues had known her during the first years of her grief and mourning.

For her own account of the role of art education in her journey as an immigrant, see her “Invention and Tradition in the Making of American Place” (1986) reprinted in Having Words, 5–21.

Although her language is typically oblique, I assume that in a letter, written Jan. 31, 1965, she is referring to comments made to her by white architects in Birmingham (she mostly met and was given tours by local architects somehow or other connected to Penn) about the Birmingham confrontation of 1963, part of her repeated rediscovery of apartheid by another name in the United States. For the letter, see Everything Loose Will Land, 83.

Scott Brown often discusses tribal identity as it shaped her childhood in South Africa. Peter Orleans also cites her use of this term. See below.

She describes the studio task as certainly impossible and as such requiring a sense of adventure, courage and “gaiety of despair.” UCLA 401, Phase II, 41.

There is of course a substantial literature on the history of urban planning: here I mention only Eric Mumford, Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–69 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Carola Hein, The Routledge Handbook of Planning History (New York: Routledge, 2018); Companion to Urban Design, Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, eds. (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). Gerald D. Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum, Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Gerald D. Suttles, Robert E. Washington, “The Chicago school and the roots of urban ethnography: An intergenerational conversation with Gerald D. Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum, Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Jr, Gerald D. Suttles and Robert E. Washington,” Ethnography 10, 4 (2009), 375–396. As she moved farther from Penn, Scott Brown’s vocabulary shifted. Not only did she reject the term “civic design” that was used at Penn, but her terms for describing the structure and nature of teamwork also shifted. For example, at Penn, she gave some students the role of “captains” and others “scribes,” and defined the overall system as “a limited democracy.” This language of hierarchical labor is eliminated in the UCLA syllabus in favor of more neutral terms such as “organizer.” See UCLA 401, “Studio Organization,” 1–3. See also the syllabus for CP503, 7, taught at Penn in 1963.

These images are the visual analog to her definition of the planner as the person who is “disillusioned with the single architect working on a single lot,” and who endeavors “to overcome our tendency, as architects, to concern ourselves with the isolated building.” See CP503, 3, and UCLA 401, “II,” 51.

In fact, some of her visitors found her dogged pursuit of comprehensiveness too much. Leland S. Burns, for example, who would become one of the most influential scholars of modern housing economics and housing policy and would eventually join the UCLA Planning faculty in 1968, wrote a tongue in cheek “review” of her course that calculated intellectual output and exhaustion over the course of a day of juries, complete with a chart of the entropic loss of focus. He wrote “By means of a very clever decide, concealed on my person yesterday, I was able to make some rather precise estimate of my ‘phase-out rate’ and ‘productivity rate,’ … and have plotted the results on the attached graph… I recommend holding each presentation to a fixed time period, rigorously enforced (perhaps with a timer equipped with frightening alarm.) It seems to me that this sort of discipline is part of training for the professional world as well.” See letter to Prof. Denise Scott Brown from Lee Burns, Nov. 10, 1966, in UCLA 401, Supportive Material.

UCLA 401, Introduction, p. 7.

See UCLA 401, Item E, part I, October 3, 1966, “Outline: Introduction to Santa Monica”, 2.

See UCLA 401, Item E, part I, October 3, 1966, “Outline: Introduction to Santa Monica,” 6.

See UCLA 401, Phase I “The Definition of Urban Form,” 2.

See UCLA 401, Phase I “The Definition of Urban Form,” 4.

See UCLA 401, Phase I “The Definition of Urban Form,” 10.

See UCLA 401, “Introduction,” 5. This definition is not unique to the UCLA syllabus and appears in her most of her teaching materials from 1963 on.

Although neighbors, friends, and colleagues, and although Scott Brown later wrote of their friendship in positive terms, they had a falling out. McCoy wrote a biting letter to Scott Brown in response to Scott Brown’s essay about her. Not only did McCoy feel that Scott Brown had falsely represented her as financially dependent on men for money, but McCoy was deeply upset that Scott Brown, just like the men on the UCLA faculty, had not valued McCoy’s work: McCoy wrote that she discovered “soon after we met that you had not read any of my three published books and had no comments on my writing on architecture for American and Italian journals.” See the letter from McCoy to Scott Brown, Feb. 6,1989, Box 14, Folder 4: Denise Scott Brown, “Knowing Esther McCoy,” in “Esther McCoy papers,” Archives of American Art. On McCoy, see Sympathetic Seeing: Esther Mccoy and The Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design,” Kimberli Meyer and Susan Morgan, eds. (Nürnberg: MAK Center for Art and Architecture and Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2011).

See Philip Thiel, “An Experiment in Space Notation,” The Architectural Review (May 1, 1962): 131, 783, and his “A Sequence-Experience Notation for Architectural and Urban Spaces,” The Town Planning Review 32, 1 (April 1961): 33–52. Thiel would eventually also publish Visual Awareness and Design: an Introductory Program In Conceptual Awareness, Perceptual Sensitivity, and Basic Design Skills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), and People, Paths, and Purposes: Notations for a Participatory Envirotecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

See “A Sequence-Experience Notation,” 34 and 50.

On Kamnitzer, see Curtis Roth, “Software Epigenetics and Architectures of Life,” Becoming Digital (e-flux Architecture, 2019), ➝; Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); and my Everything Loose Will Land, 309.

Kamnitzer, “Computer Aid to Design,” AD 9 (1969): 508.

See UCLA 401, Phase, II, “Determinants of Urban Form,” Oct. 17, 1966, 26. See also the following note Mosher added: “Perhaps a resurgence of dwelling in the central city could occur if the needs of the ‘modern’ family were provided for in parks, recreation, child care, privacy etc. This relates to the large influx of ‘mothers’ into the working force.” UCLA 401, Phase, II. 14.

See UCLA 401, Phase, II, “Determinants of Urban Form,” Oct. 17, 1966, 9, his emphasis, and 20.

UCLA 401, Phase, II., “Determinants of Urban Form,” Oct. 17, 1966, 24. See also, Peter Orleans and William Russell Ellis, Race, Change, and Urban Society (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1971). It must be noted that most of the photographs taken by Scott Brown in Watts focus on the Watts Tower and not on the neighborhood in general.

UCLA 401, Phase, II, “Determinants of Urban Form,” Oct. 17, 1966, 6.

See Scott Brown, “Little Magazines in Architecture and Urbanism,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 34, 4 (1968): 223–233.

Departmental records from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA contain some material related to Scott Brown’s tenure and promotion case that refer to a manuscript. On alternative publications during this period, see Beatriz Colomina, Craig Buckley, and Urtzi Grau, Clip, Stamp, Fold: the Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x to 197x (Barcelona: Actar, 2010), and Craig Buckley, Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture In the 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

On Venturi and historical privilege, see Jonathan Massey, “Review: Power and Privilege,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75, no. 4 (2016): 497-498.

During my interview with Scott Brown she carefully and with great detail described the almost constant assault she was under while at UCLA from most of her male colleagues, including her Dean, senior colleagues from other Departments, as well as the members of her own faculty.

See for example, Rebecca Choi, “Black Architectures: Race, Pedagogy and practice, 1957-1966,” UCLA dissertation, 2020. For recent discussions of race and its embeddedness in modern architecture see Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2020), and Charles L. Davis, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2019).

UCLA 401, Phase III Part A, 13.

Although Orleans was an associate professor at UCLA, he left his position to pursue an architecture degree at the University of Colorado, Denver.

In describing the format of student reports, she wrote “this will take two forms, a written-and-illustrated report and a verbal, slide-and-magic-lantern illustrated group lecture… It should be in Ditto form and illustrated copiously by photographs or drawings or both… Drawings should be workman-like affairs designed to inform not evade—no false ‘art.’ The same with the photographs.” UCLA 401, Phase III Part A, 40. This requirement and description were consistent across all her teaching at Penn, Berkeley and UCLA.

The “dullness” of the materials needed by the urban planner to non-planners in general and architects in particular, is something she mentions frequently. To give just one example, she wrote in the introduction to the studio: “if he {the urban designer} continues to find the world of the sociologist ‘very dull’… if the joy of numbers and their uncertainty, or the mechanics of the decision-making processes … remain foreign to him; if he believes ecology is to do only with plants and flowers, and climate is something we have to overcome with mechanical systems; then I’m afraid he is the only who is stuffy and dull,” her emphasis. UCLA 401, Introduction, 4.