Jorge Figueira: This conversation is about your contribution to the recognition of women architects. Your work had one of its highpoints in Learning from Las Vegas… and as we will begin with Las Vegas, I would like to ask a question that interests me: the comparison between Las Vegas and Macau… Do you know Macau?
Denise Scott Brown: Macau, they say it’s like a Chinese Las Vegas...

Macau has surpassed Las Vegas in terms of revenue, which is extraordinary.
Everything in China is like that. The buildings there have surpassed the buildings in New York in height, too.

When you were working in Las Vegas at the end of the 60s were you aware of the impact that Learning from Las Vegas was going to have?
No. You see, it was a logical sequence out of my own life, starting in Africa and then in England, and taking what I learned there and from the Social Sciences. To me it was a logical sequence and it was an inquiry I had been making for much of my life. Getting to write was something that American academe pushed into me. Bob [Robert Venturi], was used to the notion, from having been at Princeton, that if you’re an academic you write. But we wrote those things because we also needed to write them down, to interpret them for ourselves, and also we were not having work to do as architects, because we were just starting out. And if you can’t do it, you write about it… Bob’s first book [Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966] had created a stir, which I think surprised him. It hit the right nerve at the time. The second book [Learning from Las Vegas, 1972], we didn’t think it would do what it has done... A little while ago I did something, as every academic must do: I googled myself (I don’t have time to do that most of the time). I wasn’t looking to see how well I have done... but it was interesting. And then I found hundreds and hundreds of references and it wasn’t even about Venturi, it was me. Most of them were quick references to things written in the Humanities and the Social Sciences about Learning from Las Vegas. So, Complexity and Contradiction has had an influence in architecture and Learning from Las Vegas in those areas. The interest in Complexity is a narrow one, but the rest of the world is more interested in Learning from Las Vegas.

Is it true that it was you who convinced your husband to go to Las Vegas?
I was going to teach at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles]. We were starting a new school there and I had a good budget for visitors. So I asked many of my old colleagues from Penn [University of Pennsylvania] to come and lecture to my students. But I asked Bob because I knew he had to see Las Vegas. I was the one who introduced him to the popular environment. We both were interested in Mannerism but he had not heard of the Pop Art movement in England. He thought the first one was American, but it wasn’t. It was preceded by twenty years in England. So I was the one who brought Pop into our partnership and our marriage. And he caught on very well! And he began making these very creative comparisons with traditional architecture, which was his thing, which he learned at Princeton.

But going to Las Vegas was the “great leap forward”, the tour de force...
Yes. But I had already done a great deal of photography in Europe on popular culture, and in Africa. And in America before I got to go to the West Coast. So I already had a large slide collection. So it was a “great leap forward” but it came from something already there.

Louis Kahn didn’t try and stop you from going there?
Kahn and Bob fell out. But it was more over the fact that when he got back from Rome he shared his ideas about Mannerism with Lou Kahn and suddenly Lou Kahn was building them. You see, young artists used to say about Picasso: don’t give him your ideas, he’ll use them so much better than you. So Lou Kahn started doing that and Bob felt robbed of his intellectual property. Lou didn’t know why Bob suddenly was not his friend anymore, but he sent Bob a message via me, and the message was: “There was truth in Las Vegas”. He put it in a very Kahnian way. It was very typical of Kahn, that way of saying things. But Lou couldn’t follow us to Las Vegas. He didn’t have the tools for that.

Was it a love/hate relationship with Las Vegas, like in Pop Art?
Yes, it’s a feeling that you can’t altogether interpret: do I hate it or do I love it? We used to play that game: “I can like something worse than you can.”

But you seemed very happy and exuberant in the images of you in Las Vegas…
Well, we were falling in love, apart from everything else! So it was a mixture of things...

You have said your upbringing in South Africa influenced the way in which you connected with Las Vegas.
Yes, it’s an African view.

In what way?
People know South Africa for its racial problem. A long, sad story. But there’s also a problem which anyone who lives in Brazil will know about: there is the cosmopolitan culture and then there is the local culture. And you have the ruling class, who are British, and they tell everyone that the British way of life is the way you should live. My beautiful landscape is only beautiful to the extent you can say: “This little piece looks like Surrey!” As a child I would ask myself: “Why does it have to look like Surrey to be beautiful?” There were a set of norms applied from outside, particularly from England, to the way we should do things in Africa. And if you read debates on art in Africa, they are all about “how can we do our own things, and not be influenced?” I had an art teacher in Johannesburg, she was a Dutch Jewish refugee, and she said: “You will not be a creative artist if you don’t learn from what’s around you.”

You fell in love with Las Vegas as a spectral city, a “city as mirage”, as you have written. How do you relate to contemporary Las Vegas?
There have been may Las Vegases. The very early one, which was just a freight depot for trains. And then the first proud signs of the desert, which were the ones that we saw. It was the best place to study signs because there was no colonial landscape under it. It just stood there like that. Eventually, when Steven Winn came, he made getting rid of neon his theme. The idea was Las Vegas must grow beyond being a gambling town; it was to grow. And that was probably correct. So he removed Las Vegas’ communication with itself when he removed the neon and produced something dull and depressing. But the next group that came along, who were the ones that Rem Koolhaas was associated with, who produced New York and Paris and Venice in Las Vegas, did some interesting things. The Eiffel Tower stands on top of the Palais Lafayette [Hotel Paris Las Vegas]…

And you like that?
Well I say: eat your heart out, Paris! You can’t like it but you can wonder at it… Since then it has got denser. No, the one I really learn from is the one we learned from. But I think there are new things happening. Suddenly Neo-modernism is taking over and that one I really question. On the other hand, there are some interesting Neo-modern things. Neo-modernism is a form of Post-modernism. It’s Po-Mo, except it uses the modern. It was nothing to do with early Modernism. It does not value the same things. But when you make all our buildings mirror-buildings, they begin to send reflections to each other and in the early morning it’s as if you get the sun rising in the west. And in the evening, you get the sun setting in the east and then the shadows going that way… So you get a surrealist Las Vegas. I don’t think that’s going to be enough. I think the CityCenter is not going to be a much loved place. It doesn’t have enough communication. We’ll have to wait and see. One might have faith because they’ve done it before, and pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

Is populist is an ugly word to you?
The word is associated with a lot of racial bigotry in America. So we have to use it carefully. But the notion that people have rights to their own opinions, their own tastes, their own patrimony, their own intellectual property… If I want those rights, then other people have rights, too. But I’m an artist and I will defend the thing I have done, that I love. By the way I want to tell you about that because I would like you to help me defend it. Franklin Court [a museum dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia,1976] is under threat, they [the owners] are going to alter it. We have made a petition but they say they are not going to listen to us.

You managed to save Lieb House... [built in 1957, in Barnegat Light, New Jersey, it was moved by barge along the River Hudson to Glen Cove, Long Island in 2009].
Yes, we did. Did you see the film? Did you notice the diversity of all the people who worked on that? A group of Pennsylvania Amish took mediaeval skills they learned in Germany and used them for putting that house on the barge.

Do you see yourself as a pioneer as far as women in architecture are concerned, continuing the line of the great Jane Drew and Alison Smithson?
My mother studied architecture and when I got to my first class in architecture I said: what are all these men doing here? Five women in a class of sixty-five. My expectations were not be a pioneer. But for years and years I would find I was the only woman at meetings. There’d be fifteen hundred men, one African-American and me! And we would sort of wave at each other. We were tokens. And now, after about twenty years like that, women began entering architecture. But I still feel it’s not a good place for women, in many respects. It’s a very good field for women but it’s not welcoming to women.

Are you a feminist?
Yes, very much so.

And how do you relate to the many feminist studies about architecture that have been published recently?
I’ve written and article called “Sexism and the Star System in Architecture” [1989] and I’m happy that it’s used. The latest groups of young feminists are paraphrasing Freud, who said “what do women want?” Feminists hate him for that, but they say: “What do older women want?” They seem to suggest: “If you have problems it’s your fault.” You should criticise yourself. They say: “We haven’t had any problems.” And I react to that. I say: young women don’t realise that they’re going to hit the glass ceiling. And when they do they will think it’s their fault. Because they have no feminist awareness.  I came across another angry old woman writing in the same vein [Susan J. Douglas, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work Is Done, 2010]. And she said: young women say: “Look, men have said to us, your real power is what the Spice Girls do; use your femininity, flaunt it, that’s your power.” And she says: “Do you think that if that were real power, Cheney would not be wearing a tutu and a bustier?” I think her answer is better than mine!

In your relationship and work with Robert Venturi, what is your feminine approach reflected in – a sociological sensibility, the Pop thing?
That’s a very difficult question. Routinely everything is attributed to Bob. It’s nothing that he does; it’s just the way people want to see it. They want me to be anything they’re not interested in. “She’s a planner”; “the typist”; “the photographer”. When I taught at Berkeley, I found there were five strong women at the School of Architecture and we had a lot of common in how we taught. I don’t know if that’s nature or nurture. I say it will take thirty years for us to find out. Some people say it will take sixty years. I had to encourage young women to risk it and the young men to discipline themselves. Again, I don’t know if it’s nature or nurture.

Why do you think there have been no books that have had the same impact as Complexity and Learning from Las Vegas?
I don’t know. That needed a big change... there has not been as big a movement as the one in the 60s. The sustainability movement is a sleeping giant. I hope the new urbanism [a traditionalist American movement] well be temporary because I think it’s a restrictive movement. Sustainability has a lot of stuff to be thought through, but it has to fight the complexity of life; things don’t pan out as simply as they want them to. |

[E.N.] This interview, parts of which have already appeared in “As mulheres jovens não têm consciência feminista” – Público, (21 Jun. 2010), P2 Supplement –, took place on the occasion of Denise Scott Brown’s participation in the 1st International Meeting of the European Architectural Network (EAHN) in Guimarães from 17 to 20 June, 2010.
We are indebted to Arch. Jorge Correia for his assistance in publishing the interview.