For Denise Scott Brown, who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of design and planning projects. Through the lens of her Alpa camera she sought to penetrate the irreducible complexities of life around her – and to make a case for the architect and planner’s role in intervening within it. Encounters presents, for the first time, an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s: the formative decades during which Scott Brown left her home city of Johannes- burg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, developed the pro- found interest in postwar suburbia from which Learning from Las Vegas would emerge and joined her husband Robert Venturi in practice. Accompanied by an essay on Scott Brown’s conception of the ordinary, this collection of photographs offers a window into modes of thinking that continue to structure how designers perceive the world around them.
