ARQUINE + Denise Scott Brown

While I was working for Denise Scott Brown, one of my many tasks related to book publishing. She had several projects she wanted to do, and I was helping her with that.

There were three books she specially wanted to see happening.

The most important was a book on her photography from the 50s to the 70s, shot between South Africa, Europe and the United States, which had all the popular culture themes that are so important to the work of the firm Venturi Scott Brown.

I believe it was Denise who opened up Bob to popular culture in a major way, or she at least confirmed the intuitions he was already having with Pop. When she went to teach to the East Coast, after her first husband Robert Scott Brown died, she just saw how the car culture was transforming (or making) that part of the country, with its cheap and colorful road signage and commercial buildings. Far from the classicism and historicism of the East Coast vernacular architecture.  

Learning from Las Vegas was their honeymoon period. She seduced him, by inviting him there. 😊 “Wouldn´t Las Vegas be educational?” she asks him in a letter. So, she invited him down there and became engaged. They actually got married in Santa Monica, in Denise´s home. A bungalow style house near the beach, with both their parents and friends.  

Those pictures were seating in a wooden filling cabinet for decades. My job was also to coordinate the scanning of the roughly 15.000 slide collection hidden there.

I still recall watching them with her for the first time, after all these years, and the emotion she was feeling at seeing all that part of her history again. Such a beautiful moment. It helped her also understand her life better, and as she said "the arc of her career".

Robert Scott Brown was her greatest love, I have to say. I still recall her speech at Bob Venturi´s memorial, where she went on talking about Scott Brown for quite a while. She kept his name so the world would not forget about him. This is why I write it here as well. For her. I hope she likes it (I´ll ask Jimmie).

They met in South Africa, as teenage kids. She was the strong one it looked like. He looked like a sweet boy completely crazy about her. The pictures of that period are lovely.

Their plan was to study at Penn urban planning (he enrolled in tropical architecture or something like that) to then go back to their country, South Africa, and help build it. But that plan was cancelled by a terrible car accident, and she just couldn´t go back alone. I don´t think she ever recovered from that.

Bob Venturi was her second love, and they did love each other enormously, and built an amazing partnership together. But that first love never left her.

Anyway, she really wanted to see this book happening, and so Alexander Galan (then at Artbook D.A.P.) put us in touch with Metropolis Books, and Diana Murphy, its chief editor, got immediately interested.

But they asked Denise to write the essay for the book, and she just fell compelled to write these almost sort of memoirs, which were not done when I stopped working for her, few years later. I think she needed to put all that the pictures brought up down.

To this day I don´t know if that book is out, but I am convinced it will someday. I believe it will be a very important book.

….

The second book she wanted to see was the Spanish translation of her book HAVING WORDS, published by the Architectural Association in London (her alma matter) as part of a wonderful series of little books by great architects. She adored that little book, since it was only hers. That series is wonderful indeed, edited by Thomas Weaver.

It was hard being Robert Venturi´s partner during that period of history. Her partnership with Scott Brown was way more equal than with Bob, the genius, I presume. And although Bob was always incredibly respectful and admiring of her and her intelligence, the world was not as advanced.

Denise is not your sweet little woman, like a Ray Eames. She is tough and incredibly

opinionated, as she is incredibly intelligent. She was not tolerated much by the machismo culture of that period. A man like her would have had no problem whatsoever.

So I looked around to see who would be interested to translate that book into Spanish. I think it was Albert Ferré (the chief editor at ACTAR when I met him in Barcelona and now at the CCA) who put us in touch with Arquine, in Mexico. Miquel Adrià (from Barcelona) the boss at Arquine, was super interested and wanted also to have her come lecture to their annual symposium of architecture. A huge event in Latin-America.

I am not going to narrate that trip, but did we have fun! 😊 We went together for a whole week to Mexico D.F. and Denise had a ball. She was the star there, lecturing for an audience of 2000 architects and architecture students for almost 3 hours 😊

It was the young and up and coming architect Alejandro Hernández Gálvez who did the translation for the book. Denise asked me to go over it as the copy editor. I have to say that it was not terrific. But it is hard if you are not an English native or at least live in an English-speaking country. She is also very intellectual and well red. So, it was a difficult task they took lightly (in my opinion).

The book is not too handsome either… Denise was a bit disappointed, given the beauty of the British counterpart.

But they were very nice with us, the Mexicans, they hosted us and treated us like royalty. And I did write a couple articles for their magazine as well.

….

The third book she wanted (this is like the three little piglets’ story) was the Spanish translation of Bob and Denise´s joint book ARCHITECTURE AS SIGNS AND SYSTEMS (which in fact I read and was inspired by to do my architectural thesis PRA2).

 For that we decided to find another publisher and that I would translate it, after the good job I had done for HAVING WORDS or ARMADA DE PALABRAS (I came up with the title! She wasn´t happy with the Mexican one. I remember coming down to the TV room where Bob and Denise were watching TV, so excited. She loved that ARMADA meant she was armed but also “like a flotilla” she said 😊)

Anyway, I contacted Gustavo Gili in Barcelona and came for a meeting in one of my trips home. I met their chief editor, Moisés Puente (now running Puente Editores, Gustavo Gili has closed) and we convened that I would translate it.

And so, I did. But at the end, Denise was not happy with it, being part of another collection (she didn´t like the small format for all her maps), nor with the paper they wanted to print it in, and they never got to an agreement, and so it was never published! Gustavo Gili closed 6 months after, and I think Denise (once again) was having real intuitions. It was not of the quality she wanted.

But I have the whole translation done! Maybe we end up doing to with Moisés after all 😊 I have it in New York (I hope). I did a very good job I believe.

So that´s a story… I had such a great experience working with the Venturi family. I learnt SO MUCH. And I am very grateful of their generosity. I had just divorced, and they became like a family for some years.

Very grateful to Jim Venturi, another rebel like me, who got me all this. I am sure his documentary on his parents (on which I worked as well at the beginning for a year at his CENTER FOR MANNERIST PROPAGANDA) will end up seeing the light just as Denise´s photography book. The world needs them both.