Denise Scott Brown: Thinking Through Photography

Join Izzy Kornblatt, Lars Müller, Joan Ockman, and Bill Whitaker for a panel discussion celebrating the release of Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs (Lars Müller Publishers, 2025). This wide-ranging conversation will explore Scott Brown’s (MCP'60, MArch'65, HON'94), lifelong engagement with the medium of photography, drawing on a rich body of work that was fundamental in shaping Scott Brown’s thought, pedagogy, and practice. It will also offer a look at the collaborative book-making process through which Encounters emerged.

Edited by Izzy Kornblatt, Encounters for the first time presents an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s—the formative decades during which she departed her childhood home of Johannesburg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which Learning from Las Vegas would emerge, and joined Robert Venturi in practice. Moving thematically rather than sequentially through Scott Brown’s photographic oeuvre, and including an essay on her conception of the ordinary, Encounters opens up new ways of thinking about one of the most important architects of the postwar era.

The book will be available for purchase at the event.
 

Izzy Kornblatt is a critic, historian and designer based in New Haven, Connecticut. His writings have appeared in Architectural Record, where he serves as a contributing editor, as well as in other publications including the Architectural Review and the New York Review of Architecture, and in four books. He has completed several independent design projects and curated exhibitions at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Yale University School of Architecture. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the history and theory of architecture at Yale.

Lars Müller was born in Oslo in 1955 and has been based in Switzerland since 1963. After becoming a graphic designer in Zürich and extended travels, he started a one-year assistant position with designer Wim Crouwel in Amsterdam. Having founded his own studio, Integral Lars Müller, in Baden (Switzerland) in 1982, Müller established a long-lasting friendship with his mentor Josef Müller-Brockmann. In 1983, Müller published his first book and, as Lars Müller Publishers, has produced some 800 titles to date. He is a passionate educator and has taught at various universities in Switzerland, Europe, the USA and Japan. In 2019, he taught as the Regents’ Professor at UCLA.

William Whitaker is Director and Chief Curator of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is coauthor (with George Marcus) of The Houses of Louis Kahn and Uncrating the Japanese House: Junzo Yoshimura, Antonin and Noemi Raymond, and George Nakashima (with Yuka Yokoyama). Trained as an architect at Penn and the University of New Mexico, Whitaker works closely with the archival collections of Louis I. Kahn, Lawrence Halprin, and the partnership of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in support of teaching, scholarship, preservation, and public engagement.

Before Penn, Adjunct Professor Joan Ockman taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for over two decades and served as Director of Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from 1994 to 2008. In addition to Columbia and Penn, she has held teaching appointments at Harvard, Yale, Cooper Union, Cornell, Graduate Center of City University of New York, and the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands. Among her many edited publications are her award-winning anthology Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (Rizzoli, 1993); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001); and Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (MIT Press, 2012).

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.