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Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium

In 1972, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, together with Steve Izenour (MED ‘69), published their treatise Learning from Las Vegas following a Yale design studio. This canonical text explores architectural communication in a new kind of automobile-oriented urban landscape. Its interdisciplinary methods helped change architecture and studio teaching in fundamental ways.

Fifty years after the publication of Learning from Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown: A Symposium, convened by Frida Grahn, presents new scholarship related to the groundbreaking studio methods, developed by Scott Brown during her teaching career in the early 1960s. Three panels, building on chapters in the recently published anthology Denise Scott Brown In Other Eyes: Portraits of an Architect (2022), edited by Grahn, offer new perspectives on Scott Brown’s intellectual formation, her research on determinants of urban form, her concern for social factors, and her advocacy for minimal design interventions in lieu of large-scale urban renewal. It highlights Scott Brown’s conceptual contributions, her distinct voice, and her incisive impact on architectural education and design.

Welcome and Introduction
1:30 p.m.
Hastings Hall

Deborah Berke, Yale University
Mary McLeod, Columbia University
Frida Grahn, (Università della Svizzera italiana)

The Nonjudgmental Attitude: Learning from Three Continents
2:00 p.m.
Hastings Hall

Craig Lee, Art Institute of Chicago
Valéry Didelon, École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Normandie
Katherine Smith, Agnes Scott College
Surry Schlabs, moderator, Yale University

The City in Flux: Form, Forces, and Functions
4:00 p.m.
Hastings Hall

Lee Ann Custer, Vanderbilt University
Sylvia Lavin, Princeton University
Denise Costanzo, The Pennsylvania State University
Elihu Rubin, moderator, Yale University

Make no Big Plans: South Street vs. Co-op City
6:00 p.m.
Hastings Hall

Sarah Moses, (Harvard University)
Joan Ockman, Yale University
Frida Grahn, (Università della

Feb 8, 2023 01:30 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)