ENCOUNTERS
DENISE SCOTT BROWN PHOTOGRAPHS
- ROLE: EXHIBITION DESIGN
- TEAM:
- IZZY KORNBLATT, CURATOR
- UGEN YONTEN, CURATORIAL ASSOCIATE
- PETER XU, CURATORIAL ASSOCIATE
- MILO BONACCI, GRAPHIC DESIGN
IMAGE CREDIT: YAXUAN LIU UNLESS NOTED OTHERWISE
In the formative years between 1950 and 1970, Denise Scott Brown found in photography the possibility of looking anew at a fraught world—and of rethinking the architect’s role within it. Presenting a wide-ranging selection of Scott Brown’s photographs, Encounters explores this crucial but little-studied photographic practice, and raises broader questions about architectural research, pedagogy, and the social and political obligations of design.
Conceptual collage showing flower-covered theater in dialog with Paul Rudolph-designed Yale School of Architecture building.
Scott Brown, among the most influential architects of the postwar era, approached photography not as a fine art but as a medium through which architects and planners could be brought into direct engagement with the often-unwelcome complexities of reality. Her deployment of photography as a tool of research, teaching, and design offered a corrective to what she saw as the failures of postwar modernism. And it helped her develop the defining interest in the “ordinary” and the practice of suspending aesthetic judgment made famous in the book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which emerged out of a Yale architecture studio she taught with Robert Venturi in 1968.Encounters is the widest-ranging exhibition to date of Scott Brown’s photography, and involved extensive original research by the Yale School of Architecture–based team that developed, curated, and designed it. A number of the photographs on view have never before been exhibited publicly.
Axonometric drawing of the exhibition during YSoA's public cocktail receptions after lectures
In the exhibition, Scott Brown’s photographs are presented as 35mm slides in a purpose-built, darkened theater, offering audiences an immersive and contemplative experience of these photographs that recalls Scott Brown’s longtime usage of them as presentation and teaching slides. Surrounding the theater are five thematic rooms in which a curated selection of Scott Brown’s photographs are paired with work by other photographers including Ed Ruscha and David Goldblatt, as well as materials drawn from several archives, placing the work in an expanded field and prompting audiences to draw connections, ask critical questions, and rethink its significance for the present.Encounters is based upon the 2025 book of the same name edited by Izzy Kornblatt and published by Lars Müller Publishers, which features nearly 400 photographs chosen and ordered in collaboration with Scott Brown. The 150 photographs displayed in the exhibition theater are presented as a series of side-by-side slide projections reminiscent of facing pages; the exhibition sequence translates the book sequence into spatial form, ensuring that Scott Brown’s input over the presentation of her work is maintained.
Both in exhibition and book form, Encounters offers a point of departure to reconsider one of the central figures of twentieth-century architecture—and an invitation, as Scott Brown and her co-authors put it in Learning from Las Vegas, “to question how we look at things.”