Forms, Forces, Functions

Denise Scott Brown (born 1931) is an architect, planner, writer, educator, and former principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates in Philadelphia. Scott Brown and her late husband and partner, Robert Venturi, are regarded among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, both through their architecture and planning, and their theoretical writing and teaching. Her advisory, master planning, and design projects span work for international cities, universities, museums, and other important sites, including work on the Sainsbury Wing of the British National Gallery in London, the Seattle Art Museum, the Children's Museum of Houston, Franklin Court of Philadelphia, the Nikko Kirifuri resort in Japan, and the provincial capitol building in Toulouse, France. She has held architecture and planning professorships at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Harvard, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Yale, and visiting positions at Rice, Oberlin, UC Santa Barbara and Princeton. Elizabeth Schambelan is a writer and editor in New York. She has written for publications including Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Triple Canopy. She was an executive editor of Artforum from 2019 until 2023. She is currently working on a book forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.