Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown has won the Soane Medal, awarded annually by the Sir John Soane Museum to “architects who have made a major contribution to their field, through their built work, through education, history and theory,” and who have been able to “encourage a better understanding of the central importance of architecture.” This is the second edition of the prize, which went in 2017 to Rafael Moneo, and that involves delivering the Soane Annual Lecture in London. Born Denise Lakofski in Zambia (1931), Scott Brown took her name from her first husband and kept it until 1967, upon marrying her future studio partner Robert Venturi, deceased in 2018. She taught at Berkeley, Yale, and Harvard, but is known above all as co-author of one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto for anonymous and pop architecture. Despite working with Venturi since 1969, she was excluded from the Pritzker Prize when her partner received it in 1991, a decision that sparked much controversy among female architects, and which was partly compensated when the couple jointly received the AIA Gold Medal in 2016.