Denise Scott Brown's Pritzker Snub Becomes News Again, More than 20 Years Later

At the end of last month, Harvard's Women in Design group launched a petition to demand that the Pritzker committee recognize Denise Scott Brown alongside her life-long partner Robert Venturi, recipient of the 1991 prize for architectural achievement.

Prominent and international voices in the profession, including Robert Venturi himself, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas have backed the petition, which has garnered nearly 4,000 signatures in one week.

Karissa Rosenfield frames the debate around the nature of their collaboration, rather than sexism. She resurrects Goldberger's 20-year-old response to a letter titled "Robert Venturi: No Man Is an Island," addressed directly to former New York Times architecture critic and Pritzker Prize Committee member. In his response, Goldberger defends the decision on the grounds that, "the Pritzker Prize was awarded largely for Venturi’s architectural designs, which are rather more his own, and in recognition of the extraordinary influence of the ideas set out in his very first book, 'Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,' of which he was the sole author."

A lengthy interview with Scott Brown on the topic recently appeared in Architect magazine.

Thanks to Bora Mici