Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown (born 1931) is an architect, planner and writer, born in Nkana, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), and raised in Johannesburg. She studied at the University of the Witwatersrand and at the Architectural Association in London, graduating in 1955, then earned a master's degree in city planning at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. She taught at Penn, Berkeley, UCLA and Yale.

In 1967 she married Robert Venturi and joined his Philadelphia firm, becoming its principal for planning in 1969; it was later named Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. She led a Yale studio that studied the Las Vegas Strip and co-wrote Learning from Las Vegas (1972) with Venturi and Steven Izenour. The book treated commercial signs, parking lots and roadside buildings as subjects for serious study, and set out the distinction between the "duck" and the "decorated shed."

She directed the firm's campus and city planning, including work for Dartmouth College, and shared the design of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London (1991) and the departmental government building in Toulouse, France (1999). When the 1991 Pritzker Prize went to Venturi alone, she did not attend the ceremony; a 2013 petition to add her name was declined. She and Venturi received the AIA Gold Medal jointly in 2016.