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Denise Scott Brown: Writer and Theorist

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Denise Scott Brown

Part of the book series: Springer Biographies ((SPRINGERBIOGS))

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Abstract

The chapter includes an extensive analysis of her theoretical work and opens up the important topics and areas she has dealt with so far. Since Denise Scott Brown is still active and continues to write, it is not possible to talk about her entire theoretical work, but rather her work so far. Her main theoretical ideas are certainly of great importance for the history and theory of architecture and urban planning in the second half of the 20th and early twenty-first centuries. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi wrote their theories and published them in response to their frustration and disapproval with regard to existing aesthetics. The chapter is divided into several parts, starting with An introduction to Denise the Theorist, which is a broad overview and introduction to the theoretical works of Scott Brown, and continuing with the section, The influence of Denise Scott Brown on the development of postmodernism (Introduction to Postmodernism, Postmodern at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, Postmodernism as seen by Denise Scott Brown, The end of postmodernism). The third part of the chapter, Eternal Las Vegas, is a well-known topic, and is the research Scott Brown and Venturi undertook in Las Vegas. The previous aesthetic standards were unable to explain the appearance of general urban chaos, overcrowded with signs and symbols of various forms. Their Learning from Las Vegas book recognized the need to increase the freedom for architects to discern and learn from the everyday. The chapter ends with an examination of her theoretical work Architecture as Patterns and Systems: Learning from Planning, giving explanations of her philosophies of urbanism and their relation to architecture. This theoretical work is the second part of the book Architecture as Signs and Systems for a Mannerist Time, which Denise Scott Brown co-authored with Robert Venturi.

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  1. University of Niš, Niš, Serbia

    Biljana Arandelovic

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  1. Biljana Arandelovic
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Correspondence to Biljana Arandelovic .

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Arandelovic, B. (2023). Denise Scott Brown: Writer and Theorist. In: Denise Scott Brown. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36781-6_4

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