The Brooklyn Rail

Izzy Kornblatt, the editor of Encounters, writes in his essay “In Search of the Ordinary” that “More than any other single figure of the twentieth century, Denise Scott Brown made architects think about everyday environments.” Known primarily for her work as an architect and for co-authoring the influential book Learning from Las Vegas (MIT Press, 1972) with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown is also a prolific photographer. In the introduction to the facsimile edition of Learning from Las Vegas, reissued by MIT Press in 2017, Scott Brown writes, “Photography was our primary tool,” in arguing that Las Vegas, a city built for cars and casinos, an asphalt patchwork of parking lots and palm trees, was worth looking at, and that there was much to learn from the “ugly and ordinary” architectures rather than the “heroic and original.”

Bound in blue linen and presented in a softcover horizontal format, Encounters, which collects a selection of Denise Scott Brown’s photography from 1958 to the mid-seventies, including some of her photographs of Las Vegas, has the feel of a family photo album, albeit a weighty one at over four hundred pages. The book organizes the photographs in themed sections rather than chronologically. Uncaptioned, the photos float in associative space, allowing the reader to recall their own travels and memories, the places and people they’ve captured in photo albums of their own.

In an echo of the architectural categories presented in Learning from Las Vegas, Encounters devotes a section of the book to both “Ordinary Architectures” and “Extraordinary Architectures.” “Ordinary Architectures” contains housing from Miami Beach to Johannesburg, but could otherwise be ordinary housing anywhere. One spread shows a Levittown development in plywood progress next to a picturesque row of pastel houses, complete with green lawns and a silver water tower standing tall in the distance. In “Extraordinary Architectures,” the section of photographs directly following the ordinary, Scott Brown takes her camera on a tour of famous sites, beginning with a close-up of Watts Towers in Los Angeles. Some of the photographs in this section appear more understated or even anonymized, rather than extraordinary, especially if you can’t immediately recognize where they’re taken. On the other hand, the stately columns and stone of the Royal Crescent sweep across two photos in gray and green, extraordinary in its scale and patina of history. When I was flipping through Encounters on a plane, the man seated next to me glanced over and asked, “Is that Bath?”

The “Las Vegas” section of Encounters appears toward the end of the book, almost as if all the photographs before led Scott Brown to the desert. Echoes of what I associate with Las Vegas, that visual cacophony of resort signs and billboards, appear in the parking lots and car dealerships of Los Angeles, the shopping centers of Rio de Janeiro, roadside advertisements for Sprite and cigarettes in South Africa. In her book On Beauty and Being Just, literary essayist Elaine Scarry uses palm trees as an example of being wrong about beauty. She once thought palm trees were ugly, but an encounter with a beautiful palm makes her realize her mistake. There’s a palm tree quality about Las Vegas—it’s more frequently regarded as tacky and tawdry, a punchline of a place.

The Las Vegas depicted in Encounters is undeniably beautiful, with its wide denim washed skies and intricate signs that look confectionary during the day, like the bubblegum pink Stardust cloud, emblazoned with winking diamonds. A fold out spread of four photos in the Las Vegas section showcase the neon signs in all their glory, glowing like otherworldly beacons against the pitch-dark night. Denise Scott Brown’s photos are a nostalgic portrait of a Las Vegas that no longer exists, its famous commercial strip now decorated with giant LED screens rather than neon. It’s a snapshot of a city with a ruthless American appetite for its own reinvention. Old resorts are imploded, clearing the way for something new.

I’ve seen the Stardust sign, even though the resort is long-gone. It’s housed outside at the Neon Museum, in their neon boneyard, along with the Yucca Motel sign, pictured towards the end of the book, its stem of white flowers reaching into the sky amidst a collage of other signs for motels, rest stops, and gas stations. For Scarry, a specific palm tree changes her mind—the ugly tree is newly beautiful. Encounters suggests that the “ugly and ordinary” has always been beautiful from Scott Brown’s point of view. She takes photos of parking lots and picturesques both with care and attention. Encounters is a celebration of this kind of looking, one that invites you to sit down and look closely at the everyday around you, with fresh eyes.