April 18, 2026
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Transcribed from The Philadelphia Inquirer
Denise Scott Brown was a faculty member at Penn’s architecture school in 1960 when she opposed the tearing down of the university’s Frank Furness-designed library, where the Fisher Fine Arts Library now stands. In this meeting, Scott Brown found an ally in her department colleague, the young architect Robert Venturi.
A lifelong partnership of creativity and genius was formed between the two.
They got married in 1967 but before that, on Scott Brown’s insistence, the architects studied the city of Las Vegas and later published the seminal manifesto-like Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form that pushed against the rigid tenets of modern architecture and argued in defense of the American sprawl.
A documentary made on the couple, by their son, Jim Venturi, called Stardust: A Story of Love and Architecture, chronicles their love story and professional partnership as formidable equals.
Together, they designed a Mount Airy restaurant, restored the Fisher Fine Arts Library, and (among many other national and international projects) worked on Penn’s Perelman Quadrangle.
You think you’ve never seen their work, but the film tells you that you most probably have.
Vehemently, stubbornly, the couple lived in Philadelphia, a city that never could boast of a public building made by them.
“There’s something very Philadelphia about all of this,” my colleague Peter Dobrin wrote upon Venturi’s death in 2018. “ … I’ve come to believe there’s an additive in the local water that makes it impossible for natives to entertain the idea that anything here can be tops.”
Scott Brown is the hero of the story to me.
An architect and urban planner, she was always a professional equal to her husband in spite of the inherently sexist old boys’ club of architecture. Without batting an eye, she held on to her convictions even when it meant making enemies of the most powerful architects like Philip Johnson.
Scott Brown was often underrecognized in the shadow of her husband. When Venturi won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1991, Scott Brown’s name was not mentioned. In 1989, she published her essay, “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture.”
There’s a scene in the film where Scott Brown defends the highly commercial architecture of Las Vegas and compares it to a classical Greek church, and argues that both buildings are aiming to make a sale.
“Would you rather be sold soap or religion on a billboard?” she asks her son who is behind the camera. “I’d go with soap.”
I doubt I will ever be able to look at a church or a temple the same way again.
“Stardust: A Story of Love and Architecture” plays April 21, Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr. brynmawrfilm.org
— Bedatri D. Choudhury
