The Arquitect´s Album 02 - Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown (1931), a well-known architect who, since the late 1960s, has formed, together with Robert Venturi, one of the most prolific and revolutionary couples in the history of contemporary architecture, has also been a photographer and traveller: naturalised American, she was born in Zambia, grew up and studied in South Africa, went on to study in England and Italy, continued learning and teaching on the East and West coasts of the United States and settled in Philadelphia, where she currently lives. To her we dedicate this second volume of the collection The Architect's Album, whose first issue was dedicated to the figure of Sigurd Lewerentz, architect-photographer-traveller.
 
Here we present a selection of around 50 unpublished photographs that tell the story of her wedding journey with her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, in 1955: five weeks travelling in Illyria, a Balkan region between Albania and the former Yugoslavia, 
where a young architect-photographer shows us, through her camera, a country in transition, portraying aspects of rural and urban life, through places, people, animals, landscapes, streets and architecture that take us on a unique and transcendental journey, her Illyrian Honeymoon.
 
During the development of the photographic sequence and the graphic design, we received a letter from Denise, in which, in addition to some comments and recommendations about the book, she proposed adding a text written by herself, which would accompany the selection of images. A poetic, reflective and very personal text, though also polemical and transgressive, which we have incorporated in fragments distributed throughout the book. A text, which can be read independently or as a complement to the images - which also have their own visual narrative structure -, full of reflections on the places she visits and of memories with her "first Bob", who died a few years later, in 1959, in a tragic car accident in Philadelphia, to whom Denise dedicates the book.