Architectural Behaviorology: Denise Scott Brown Photographs

Join Beatriz Colomina, Andrés Jaque, Izzy Kornblatt, and Lars Müller for a panel discussion celebrating the release of Encounters: Denise Scott Brown Photographs (Lars Müller Publishers, 2025). Drawing on Scott Brown’s striking body of images—many of which have never before been shown publicly—this conversation will touch on Scott Brown’s experience in Apartheid-era South Africa, her “Grand Tour” through Europe, and her teaching on Las Vegas and Levittown, among other topics. More broadly, it will explore how photography serves as a critical medium of thought for designers.

Edited by Izzy Kornblatt, Encounters for the first time presents an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s—the formative decades during which she departed her childhood home of Johannesburg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which the seminal Learning from Las Vegas (The MIT Press, 1972) would emerge, and joined Robert Venturi in practice. Moving thematically rather than sequentially through Scott Brown’s photographic oeuvre, and including an essay on her conception of the ordinary, Encounters opens up new ways of thinking about one of the most important architects of the postwar era.

Speakers:
Beatriz Colomina, Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of Media and Modernity Program, Princeton University
Andrés Jaque, Dean, Professor, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Izzy Kornblatt, Critic, Historian, Designer
Lars Müller, Founder, Lars Müller Publishers

About the Speakers:
Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architecture and the founding director of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Program at Princeton University. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold (2010), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016), X-Ray Architecture (2019), and Radical Pedagogies (2022). Her exhibitions include Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012), Radical Pedagogies (2014), and Sick Architecture (2022). With Mark Wigley, she is the curator of the current exhibitions We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture at the 2025 Milan Triennale, and The Other Side of the Hill at the 2025 Venice Biennale. Her latest books are Sick Architecture (MIT Press, 2025) and the forthcoming We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture (Lars Müller, 2025), with Mark Wigley.

Andrés Jaque is Dean and Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He is founder of the New York- and Madrid-based architecture practice Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN), which works at the intersection of research, architectural design, and activism. Notable recent projects include the Reggio School, Madrid; the Ocean Space for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Collection (TBA21), Venice; and the Babin Yar Museum of Memory and Oblivion, Kyiv. Jaque was the chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water (2020), and has authored a number of books including Superpowers of Scale (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2020), PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (Fundació Mies Van der Rohe, 2013), and Mies y la gata Niebla. Ensayos sobre arquitectura y cosmopolítica (Puente Editores, 2019). 

Izzy Kornblatt is a critic, historian and designer based in New Haven, Connecticut. His writings have appeared in Architectural Record, where he serves as a contributing editor, as well as in other publications including the Architectural Review and the New York Review of Architecture, and in four books. He has completed several independent design projects and curated exhibitions at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Yale University School of Architecture. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the history and theory of architecture at Yale.

Lars Müller was born in Oslo in 1955 and has been based in Switzerland since 1963. After becoming a graphic designer in Zürich and extended travels, he started a one-year assistant position with designer Wim Crouwel in Amsterdam. Having founded his own studio, Integral Lars Müller, in Baden (Switzerland) in 1982, Müller established a long-lasting friendship with his mentor Josef Müller-Brockmann. In 1983, Müller published his first book and, as Lars Müller Publishers, has produced some 800 titles to date. He is a passionate educator and has taught at various universities in Switzerland, Europe, the USA and Japan. In 2019, he taught as the Regents’ Professor at UCLA.