ABSTRACT
Scott Brown was born in 1931 in Nkana, Zambia, into a well-to-do Jewish household of Lithuanian and Latvian ancestry. After architectural studies at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, she earned a diploma at the Architectural Association in London in 1955 and was registered in the United Kingdom in 1956. Her teachers included Arthur Korn, a Bauhaus émigré and coauthor of the MARS plan for postwar London who emphasized the connections between social structure and urban form, and historian John Summerson, whose preoccupations with mannerism and Georgian urbanism contrasted with contemporary CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and “townscape” planning ideas. Peter and Alison Smithson’s focus on advertising, everyday experience, and neighborhood “association” also stimulated her interest in pop art and ordinary urban environments. At the University of Pennsylvania, she obtained masters degrees in city planning and architecture in 1960 and 1965, studying under sociologist Herbert Gans, a “participant-observer” of Levittown, who defended the aesthetic validity of popular culture, and planner David Crane, an originator of advocacy planning. An early article, “The Meaningful City” (1965), adapted Crane’s articulation of three levels of urban meaning-“heraldic,” “physiognomic,” and “locational”—to urban design. Her multifaceted education generated a sophisticated understanding of the interaction between architectural form and social forces as well as the conviction that architects should foster rather than negate patterns of urban order arising from the aggregation of many individual social and economic decisions.
