ABSTRACT
In 1956, Denise Scott Brown and her husband, Robert Scott Brown, left London where they had studied architecture, to tour Europe. In Venice, they attended a CIAM-sponsored summer school, where they met the Italian architect Ludovico Quaroni. Broke and exhausted, the young architects decided to look for work in Italy and Quaroni directed them to Giuseppe Vaccaro’s office in Rome. Vaccaro hired the young couple to assist him on the design for Ina-Casa’s Ponte Mammolo neighborhood on the northeast side of Rome. Reflecting on the experience years later, Denise Scott Brown recalled:
The INA CASA housing was a project Robert and I could immediately identify with. Out of South Africa of the early 1950s and England of the mid 1950s, we were idealistic about the housing mission of architecture and demanded a high degree of functional and structural probity in architectural design. Most architects in practice could not meet our youthful demands for moral correctness. Here was a project that (almost!) could. 1
