This photograph, probably taken from a moving vehicle, shows a cherry-red sportscar speeding along a Los Angeles highway, with a dense array of houses and power lines visible just beyond the far shoulder. The car is a 1965 Ford Mustang, likely a fastback model: a classic, coveted automobile. Yet it was not the primary interest of the photographer, Denise Scott Brown. Instead Scott Brown was keen to document the built landscape as a whole—made up of roads, architecture, signage, strip malls, parking lots, and so forth—as part of her practice as an urban planner, architect, writer, and educator.
A daughter of European Jewish immigrants, Scott Brown was born in Zambia and grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. After studying and traveling extensively in Europe and the United States, she arrived in Los Angeles in 1965 and joined the three-person faculty of UCLA’s newly established School of Architecture and Urban Planning. L.A.’s built environment, despite being disdained by serious urban planners at the time, inspired her. Scott Brown didn’t consider herself to be a photographer but was nonetheless “shooting like crazy” in the city, “building up my data by photographing what I loved.” She devised an ambitious studio course titled “Form, Forces and Function in Santa Monica,” and used color slides in the classroom to discuss the city’s historical, cartographic, and sociological aspects. Industrial Romanticism, Los Angeles is one of approximately 11,000 slides she shot between 1956 and 1975 and then stowed in a closet, forgotten, while she focused on the architectural firm she established with her husband, Robert Venturi. Scott Brown’s slides came back to light after some four decades and have since been exhibited, published, and printed.
Britt Salvesen
2025