Yale Architecture

In the formative years between 1950 and 1970, Denise Scott Brown found in photography the possibility of looking anew at a fraught world—and of rethinking the architect’s role within it. Presenting a wide-ranging selection of Scott Brown’s photographs, Encounters explores her crucial but little-studied photographic practice, and raises broader questions about architectural research and pedagogy, the profession’s interest in so-called ordinary places, and the social and political obligations of design. In Encounters, these photographs—many of which are shown as slides in a darkened theater—are paired with work by other photographers, as well as materials drawn from several archives, placing Scott Brown’s work in an expanded field and prompting audiences to rethink its significance for the present.

Neither wholly modern nor wholly historicist, the work of Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) resists being categorized into any specific architectural movement. Rather, Plečnik, who played a pivotal role in transforming his home city of Ljubljana after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, created a distinctly Slovenian architectural language during a critical period of national identity formation. Plečnik did not create a sweeping, grand vision for a new city. Instead, for more than three decades, he worked incrementally on urban projects large and small, creating an accretion of interventions that effortlessly graph onto an existing context. Pre-Mo Po-Mo: Micro-Urbanism in Jože Plečnik’s Ljubljana brings together these works of micro-urbanism—lampposts, steps, paving, and ornament—that mediates between the scale of the body and the city. Through modest means, these works produce a sense of intimate monumentality, revealing how cumulative, human-scaled design can transform urban experience.