Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture

Author: Denise Scott Brown Year: 1989 Source type: chapter Raw file: raw/chapters/scott-brown_1989-sexism-and-the-star-system.md

In: Ellen Perry Berkeley (ed.), Architecture: A Place for Women (1989). The chapter is, by Scott Brown's own account, "an abridgment of an article I wrote in 1975" — withheld from publication for fourteen years ("in samizdat, it achieved a following of sorts") and closed with a 1989 postscript on what had changed since.

Summary

Denise Scott Brown's account — part testimony, part speculative sociology — of how the star system and sexism together submerge the female architect who collaborates with a famous husband. After marrying Robert Venturi in 1967, she watched critics attribute their joint theory and design to him alone, despite attribution notes and information sheets; she names the mechanism (critics' need for a single author, the guru selected to steer by in "unmeasurables," the kingmaker-critic, the Beaux-Arts men's club) and argues the star system is "doubly hard on women in a sexist environment." The 1989 postscript finds postmodernism's "cult of personality" making matters worse: "the dernier cri is as male as the prima donna."

Key Claims

Misattribution as sexism's chief instrument. The wrongness began socially ("We at the office think it was Bob writing, using your name") and hardened into a norm: "A body of theory and design in architecture apparently must be associated by architecture critics with an individual; the more emotional their criticism, the stronger is its focus on one person."
The pro-forma attribution. The office distributes an information sheet specifying preferred attribution — "the work to our firm, the writing to the person who signed the article or book" — but critics comply only formally: a pro-forma nod in an inconspicuous place, while "in the body of the text, the design of the work and the ideas in the writing are attributed to Robert Venturi."
The Crosstown Community case. Hideki Shimizu's review in A+U (November 1974) analyzed "his plan for the Crosstown Community" as Venturi's; "the Crosstown Community was my work and was attributed as such in our book; I doubt whether, over a period of three years, Bob spent two afternoons on it."
The Praeger dust-jacket case. Conversations with Architects (Cook & Klotz, 1973) omitted her from the dust jacket; the inside flap praised "eight architects" and "the men behind" modern architecture — "As nine were listed on the front, I gather I am still left out."
Huxtable the exception. "Ada Louise Huxtable has never put a foot wrong with me. She works hard at reporting our ideas correctly too."
The one-Man test. A 1971 critic "was on the warpath in the opposite direction, out to prove that Great Art can only be made by one Man, and that Robert Venturi (read Howard Roark) is led astray when 'he joins his wife Denise Scott Brown in praising certain suburban practices.'" The same critic in 1979 wrote the citation honoring Bob for his "discovery of the everyday American environment."
The double standard, stated as a counterfactual. "What would Peter Eisenman do if his latest article were attributed to his co-editor, Kenneth Frampton? Or Vincent Scully, if the book on Newport houses were attributed to his co-author, Antoinette Downing…?" — "I doubt whether it would be enough for my male colleagues."
The duck attribution. "So I complain to the editor who refers to 'Venturi's ducks,' informing him that I invented the 'duck.' (He prints my letter under the title 'Less is a Bore,' a quotation from my husband.)"
Petty apartheid. The "social trivia (what Africans call petty apartheid)": wives' dinners ("'We'll just let the architects meet together, my dear'"), job interviews distressed by the architect's wife's presence, dinners she must not attend because a client wants "the architect" as her date, "the tunnel vision of students toward Bob," and the paired greetings — "'so you're the architect!' to Bob, and the well-meant 'so you're an architect too?' to me."
The division of labor in the firm. Collaborating since 1960 in ideas, 1967 in practice: "As chief designer, Bob takes final design responsibility." Her span: "All of our firm's urban planning work, and the urban design related to it, is my responsibility; Bob is virtually not involved with it." On a few projects "the basic idea (what Lou Kahn called the What) was mine." "We ourselves cannot tease our contributions apart."
The pyramid fiction. "The star system, which sees the firm as a pyramid with a Designer on top, has little to do with today's complex relations in architecture and construction. But as sexism defines me as a scribe, typist, and photographer to my husband, so the star system defines our associates as 'second bananas' and our staff as pencils."
Stardom is done to the star by others. Against Budd Schulberg's "Star Quality" ("a 'mysterious amalgam of self-love, vivacity, style and sexual promise'"), she objects: "it omits the fact that stardom is something done to a star by others. Stars cannot create themselves."
Why architects need stars: unmeasurables. "Because, I think, architecture deals with unmeasurables… architects stand or fall in their own estimation and in that of their peers by whether they are 'good designers,' and the criteria for this are ill-defined and undefinable. Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic." The guru is the ship's figurehead for design's open sea.
The guru is male. "The guru, as architectural father figure, is subject to intense hate and love; either way, the relationship is personal, it can only be a one-to-one affair" — which "accounts for the intensely ad hominem stance of some of 'Venturi's' critics." And: "I suspect, too, that for male architects the guru must be male. There can be no Mom and Pop gurus in architecture. The architectural prima donnas are all male."
The men's club. Via Lionel Tiger's Men in Groups ("men run in male packs") and Ionel Schein's 1950s exclamation in Le Carré Bleu — "'The so-called studio spirit is merely the spirit of a caste'" — she reads the American profession's upper-class origins, and "the strong similarities that still exist today between the architecture profession and a men's club."
The Beaux-Arts residue. "American architectural education was modeled on the turn-of-the-century, French Ecole des Beaux-Arts… its organization was strongly authoritarian, especially in its system for judging student work. The authoritarian personalities and the we-happy-few culture engendered by the Beaux-Arts stayed on in Modern architecture long after the Beaux-Arts architectural philosophy had been abandoned; the architecture club still excludes women."
The macho revolutionary. "The heroically original, Modern architectural revolutionary with his avantgarde technology, out to save the masses through mass production, is a macho image if ever there was one." A "more conserving and nurturing (female?) outlook" is commended by urban planners and ecologists — "Women may yet ride in on this trend."
The kingmaker-critic. "The critic in architecture is often the scribe, historian, and kingmaker for a particular group… The kingmaker-critic is, of course, male… he would be a poor fool in his eyes and theirs if he tried to crown the whole group king. There is even less psychic reward in crowning a female king." Her reading parallels Cynthia F. Epstein (named in the source; page needed — see log): "the colleague system," a men's club, and "the sponsor-protege relationship, which determines access to the highest levels of most professions"; the high-level sponsor "would… look foolish if he sponsored a female and, in any case, his wife would object."
Sexual promise and the pornographic register. The familiar ring in hostile letters-to-the-editor — "hostile, lugubriously self-righteous, yet somehow envious" — she recognizes as "the tone middle America employs in letters to the editor in pornography. Architects who write angry letters about our work apparently feel we are architectural panders… An English architecture instructor: 'Venturi has a niche, all right, but it's down there with the flagellant, the rubber-fetishist and the Blagdon Nude Amateur Rapist.'"
No sociology of architecture. "We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry." Her interpretations are explicitly "speculative."
The star system is unavoidable but reducible. "Should there be a star system? It is unavoidable, I think, owing to the prestige we give design in architecture. But the schools can and should reduce the importance of the star system by broadening the student's view of the profession to show value in its other aspects." Schools should also "combat the student's sense of inadequacy about design, rather than, as now, augmenting it through wrongly authoritarian and judgmental educational techniques" — then "architects would feel less need for gurus, and those they would need would be different—more responsible and humane than gurus are asked to be today."
The insoluble personal problem. "To the extent that gurus are unavoidable and sexism is rampant in the architecture profession, my personal problem of submersion through the star system is insoluble." Recognition could be recovered only by leaving collaboration — but "this is a pity, as our joint work feeds us both."
The 1975 suppression. "The foregoing is an abridgment of an article I wrote in 1975. I decided not to publish it at the time, because I judged that strong sentiments on feminism in the world of architecture would ensure my ideas a hostile reception, which could hurt my career and the prospects of my firm." It circulated "in samizdat."
The 1989 postscript: postmodernism made it worse. The schools reach 1:1 male:female in admissions, but "Architects lost their social concern; the architect as macho revolutionary was succeeded by the architect as dernier cri of the art world; the cult of personality increased. This made things worse for women because, in architecture, the dernier cri is as male as the prima donna."
The seniority-spectrum thesis. Rising female admissions and the move to the right "appear to be trends in opposite directions, but they are, in fact, unrelated because they occur at either end of the seniority spectrum. The women entrants are young, the cult of personality occurs at the top. The two trends have yet to meet."
Affirmative action's ownership paradox. "Affirmative action programs have helped small female-owned firms get started but may have hindered the absorption of women into the mainstream of the profession, because women who integrate large existing practices gain no affirmative action standing unless they own 51 per cent of the firm."
The daily rate. "For me, things are much the same at the top as they were. The discrimination continues at the rate of about one incident a day." Journalists feel they must "deliver Venturi." "In the last twenty years, I cannot recall one major article by a high-priest critic about a woman architect." Young women critics "become as macho as the men… to survive and win in the competitive world of critics."
Discrimination is back-loaded. School "is probably the least discriminatory [environment] they will encounter in their careers"; early practice "bring[s] little differentiation between men and women. It is as they advance that difficulties arise, when firms and clients shy away from entrusting high-level responsibility to women." Women without a feminist analysis "are likely to feel that their failure to achieve is their own fault."
The sophisticates. The closing consolation: "the people who cause my painful experiences are ignorant and crude. They are the critics who have not read enough and the clients who do not know why they have come to us" — while "the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose friendship inspires us, have no problem understanding my role."

Connections

Concepts: star-system-architecture — the chapter's founding concept and analysis; misattribution — the attribution apparatus (information sheet, pro-forma attribution, the Crosstown and Praeger cases); tokenism — the "two tokens" committees and role-model invitations; authorship — the collaborative authorship the critics refuse to see; star-architecture — the contemporary commissioning-side descendant of the star system; the-duck — the coinage she claims ("I invented the 'duck'"); design-studio-pedagogy — the Beaux-Arts authoritarian judging system and the schools' reform mandate; homosocial-space — the men's club, the male pack, the architecture club; masculinity — the macho revolutionary and the dernier cri; iconic-architecture — the cult-of-personality economy the postscript indicts.

Authors: scott-brown-denise · venturi-robert · eisenman-peter · frampton-kenneth (both named in the Eisenman/Frampton counterfactual). Named in the text without pages (see log): Ellen Perry Berkeley (volume editor), Ada Louise Huxtable, Vincent Scully, Antoinette Downing, Lou Kahn, Ionel Schein, Lionel Tiger, Cynthia F. Epstein, Budd Schulberg, Hideki Shimizu, Philip Johnson, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, Bertrand Goldberg, Morris Lapidus, Charles Moore, Alan Lapidus.

Debates: genius-vs-bureaucracy — the hero-genius model ("Great Art can only be made by one Man"; Howard Roark) whose social machinery this chapter exposes; sexism-and-the-star-system — the framed debate this chapter founds.

Related source notes: *Learning from Las Vegas* (1977) — the book whose attribution note ("asking that the work and ideas not be attributed to him alone") the critics "almost totally ignored"; Ugly and Ordinary Architecture, or the Decorated Shed (1971) — the joint work the 1971 critic attacked ("praising certain suburban practices"); *Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture* (1966) — "Less is a Bore," the quotation from her husband under which her duck letter was printed; Fifty Years of "Learning from Las Vegas" (Hawthorne 2023) — the retrospective against which the 1989 postscript reads; War on Architecture: E.1027 (Colomina 1993) — the built-case sibling of the misattribution problem (the effacement of Eileen Gray's authorship).

Direct Quotes

The raw extract carries no printed page numbers; quotes are cited from the chapter text (the postscript is marked by the author's note that "the foregoing is an abridgment of an article I wrote in 1975").

"I watched as he was manufactured into an architectural guru before my eyes and, to some extent, on the basis of our joint work and the work of our firm."

"A body of theory and design in architecture apparently must be associated by architecture critics with an individual; the more emotional their criticism, the stronger is its focus on one person."

"The result is that some critics now make a pro forma attribution in an inconspicuous place; then, in the body of the text, the design of the work and the ideas in the writing are attributed to Robert Venturi."

"This would be fine except that the Crosstown Community was my work and was attributed as such in our book; I doubt whether, over a period of three years, Bob spent two afternoons on it."

"Ada Louise Huxtable has never put a foot wrong with me."

"So I complain to the editor who refers to 'Venturi's ducks,' informing him that I invented the 'duck.'"

"The social trivia (what Africans call petty apartheid) continue too: wives (dinners) 'We'll just let the architects meet together, my dear'…"

"What would Peter Eisenman do if his latest article were attributed to his co-editor, Kenneth Frampton?"

"The star system, which sees the firm as a pyramid with a Designer on top, has little to do with today's complex relations in architecture and construction. But as sexism defines me as a scribe, typist, and photographer to my husband, so the star system defines our associates as 'second bananas' and our staff as pencils."

"My God, you too?"

"We two tokens greet each other wryly."

"I am frequently invited to lecture at architecture schools, 'to be a role model for our girls.' I am happy to do this for their young women but I would rather be asked purely because my work is interesting."

"Though his definition catches the spirit of architectural stardom, it omits the fact that stardom is something done to a star by others. Stars cannot create themselves."

"Because, I think, architecture deals with unmeasurables."

"Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic."

"I suspect, too, that for male architects the guru must be male. There can be no Mom and Pop gurus in architecture. The architectural prima donnas are all male."

"'The so-called studio spirit is merely the spirit of a caste.'" (Ionel Schein, Le Carré Bleu, 1950s, quoted)

"The authoritarian personalities and the we-happy-few culture engendered by the Beaux-Arts stayed on in Modern architecture long after the Beaux-Arts architectural philosophy had been abandoned; the architecture club still excludes women."

"The heroically original, Modern architectural revolutionary with his avantgarde technology, out to save the masses through mass production, is a macho image if ever there was one."

"The critic in architecture is often the scribe, historian, and kingmaker for a particular group."

"There is even less psychic reward in crowning a female king."

"I have suggested that the star system, which is unfair to many architects, is doubly hard on women in a sexist environment, and that, at the upper levels of the profession, the female architect who works with her husband will be submerged in his reputation."

"We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry."

"Should there be a star system? It is unavoidable, I think, owing to the prestige we give design in architecture."

"To the extent that gurus are unavoidable and sexism is rampant in the architecture profession, my personal problem of submersion through the star system is insoluble."

"Architects lost their social concern; the architect as macho revolutionary was succeeded by the architect as dernier cri of the art world; the cult of personality increased. This made things worse for women because, in architecture, the dernier cri is as male as the prima donna." (1989 postscript)

"The two trends have yet to meet." (the rising female admissions and the top-end cult of personality)

"Meanwhile, affirmative action programs have helped small female-owned firms get started but may have hindered the absorption of women into the mainstream of the profession…" (1989 postscript)

"For me, things are much the same at the top as they were. The discrimination continues at the rate of about one incident a day."

"Journalists who approach our firm seem to feel that they will not be worth their salt if they do not 'deliver Venturi.'"

"In the last twenty years, I cannot recall one major article by a high-priest critic about a woman architect."

"It is as they advance that difficulties arise, when firms and clients shy away from entrusting high-level responsibility to women. On seeing their male colleagues draw out in front of them, women who lack a feminist awareness are likely to feel that their failure to achieve is their own fault."

"They are the critics who have not read enough and the clients who do not know why they have come to us. I have been helped to realise this by noticing that the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose friendship inspires us, have no problem understanding my role."

Open Questions

The submersion thesis's most-cited test case lies just past the essay's horizon: the 1991 Pritzker awarded to Venturi alone (per venturi-robert's page), the episode around which the misattribution debate later crystallized — but this source predates it and cannot be cited for it. Should the wiki ingest the 1991–2013 attribution controversy (e.g., the "Scott Brown 2013" petition literature) as its own source?
Scott Brown's 1975 claim that "We have no sociology of architecture" — the wiki's later cluster (Knox on starchitects, Sklair's Icon Project, Grubbauer on projects) is now exactly that sociology. Does any of it test or confirm her speculative claims (the male guru, the kingmaker-critic, the daily rate of incidents)?
Her seniority-spectrum thesis ("the two trends have yet to meet") — what does the wiki's star-architecture cluster say about women's position in the star economy after 1989 (e.g., Hadid as the exception that may prove the prima-donna rule)?
The Alliance of Women in Architecture episode — the women-only meeting she later calls "probably incorrectly" separatist — sets an unresolved tension: consciousness-raising (the "My God, you too?" discovery) versus the mixed-sex professional normality she ultimately wants ("I would rather be asked purely because my work is interesting"). Where does the wiki's homosocial-space register land on this?