Kathleen James-Chakraborty – Session: Imagining Pasts; Conference: AIARG 2024, Dublin (14-15 March 2024)

In 1977 the work of Chloethiel Woodard Smith and Denise Scott Brown were
addressed in the same chapter of the pathbreaking book Women in American
Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective edited by Susana Torre.
Since then Smith has faded into near oblivion while Scott Brown is the subject of a quickly increasing body of scholarship. Smith described herself as an “applied” rather than a “theoretical” architect, and it was this pragmatism that accounted for her success in running what was in 1977 still a much larger practice than the one that Scott Brown shared with her husband Robert Venturi. Yet there are many important continuities between the two women, both of whom considered themselves to be planners as much as architects, both of whom were committed to ordinary users of architecture, and both of whom addressed the place of the car and the highway in the postwar American city. Comparing their careers casts light on how these two women were able to carve out space for themselves in what was in the 1970s one of the most masculine occupations in the United
States.