Denise Scott Brown: A Precursor in Encoding Complexities and Challenges of Contemporary Stratified Urban Life, Suburban Sociologies, and the Symbolism of Postmodern Housing

Denise Scott Brown a trailblazing architect and advocate for postmodernism played a pivotal role in reshaping the architectural landscape by championing the inclusion of postmodern urban and housing experience. The paper focuses on the transition from modernist formalist and functional understanding of the city, towards postmodern urban methods as represented by DSB, photography, collage, active socioplastics, attention to consumerist symbolism, as a means of encoding the empirics of urbanism, the living cities. In everyday scenes she documented social interactions, meditated on complexities of postmodern experience of poverty and wealth, criticism of increasing commercialization of the image of the city, and muteness of formally planned urban scape, and architectural vernacular of twentieth century American city. She was a precursor in her socially informed studies of postmodern society and its embodiment in suburban housing, such as in “Learning form Levittown”. She applied the new methodology and critical yet inclusive observation of complexities and challenges of contemporary cityscape.