For Denise Scott Brown, who is among the most important architects of the postwar era, photography has long served as a critical medium through which to perceive, document and think about the world in which designers operate. Fascinated by the ephemeral and the everyday, Scott Brown took photographs for fun, research and teaching, and later as a component of design and planning projects. Through the lens of her Alpa camera she sought to penetrate the irreducible complexities of life around her – and to make a case for the architect and planner’s role in intervening within it

Encounters presents, for the first time, an essential collection of Scott Brown’s photography from the 1950s to the 1970s: the formative decades during which Scott Brown departed her childhood home of Johannesburg to study in London, traveled through Europe, moved to the United States, developed the profound interest in postwar suburbia from which “Learning from Las Vegas” would emerge and joined her husband Robert Venturi in practice.