Denise Scott Brown

The idea organising Learning from Las Vegas is hers: to look at the Strip as an anthropologist would look at an unfamiliar settlement, without judging it before understanding it. That gesture, obvious in the social sciences and scandalous in the architecture of 1968, made it possible to see that signs, car parks and commercial façades form a coherent communication system, tuned to a landscape travelled by car at seventy kilometres an hour.

From it came the distinction between the duck, the building whose whole form is the symbol, and the decorated shed, the ordinary structure with a sign in front. Scott Brown defended the second on practical grounds: it costs less, adapts to changes of use, and puts the message on the cheap part of the building. Read today, the book is more urbanism than architecture, and that is the contribution of her training.

Born in 1931 in what is now Zambia, she trained in Johannesburg, at the Architectural Association in London and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied planning with Louis Kahn and David Crane and absorbed planning and social science before meeting Robert Venturi. It was she who took him to Las Vegas in 1966, and together they ran the Yale studio that produced the book.

Their practice, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, designed the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery and many urban plans. In 1991 the Pritzker Prize went to Venturi alone despite fifty years of joint work; in 2013 a petition signed by thousands of architects asked for her to be recognised retroactively and the jury refused. Her essay Room at the Top? (1989) on sexism in the profession remains a standard reading.