April 13, 2010
The Guru Track
While doing some research recently, I found myself reading Denise Scott Brown’s “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” an essay written in the 1970s as a response to the routine discrimination to which she was subjected following her marriage to and partnership with Robert Venturi. Scott Brown didn’t publish the article at the time, fearing professional retribution, but circulated it among friends and colleagues. In the years since, acknowledgment of her work has remained sporadic and grudging. Most famously, in 1991, the Pritzker Prize was granted to Venturi alone, just the kind of “petty apartheid” of which she had written.
Is that a worthwhile pursuit? Does the profession require the publicity attendant with such prizes? Does the success of a few standard-bearers trickle down to the rest of the field, in the guise of added exposure and a generally elevated status for design? Are the benefits worth the costs, the most glaring being an entrenchment of the division between a group of jet-setting international stars and those who practice with less fanfare, between the gurus and non-gurus? It’s telling that so many young architects I know have such ambivalent feelings about the Pritzker. They’re keen to handicap the candidates and debate the merits of the winners, but they’re also quick to deride the prize, much as serious cineastes dismiss the Oscars. Of course, they’d all love to have the Pritzker medal hanging around their necks. Everyone, I suppose, wants to be a guru.
Observed
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Observed
By Mark Lamster
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