05 April 2019

the villa of Denise Scott Brown's family

The Architect's Newspaper posted a link on Facebook to a 2013 video interview with Denise Scott Brown. It is fascinating and she is captivating. The interview is entitled "Denise Scott-Brown: An African Perspective." I had not ever read significant biographical information about her and had not realized she grew up in South Africa. Her family lived for a time in a modernist villa-style house designed by Norman Hanson, along the lines of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier. You may have read a couple earlier posts -- Villa Savoye and northern Italy and The villa as building type -- that I wrote on villa-style modernist houses, inspired by traveling in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria, that is, Milan, Turin, and Genoa. As I fetched the links for those posts, I was amused to note that Blogger, in its wisdom (artificial intelligence), had chosen "villa-savoye-in-savoy-country" as the title for the post I had called "Villa Savoye and northern Italy." Meanwhile, here's a still of the childhood home of DSB, from the video interview:

I am sorry to see that architect Norman Leonard Hanson (1909-1990) doesn't yet have a LC/NAF authority record but he does have a ULAN record from Avery. Scott Brown says "people are writing about him nowadays" so there may be a book one of these days that will lead to a NAF record.

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