Finally! High Architecture Honor to Noted Couple
After years of speculation, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) is to confer the 2016 Gold Medal, its highest honor, to the Philadelphia designers Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, partners since the late 1960s in both practice and marriage. To make this outcome possible, the Institute board had to cut through a thicket of policies, biases and design dogma. In 2013, eligibility for this medal was belatedly revised to permit its award to “two individuals working together.” This by-law change was widely viewed as enabling Mr. Venturi and Ms. Scott Brown to win the medal, since Mr. Venturi was known to have ruled out accepting it alone (he reluctantly accepted the international Pritzker Prize singly in 1991, and a widely supported plea for the Pritzker jury to amend that award was turned down in 2013). There was of course the difficulty AIA Board members had finding medal-worthy women …
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