Scott Brown’s project looks remarkably similar to that of the philosopher J. L. Austin, who in the 1950s argued for the remaking of philosophy as the interpretation of ordinary speech. His reasoning was straightforward: “our common stock of words,” he wrote, “embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations.” Both Austin and Scott Brown’s quests to study everyday life are built on three elements. First, motivation: for Austin, this was to find a philosophical wisdom more useful and less confused than that available to his colleagues, who (in his view) refused to venture outside of their oak-lined offices. Second, a set of literal or metaphorical tools: in his case, little beyond an ear attuned to distinguishing linguistic subtleties. And, finally, a definition of the field of inquiry, of the ordinary itself. For Austin, the ordinary was defined above all by existing outside of his own field of philosophy. The point was to find a topic “neighboring” philosophy but nonetheless separate from it, “a good site for field work,” as he put it. The implied analogue for this form of knowledge production, then, was anthropology—the discipline with which the phrase “field work” is most often associated. Just as anthropological research traditionally takes the form of ethnographic observation of “natives”—subjects far removed from anthropologists themselves—so philosophers must establish a distance between their own sphere of knowledge and that of their external object of study, and take their own task to be continuously moving back and forth between the two.

And might this philosophical model, based in part on anthropology, be itself applicable to other fields? On this point Austin offered an intriguing thought: “How much it is to be wished that similar fieldwork will soon be undertaken in, say, aesthetics; if only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.”

The development of Levittown, New Jersey, captured by Denise Scott Brown in 1963, epitomized her interest in the overlooked and the everyday. Photo © Denise Scott Brown

This is precisely what Scott Brown did. As with Austin, the motivation for her inquiry into the ordinary arose from a dissatisfaction with existing forms of knowledge in architecture—and, in her case, this dissatisfaction was charged with the force of a broader social critique. In a number of essays and books published between the 1960s and 1980s, Scott Brown argued that the study of the ordinary produced a more relevant knowledge than that otherwise available in a field prone to ignoring the majority of places where modern people lead their lives. “Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Levittown, the swinging singles on the Westheimer Strip, golf resorts, boating communities, Co-op City, the residential backgrounds to soap operas, TV commercials and mass-mag ads, billboards and Route 66 are sources for a changing architectural sensibility”: so begins Scott Brown’s 1971 essay “Learning from Pop,” which goes on to make the case that orthodox modern architecture’s failure to live up to its revolutionary ideals proves the need for new ways both of understanding what exists and how it might be transformed through architecture. “If high-style architects are not producing what people want or need, who is, and what can we learn from them?”