As of today, 9,300 people had signed an online petition demanding that Denise Scott Brown be given a retroactive Pritzker Architecture Prize as the equal partner and collaborator of her husband, Robert Venturi, who won the prize in 1991. Scott Brown says she is “thrilled” about the petition, which was launched on March 27 by two students at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Caroline James and Arielle Assouline-Lichten, after they learned that Scott Brown had recently told the Architects’ Journal in London that she deserved her own Pritzker in a modest “inclusion ceremony.” The petition, which James and Assouline-Lichten hope gets 10,000 signers, was earlier this week hand-delivered to Martha Thorne, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize. In an interview, Scott Brown asked philosophically: “I am a prize loser, but which of the prize winners could have been the cause of a petition signed by more than 8,700 people?”
Should Scott Brown be given the prize retroactively? Those who signed the petition respond with an emphatic yes. So did several architects interviewed for this article. “Of course, the Pritzker jury should recognize Denise Scott Brown,” says Annabelle Selldorf. “Why did they not in the first place?”
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