The Harvard Graduate School of Design students behind the Denise Scott Brown petition are not taking no for an answer.

The students today called on the current Pritzker Prize jury to reconsider its decision, announced last month, not to retroactively include Scott Brown in the prize won by her husband and partner Robert Venturi in 1991. In a letter to the jury, the students, part of Harvard’s Women in Design group, rejected the notion that prize rules are fixed and do not allow the jury to revisit past awards. “[T]he rules of the Pritzker Architecture Prize are made by the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Thus, your refusal to not revisit the 1991 prize is a choice.”

They further suggested that the Scott Brown case—and the current public outcry—reveals larger philosophical and procedural flaws in the judging of the Pritzker Prize, noting the recent omission of Lu Wenyu from the 2012 prize awarded to her husband Wang Shu. "We are deeply concerned that there is a systemic bias in the awarding of the Pritzker Prize, which has led in particular to the exclusion of women, and the prolonging of a myth of the lone male hero in architecture."

(Read the text of their letter to the jury below.)

As an extension of the petition, the students also announced the launch of a new group, Design For Equality, which will catalogue responses to the Denise Scott Brown petition and explore the broader issues of diversity and collaboration in the architecture profession.

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