The AIA 2016 gold medal was awarded to Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi

The American Institute of Architects announced on Thursday that the 72nd recipients of the AIA Gold Medal are the couple Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, who have been running a joint office in Philadelphia for more than half a century. They also became the first couple to receive such an award, made possible by a change in the rules approved in 2013 following protests from two architecture students at Harvard University, who initiated a petition for the posthumous awarding of the Pritzker Prize to Denise Scott Brown, since this prestigious award was given in 1991 only to her husband. Although the previous decision of the jury could not be changed, several other institutions responded by changing their statutes, resulting in the awarding of the AIA Gold Medal. Denise Scott Brown is the second woman to receive the AIA Gold Medal, after Julia Morgan. However, Morgan received this honor 57 years after her death.
Robert Charles Venturi is from Philadelphia, studied architecture at Princeton University, and worked for E. Saarinen and Louis I. Kahn before founding his own firm. In the early 1960s, he met Denise Scott Brown, with whom he not only worked in design practice but also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and together they published theoretical works that profoundly influenced the profession of architects worldwide.
Denise Scott Brown was born in the Zambian city of Kitwe, attended the Architectural Association in London, and moved to the USA in the late 1950s, where she studied under Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania. At this university, she also met Robert Venturi, with whom she formed an inseparable pair. Their postmodern work, balancing on the edge of historicism and pop art, represents a counterpoint to the main modernist stream in American architecture in the second half of the 20th century.

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