Editing Denise Scott Brown (section)

== Early Life and Education ==

Denise Scott Brown was born Denise Lakofski in 1931 in Nkana, Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), where her parents had emigrated from Latvia. She grew up in South Africa, developing awareness of how architecture and planning shape social relations that would inform her later work. Scott Brown studied architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, encountering both modernist pedagogy and the racial segregation of apartheid that made visible architecture's political implications.<ref name="brownlee">{{cite book |last1=Brownlee |first1=David B. |last2=De Long |first2=David G. |title=Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates |year=2001 |publisher=Philadelphia Museum of Art |location=Philadelphia}}</ref>

After completing her degree, Scott Brown continued studies at the Architectural Association in London and then at the University of Pennsylvania, where she encountered urban planning approaches that complemented her architectural training. At Penn she met and married Robert Scott Brown, an architect who died in an automobile accident in 1959. Her subsequent career would combine architectural design with urban planning concerns, bringing to architecture attention to context, community, and the complexity of urban systems.<ref name="stierli"/>