Born: 3 October 1931, Zambia
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Denise Lakofski
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize, generally considered the world’s highest honour in that field, is meant to be awarded “irrespective of nationality, race, creed, or ideology”—note that gender is not included. Denise Scott Brown, who won the Soane Medal in 2018 for the “global influence” of her work, was deliberately excluded when her husband won the Pritzker in 1991 for work that everyone knew they had collaborated on together. When the blatant insult caused outcry, organisers claimed that the award can only be given to one person—a flagrant lie, as two men received the prize jointly only a few years earlier, in 1988. Scott Brown later told CNN, “the Pritzker Prize was based on the fallacy that great architecture was the work of a ‘single lone male genius’ at the expense of collaborative work.”
The decades-long streak of male-only winners was broken by Zaha Hadid in 2004. Even though several women have won since then, the organisation appears not to have learned its lesson, as they did the exact same thing to Chinese architect Lu Wenyu in 2012, when her husband Wang Shu alone was recognised for work they did together. Although Lu later asserted that she did not want the Pritzker, as she preferred to avoid the fame that would accompany such an award, and that her partner would have shared it if she had wanted him to, the fact remains that the organisation apparently did not offer. For both women, it is part of a larger pattern for themselves and other women in architecture of having their collaborations credited solely to their male collaborators.