Denise Scott Brown

AT SEVENTY I FELT I WAS BEGINNING, maybe, to achieve a sense of my own personal style. Before that, there seemed to be no ordering principle to be found within my roles and directions. Even now, “Denise style,” if it exists, is probably better defined by others than by me. As for fashion, what’s in it for me? Which items around me can be adapted to my body or my experience? I fantasize about a clothing catalogue that offers selections from other catalogues to customers like me, ranging from elderly to ancient. It would cater to tastes from sassy to conservative and to various forms of ambulation.

print December 2005

WHAT SHOULD NEW ORLEANS DO?

AFTER THE GREAT FIRE OF 1666, England’s leading architect, Sir Christopher Wren, made a plan for rebuilding London. Adopting a style fashionable in Europe, he proposed cutting across the city’s medieval fabric with broad diagonal avenues that would meet at Rond-Points—a pattern already found on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles and used again in L’Enfant’s Washington. Architects ever since have expressed outrage that Wren’s plan was not undertaken, but historians point out that the English monarch at the time lacked the power of a Louis XIV and could not stand against the vested