Author Description

A visual journey through Denise Scott Brown’s 1955 honeymoon in Illyria, a region of the Balkans between Albania and the former Yugoslavia, with her first husband, Robert Scott Brown. Through 50 photographs, she captures a land in transition—its people, landscapes, and architecture—accompanied by her poetic and reflective writings. Before arriving in the USA and beginning her most famous American period, Denise shared her experiences, her travels and her education with the architect Robert Scott Brown, who she married in London and whose surname she kept after her second marriage to Robert Venturi. Following the proposal from her “first Bob” to spend two weeks in Paris to celebrate their honeymoon, Denise suggested spending five weeks travelling in Illyria, a region of the Balkans between Albania and the former Yugoslavia, where the young architect-photographer shows us, through the lens of her camera, a country in transition. She portrays aspects of rural and urban life, through places, people, animals, landscapes, streets and architecture that take us on a unique and transcendental journey, her Illyrian Honeymoon. While we were developing the photographic sequencing and graphic design, we received a letter from Denise Scott Brown, in which, in addition to a few comments and recommendations regarding the book, she suggested that we include a text written by her, to accompany the selection of images. A poetic, reflective and highly personal text, but also polemical and transgressive, which we have incorporated as fragments interspersed throughout the book. The text, which can be read independently or as a complement to the images - which also have their own visual narrative structure - is full of reflections on places she visited and memories of her “first Bob”, who died a few years later, in 1959, in a tragic car accident in Philadelphia, and to whom Denise has dedicated the book. Bilingual edition in English & Spanish