This month, our first profile, is of Denise Scott Brown, architect, planner and urban designer and a founding principal of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc .

In 2007 Ms. Scott Brown received the Vilcek Foundation Prize for outstanding achievement in the arts and humanities. The prize is bestowed each year on two foreign-born Americans who have profoundly benefited society through their work in either the arts or the sciences.

Through her practice, writing and teaching, Denise has influenced architects and planners worldwide. She credits her outlook to the diverse influences of growing up in South Africa, studying architecture at Wits and at London’s Architectural Association.

She studied further at the University of Pennsylvania, taught there and at the universities of California and Yale during the 1960s and later at Harvard and Princeton

Denise has conducted urban planning and advocacy projects in large cities and small towns, including Philadelphia, Miami Beach, Memphis and Princeton. She directed the six-campus University of Michigan master plan and in parallel, site planning and pre-schematic design for a complex that housed the University’s Life Sciences Institute, Undergraduate Science Building and Palmer Commons.

Among her projects are the provincial capitol building in Toulouse, France, the University of Pennsylvania’s Master Plan and Perelman Quadrangle, the program of requirements for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and campus planning for Dartmouth College, Brown and Harvard Universities, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. Other projects close to Denise’s heart are contributing to two schools in Philadelphia poverty areas and providing financial support for a young Zulu girl through her schooling at Johannesburg’s Kingsmead College.