Architecture Words 4: Having Words

Having Words collects together ten essays by the architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown. The essays extend from her 1969 text, ‘On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning’ to ‘Towards an Active Socioplastics’ from 2007, which offers an overview of Scott Brown’s education and the gestation of her key architectural and urban ideas. The collection is bookended by two additional texts by Scott Brown, a foreword and an afterword, addressing specifically the act of writing about architecture.

Architecture Words is a series of texts and important essays on architecture written by architects, critics and scholars. Like many aspects of everyday life, contemporary architectural culture is dominated by an endless production and consumption of images, graphics and information. Rather than mirror this larger force, this series of small books seeks to deflect it by means of direct language, concise editing and beautiful, legible graphic design. Each volume in the series offers the reader texts that distil important larger issues and problems, and communicate architectural ideas; not only the ideas contained within each volume, but also the enduring power of written ideas more generally to challenge and change the way all architects think.