When Venturi got the Pritzker phone call, though, his surprised reaction was to ask: What about Denise? “Denise” is Denise Scott Brown, who had been Venturi’s intellectual collaborator since the early nineteen-sixties, and a partner in the firm since 1969, deeply involved in everything it had done. Scott Brown was the one who’d been drawn to Las Vegas, who set in motion the project that culminated in “Learning from Las Vegas,” who created the studio class, which led to the book that influenced a generation of architecture students. (“Learning” was co-authored by Scott Brown, Venturi, and Steven Izenour.) More importantly, the ideas at the heart of Venturi, Scott Brown—the notions that bucked modernism and reconnected American architecture with older traditions—were developed by the two as a team, or, as Scott Brown has put it, as “a joint creativity.” But Scott Brown was a woman and, worse still, married to Venturi. (When it came to the perception of outsiders, “architect’s wife” trumped “architect.”) Venturi asked that Scott Brown be included in the award and was told that would not be possible. 

there should be a co-equal Pritzker Prize in Architecture for Denise Scott Brown.