Venturi & Scott Brown Pile Up Prizes

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown may not be able to win a decent commission in Philadelphia, but they have no trouble racking up prizes. Today, the Cooper-Hewitt design museum announced that the couple had been deemed "visionaries" and awarded them the Design Mind prize as part of the museum's National Design Awards. The award "recognizes visionary individuals or firms that have affected a shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research and scholarship." That they've certainly done.
Earlier this spring, Denise Scott Brown received the Vilcek Foundation's arts and humanities prize, which is given to foreign-born individuals for helping make America great. Scott Brown was born in Zambia and raised in South Africa, before leaving for university in London and a career in Philadelphia. Cooper-Hewitt, which has been struggling to win some respect for its annual awards and as much publicity as the Pritzker Prize gets (Sorry, no help here), also gave a lifetime achievement award to Antoine Predock, the architect whose work is inspired by the American west, its Corporate Achievement Award (no wonder they get no respect) to Adobe Systems, and a special jury commendation to Frank Ching, an architect and graphic designer.
Venturi and Scott Brown, of course, have no shortage of plaques, trophies and other useless chachkas to decorate their Manayunk offices. Venturi won the Pritzker in 1991 and the pair won the Presidential National Medal of the Arts in 1992. The French government also decorated the pair with medals and ribbons after they completed their Toulouse government buildings.