Robert Scott Brown was born in 1931, in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up on a farm in Natal, the son of a Presbyterian, Scottish lawyer. He took an architecture degree at the University of The Witwatersrand, where he met his future wife, Denise Lakofsky (1931-), graduating in 1954. Robert then travelled to the UK and joined in the inaugural year of postgraduate course at the Architectural Association’s Department of Tropical Architecture – where he was to study alongside Denise, who had enrolled in the AA Third Year in 1952 and had also signed up to take the Tropical Architecture course, as part of her final Fifth Year Diploma course in 1954-1955. Robert and Denise married in the summer of 1955 and in 1956 spent six months travelling in Italy, in a three-wheeled Morgan, to an itinerary set by their friend, the architectural historian, Robin Middleton - culminating in the CIAM Summer School in Venice. After a return to South Africa in 1957, Robert and Denise Scott Brown set out for the University of Pennsylvania, on the advice of Peter Smithson, to study city planning, joining the Masters course there in 1958. Tragically, Robert was to die in a car crash in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in July the following year, aged just 27.
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