NEW YORK, NY.- Why have so many children of architects made films about their parents?

To a list that includes Eric Saarinen, son of Eero; Tomas Koolhaas, son of Rem; and most famously Nathaniel Kahn, son of Louis, we can now add Jim Venturi, whose lively, affecting and long-gestating first film, “Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” will open the 2024 Architecture and Design Film Festival’s New York run on Wednesday. Closing the festival — as a reminder that it’s not just the sons who go this cinematic route — will be “Ada – My Mother the Architect,” a documentary by Yael Melamede about Ada Karmi-Melamede, who designed the Supreme Court building in Jerusalem, among other notable projects in Israel.

The directors of these films may hope to put a tangible mark on the world the way their parents did with their buildings. Or to take some measure of the architectural personality, which can sometimes (not always! but not rarely!) concern itself more passionately with the arrangement of windows and staircases, or the whims of potential clients and turncoat critics, than with getting a small child off to school in the morning.

Or it may be something simpler: that the particular qualities of architecture as a creative pursuit (as opposed to, say, novel-writing) lend themselves to the screen, big or small. This can be as true in psychological terms as visual ones. The building, looming in front of the viewer, becomes a stand-in for the distant, distracted or intimidatingly brilliant father or mother. The director can scrutinize its facade, lingering over it with the camera, for some sign of explanation — or confession — not always forthcoming from the parents themselves.

Complicating the biography, perhaps, but enriching the film, Jim Venturi had as parents not one but two prominent architects. His father was Robert Venturi, born in Philadelphia and educated at Princeton; he died in 2018. His mother is Denise Scott Brown, raised in Johannesburg, trained in London and then the United States and still, at 92, a lively and cantankerous presence on the architecture scene. They met as young members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty and married in 1967, the same year Scott Brown joined the firm Venturi had founded several years before.

Together, in their buildings and their writing, they helped sideline the sterile, corporate-friendly brand of modernist architecture popular after World War II, replacing it with a new style, which later flowered into postmodernism, that found inspiration in architectural history and pop culture, Borromini and hamburger stands, in equal measure. In their best-known book, “Learning From Las Vegas” (written with Steven Izenour and published in 1972), they called for a radical change not so much in how buildings look as how we look at buildings.

“Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,” they wrote. The book’s daring was to take the Las Vegas Strip seriously — and not just as a cultural curiosity but as the neon-lit source material for a new architecture.

Their legacy is bound up in another set of questions, too. These have to do with the treatment of female architects and how the media and architecture firms themselves dole out credit, to say nothing of why certain architects gain celebrity while others, equally talented, toil in the relative shadows.

Denise Scott Brown became a partner in the firm Venturi and Rauch in 1969, but her name wasn’t added to the firm’s until 11 years later. In 1991, a quarter century into their professional partnership, Robert Venturi was named the winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s most prestigious honor. Scott Brown was not included in the award, which, at that point, had never gone to a woman or to a pair of architects. Venturi decided, after discussing it with his wife, to accept it anyway.

As Scott Brown wrote in an essay titled “Room at the Top? Sexism and the Star System in Architecture,” published in 1989, “I married a colleague and we joined our professional lives just as fame (though not fortune) hit him. I watched as he was manufactured into an architectural guru before my eyes and, to some extent, on the basis of our joint work and the work of our firm.”

“Stardust” jumps right into these muddy waters in its first scene. We see Robert Venturi onstage in 2006 with the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Mark Wigley, at an event marking the 40th anniversary of the architect’s first book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” sometimes known as “C and C.” Wigley asks him about the people who influenced him, “the first being of course Denise Scott Brown,” while he was writing it. “‘C and C’ was mostly written before I knew Denise,” Venturi responds. At this Scott Brown, siting in the front row, interjects.

“No, it wasn’t,” she corrects, drawing laughs from the audience. “You were writing it in ’62, ’63, and we met in 1960.”

With that back-and-forth, the documentary introduces the pivotal theme of credit and collaboration — a different C and C — “at the very beginning,” Anita Naughton, who wrote and edited “Stardust,” said in a joint interview with Jim Venturi. “It also tells you something about their marriage.”

She added: “The only thing that’s slightly unfair in that scene is that Bob was having memory loss” by the time it was filmed. In general, she said, Robert Venturi made sure to mention his wife’s contributions: “It was other people that often didn’t.”

Jim Venturi, who refers to his parents by their first names, agreed. “I think it’s easy to come up and project upon Denise and Bob a kind of #MeToo narrative,” he said. “I haven’t seen it much, but when it does happen it’s very upsetting, because Bob was always extremely careful to give credit to Denise throughout their partnership.”

Similar themes are central to Yael Melamede’s elegant film, which relates her mother’s failure to get tenure at Columbia after teaching at its architecture school for more than a decade, and the smoother paths to success found by her mother’s father and brother, both leading architects in Israel. Yael Melamede reveals partway through the documentary that she, too, trained as an architect, at Yale, and worked briefly in her mother’s office. But she left the profession to pursue film “because I never quite found my way.”

According to Kyle Bergman, the founder and director of the Architecture and Design Film Festival, “Kids who grow up with architects as parents mostly fall into two groups. Some want to become architects and some want to run away, to get as far away from architecture as possible. But then there’s this middle ground, people who are intrigued by what their parents do but want to do their own thing.”

That third group is where the future documentarians come from, Bergman said.

He added: “And also because in this little niche of films, the success of ‘My Architect’” — Nathaniel Kahn’s moving portrait of a father he never really knew, which earned a 2003 Oscar nomination for Documentary Feature — “really did open up an avenue.” Yael Melamede was a co-producer on Kahn’s film.

(Full disclosure: A documentary I wrote and directed, “That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles,” was included in the Architecture and Design Film Festival in 2019.)

As Robert Venturi’s health declined further, in the 2010s, Scott Brown had a chance to speak more freely about their work — and took it. When I visited the couple’s house in Philadelphia in 2017, he was barely verbal. Scott Brown positioned his chair near the edge of the dining room, where she and I then sat down to talk. “He likes to listen,” she explained.

She then proceeded to tell me about her work before she and Venturi were married, clicking through some strikingly composed photographs of Los Angeles cityscapes, made while she was teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the mid-1960s and seeming clearly to prefigure the critical posture of “Learning from Las Vegas.” She also spoke candidly about some of the figures in architecture she felt had underestimated her or held her back.

As “Stardust” makes clear, these included some of the most prominent men in the field, including Robert A.M. Stern and Philip Johnson. Johnson in particular operates in the documentary as a villain, the leader of a boy’s club that excluded women — and Denise Scott Brown specifically.

As critic Martin Filler says of Johnson in the film, “You could put everything he disliked into a computer, and out would pop Denise.”

Others in the architectural establishment were wary of Venturi and Scott Brown for the irreverence of their work, for their willingness to play fast and loose with tradition. In their controversial 1991 design for an addition to London’s National Gallery, called the Sainsbury Wing after its lead donor, John Sainsbury, the pair made a careful study of the museum’s neoclassical main facade, designed in the 1830s by William Wilkins, and used similar columns and pilasters on their building. But they arranged them in a way that had more to do with a kind of visual rhythm than with fidelity to architectural history or any structural requirements. (This approach struck some critics, ultimately including Sainsbury himself, as capricious. He responded by hiding a letter criticizing their design inside a column in the building during construction, calling the new pillars “unnecessary.” That letter was uncovered last year during the renovation of the Sainsbury Wing led by New York architect Annabelle Selldorf.)

“This design has been accused of being pastiche,” Robert Venturi says in the film, while standing with Scott Brown in front of the Sainsbury Wing. “It is pastiche! That is one of the main ideas of it. It is appropriately so.”

“Stardust” is something of a pastiche in its own right, stitched skillfully together from sections of earlier documentaries by British filmmaker Michael Blackwood, a raft of archival material and footage shot by Jim Venturi and his team over many years, the bulk of it between 2005 and 2010.

In the end, returning thematically to where the film began, Venturi turns the spotlight back on his mother, for a reflection on her husband’s fame, and the price she paid for it, that is at once subtle and pointed. Her comments also suggest how apt a title “Stardust” is for the documentary, referring not just to the hotel on the Las Vegas Strip whose illuminated facade so inspired his parents but also the nature of architectural celebrity itself, the glittering halo it hangs on a select few.

(True to his observations about the importance of sharing credit, Jim Venturi is quick to point out that Naughton came up with the title.)

“Maybe there’s a shortsightedness in stardom,” Scott Brown says to her son, peering through clear-framed glasses. “You can’t see enough because you’re blinded by the light that you’re generating. There it is. That’s all.”

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The Architecture and Design Film Festival New York, Sept. 25-28 at the Village East by Angelika; adfilmfest.com.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.