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Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community By A. Christa Sykes | Bloomsbury | $115
In 1983, a rosy-cheeked man in his 60s and a quintessential professor in a tweed blazer took public television viewers on a leisurely two-hour stroll through the history of American art. Visions of a New World: American Art and the Metropolitan Museum, 1650-1914 Beginning in the galleries of the famous New York museum, but often cutting to important locations outside the gallery walls. There, the affable and knowledgeable host admired the architectural achievements of Manhattan’s Financial District, the sleek rowboats of Philadelphia, the faint scars of war still etched in the landscape at Gettysburg, and the noble neoclassicism of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Full of poetry.
When the two-part special aired on PBS, the host was acclaimed in academic and cultural circles. eight years ago, people The magazine declared him one of “America’s 12 Great Professors.” Nine years ago, he appeared on ” time Named one of the top ten “great teachers” by the magazine.Released approximately ten years after New world vision, My own sister, who as far as I know was a Jimmy Buffett major at the University of Miami, never showed an interest in architecture, but she found herself fascinated by a brilliant professor whom she still affectionately refers to as “the literary Si”.
How Vincent J. Scully, Jr. (1920-2017) reached the heights of academic celebrity is the subject of A. Krista Sykes’s meticulously researched and skillfully written biography, Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community (Bloomsbury, 2023), Sykes traces Sculley’s life from his childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, to his student days at Yale University and his service during World War II. military service, and his rapid rise to fame in postwar academia.
As Sykes recalls, Scully was born an only child into a working-class family. A precocious student and voracious reader, he attended Yale University early, where he paid for his education by serving meals to wealthy classmates. The war years left Scully with a new wife, a young family, and psychological trauma that would haunt him for the rest of his life.He sought solace in his studies of art history at Yale University and soon came under the influence of Henry-Russell Hitchcock, whose 1932 book International Style: Architecture since 1922Co-authored with Philip Johnson, in conjunction with their groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, it introduced European modern architecture to a mainstream American audience.
Sculley studied design at the Yale School of Architecture while taking courses in art history, where he was trained in an environment that largely believed in the validity of European modernism. However, as his mentor Hitchcock had done, he soon turned his attention to the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright and then to American architecture more broadly, eventually writing an essay on 19 Essay on century american country style.Redesigned and published as Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from the Origins of Richardson to Wright (1955), Sculley’s research was well received and helped secure his place on the Yale faculty, although some reviewers criticized the “exaggerated diction” and “almost evangelical anger” in his vivid prose.
Infinite enthusiasm for his subject matter became the hallmark of Scully’s famous lectures on the history of art and modern architecture. He brought a similar enthusiasm to his later works that dealt with an almost irresponsible range of subjects.he followed shingle style Special studies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, surveys of modern architecture and American urbanism, analysis of ancient sacred sites Greece and the American Southwest, a treatment of Andrea Palladio’s villas, and a comprehensive introduction to the relationship of architectural form to the surrounding landscape in his last important book, Architecture: natural and man-made, year 1991.
Sykes traces these investigations and the development of Sculley’s renowned courses at Yale and his increasingly influential voice in contemporary architecture and historic preservation. These efforts cemented his reputation on the world stage, although his willingness to branch out into adjacent academic fields sometimes drew harsh criticism.Archaeologists come down hard on him Earth, Temple and Gods (1962), for example, stung him deeply and may have prompted him to cancel a planned sequel to his study of Greek sacred architecture.Even so, in Sykes’s Churchillian phrase, “Sculley’s driving belief [was] Architecture and society have a give-and-take relationship – society shape and is shaped by The architecture it creates.
At the same time, Scully shaped and was shaped by the architectural and political culture around him.His early enthusiasm for the work of his friend Robert Venturi led him to publish the architect’s now-classic book The complexity and contradiction of architecture (1966) “Perhaps the most important work on architectural creation since Le Corbusier towards architecture, 1923. This statement seems strange when it first appears. Over time, it proved surprisingly prescient. Sculley’s advocacy of Venturi’s work created a receptive environment for the architect’s iconoclastic ideas, just as his support of Robert A. M. Stern and the so-called “grey” architects of the 1970s created a receptive environment for the United States Discussions of postmodern architecture set the tone as well.
After retiring from Yale, Sculley held a visiting position at the University of Miami in Florida, which brought him into close contact with his former students Andres Duany and Elizabeth Platt-Zieberk, who were Key figures in the development of New Urbanism. He spent many of the remaining years of his life advocating for (and occasionally criticizing) the “community architecture” of New Urbanism, which embraced the Native American language he had learned in his youth and the smallness of places like his beloved New Haven. The town feels that New Haven is still precious today.
Sykes draws on interviews she conducted with Sculley during his lifetime, unprecedented access to his personal papers, and a deep understanding of 20th-century architectural culture to treat Scully with intelligence, compassion, and admirable clarity. These and other events in Cali’s long career. Anyone interested in the historian’s life and work or the development of American architecture from the postwar period to the present will find great value here, although some specialist readers may wish for a closer analysis of Scully’s text, or setting his work apart from his peers.
For example, while Sykes briefly examines Scully’s relationships with Colin Rowe and Rainer Banham, a more sustained comparison with these two close contemporaries might have been interesting. Despite the strong image of his friend and Yale colleague Harold Bloom, I waited in vain for a discussion of Sculley’s connections to the theoretical hothouse that flourished at Yale in the 1970s: One of the deconstructive goals proposed by the so-called “Yale critics” (Bloom, Paul de Man, Jeffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller) was to undermine the historiography The kind of grand narrative that Home has articulated throughout his career.
Sykes, who had previously assembled two rich anthologies of architectural theory, was certainly aware of this, just as she knew that the meticulous close reading required for such an analysis would run counter to her wider ambitions here. Because in the end, Vincent Scully It is a work of biography, not history. Sykes displays a preference for clear vistas of narrative forests rather than close observations of individual trees. I suspect she did this out of deference to intelligent ordinary readers such as my sister and the countless students from outside the field of architecture who listened with rapt attention to Scully’s lectures. Like Scully’s text, Sykes’ engaging style and first-person engagement do not detract from her scholarship. Rather, it provides a laudable model for contemporary scholars seeking to expand the scope of their research and provides a valuable portrait of one of the most important architectural historians of twentieth-century America.
Todd Gannon is professor of architecture at The Ohio State University.
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