Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community by A. Krista Sykes. Bloomsbury, 278 pp., $115.
In December of last year, Yale announced that it was appointing a University Architect for the first time in the school’s 322-year history. James Kolker, poached from the same post at Washington University in St. Louis, would “be responsible for maintaining an architectural vision for Yale,” in a move that “aligns the university with our Ivy League peers.”
The simple question raised by this news—what took so long?—can be answered, in large part, with two words: Vincent Scully. For much of the postwar period, the historian and critic, who grew up in New Haven, earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale, and taught there for more than six decades, played the role of architectural kingmaker on campus, forming a powerful if unofficial planning committee alongside Yale’s president and architecture dean. In the 1960s the troika included, in addition to Scully, Alfred Whitney Griswold and Paul Rudolph; later, A. Bartlett Giamatti and César Pelli cycled into place, to be followed, near the end of Scully’s career, by Richard Levin and Robert A. M. Stern.
Scully didn’t always get his way: In 1969 he argued that Venturi and Rauch, rather than Louis Kahn, an earlier favorite of Scully’s, should design the Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street. (Kahn got the job.) But you could make a case that Scully, in addition to his prominence as a scholar, had a greater impact on Yale’s architectural character than anyone since James Gamble Rogers, who from the 1910s to the 1930s designed several of the university’s neo-Gothic residential colleges as well as its main library.
A. Krista Sykes’s insightful new biography, Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community (2023), is at its core a study of that influence. In its early chapters it is also a chronicle of how intertwined Scully’s childhood was with Yale and, more specifically, the architecture of its campus. He entered New Haven’s Hillhouse High in 1932 at age twelve, having skipped two years of grade school. (He’d earn his BA at nineteen.) His daily walk to Hillhouse, Sykes writes, “took him straight through Yale’s campus, past the block-long construction site where [Rogers’s] Davenport and Pierson colleges were nearing completion.”
Roughly twenty-five years later, Hillhouse was demolished (and its students relocated to a new campus nearby) to make room for Yale’s Morse and Stiles Colleges, designed by Eero Saarinen. Scully became the live-in head of Morse in the 1970s and, as Sykes notes, discovered that his bedroom there “was located precisely where his homeroom at Hillhouse High School had been more than thirty years before.”
As Moore would later gratefully point out, it was thanks to Scully that “influence, like sex, can be openly discussed.”
Scully’s dissertation—for which Henry-Russell Hitchcock, then teaching nearby at Wesleyan, served as unofficial adviser and which was published in 1955 as The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright—almost sounds like the response to a dare: Find something meaningful to say about the high-end residential designs of 1880s and 1890s New England by H. H. Richardson and McKim, Mead & White. Then as now, that architecture was generally neglected by critics and scholars, but it was familiar to Scully as a more glamorous version of the houses that lined the New Haven streets of his youth. “At that time,” Scully later said, “nobody liked nineteenth-century architecture, but it spoke to me because it was part of my background. I understood it. My aim was to rehabilitate it.”
Did he? More than we remember, yes. From Sea Ranch to the Hamptons, the 1960s and early 1970s saw a resurgence of houses, in a decidedly American vernacular, with at least one foot in shingle-style aesthetics—something of a niche revival but also an early stirring of postmodernism—by architects including Robert Venturi, Charles Moore, Ulrich Franzen, and Charles Gwathmey. Scully was among the intellectual figures in American architecture at midcentury who helped make the past look like fertile territory again while—crucially—linking it directly to contemporary practice. (Bear in mind that The Shingle Style was published eleven years before Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, for which Scully wrote the introduction.) As Moore would later gratefully point out, it was thanks to Scully that “influence, like sex, can be openly discussed.”
As these things go, Sykes’s biography is rather well-behaved. Her Scully is less the sensualist than the native son made good, who took a stand against the urban-renewal campaigns that ravaged New Haven. (Washington sent New Haven more redevelopment funding per-capita than any other American city: more than $450 per resident, compared with $31 in New York City.) Watching their effect on his hometown, which Scully called “cataclysmic,” changed his scholarship, moving urbanism, largely neglected in his earlier work, to the center of his research.
It also turned his politics in a more progressive and activist direction. Scully, who served in the Marine Corps in World War II, became severely disillusioned with federal policy, arguing in a 1971 essay in the New York Times that urban renewal and the war in Vietnam “were intimately connected and were indeed the two massive failures of American liberalism.” Both, he added, were “based on heroic concepts which were half a generation out of date, and they were alike in the arrogance of their intrinsic, if more or less unconscious, racism.”
Sykes’s research is greatly enriched by her access to a memoir Scully drafted but never published. If her book is thorough without quite being meticulous—she mentions the architect “Steven Hall,” among other small errors—she makes clear sense of the epic sweep of Scully’s career, which in her view “coalesced around two core beliefs: that all architecture shapes and is shaped by society and that the best architecture responds, above all else, to the human need for community and connection.”
She has a knack for picking out turns of phrase that illustrate the way Scully’s critical sensibility was inextricable from his gifts as a writer, for example his reference to the “titanic structural agonies” of Brutalist buildings like Rudolph’s 1963 Art and Architecture building at Yale or his description of the 1967 Knights of Columbus tower in New Haven, by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, as projecting “a kind of paramilitary dandyism.” Or consider his Fitzgeraldesque assessment of the 1971 Trubek and Wislocki houses, by Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, on Nantucket:
How lonely each seems, as Americans have somehow always felt themselves to be. How stiff their backs … For these new houses on archaic Nantucket there is no planting, and the height of the block foundation is as it has to be, unadorned. How hard is our American present, it seems to say; how threatened, beneath the superficial affluence, with instant poverty on a national scale. How threadbare plain the ‘real,’ the beloved, America has always been in fact, but how, like these houses stretching upward, it yearns.
It was really only in the classroom, though, where Scully combined a “virtuoso’s knowledge and a showman’s aplomb,” that the full range of his talents was on display. Here, he was in absolute control, striding the stage and whacking a giant screen (onto which were projected Scully’s own photographs, not always in perfect focus, of everything from Taos Pueblo to the Villa Savoye) with the ten-foot wooden pole that he used in place of a pointer. Scully’s survey courses were often the most popular at Yale, sometimes attracting more than 500 students.
I was one of them. In fact, as Sykes’s book reminded me, I was in attendance, in the spring of my sophomore year, for Scully’s final lecture as a member of the full-time faculty, in April of 1991. The course was his modern architecture survey, History of Art 299b, a version of which he’d taught at Yale going back to 1947. Friends, colleagues, and former students—including Maya Lin, who designed the first version of her Vietnam War Memorial in an undergraduate seminar led by Scully, as well as Stern, Pelli, Philip Johnson, Leon Krier, and Paul Goldberger—crowded into the Law School auditorium, one of the few classrooms at Yale big enough to accommodate his lecture courses, to send him off. The Times sent a reporter, John Tierney, to cover the event, and ran Tierney’s story two days later on the front page, under the headline “Mr. Scully’s Architecture Class Is Dismissed.”
(It was something of a false alarm, as it turned out: Though the university did insist that professors move from full-time to emeritus status when they turned seventy, a policy that has since been modified, Scully taught each fall at Yale for another seventeen years, through the end of 2008, while spending his spring semesters as a visiting professor at the University of Miami.)
While I vividly remember the subject of his lecture that day—1980s new towns in suburban Paris, with a focus on work by Ricardo Bofill—I have no recollection of the fact that so many design-world luminaries joined us in the auditorium. This was typical of my experience with Scully (who, to be clear, was never a personal mentor to me the way he was for Goldberger and others). In his writing as well as his lectures, the spellbinding power of the delivery tended to overwhelm all else.
Sykes quotes a rather cutting line from the historian Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, a colleague of mine on the Yale School of Architecture faculty, suggesting that Scully’s “rhetorical skills and ability to trigger historical imagination often trump his historical acumen.” This isn’t a new argument: In 1955, one reviewer of The Shingle Style complained that its scholarly insights were “overshadowed by the ‘Scully style’ of writing.”
While that book, which Scully republished in slightly different form in 1974 with the subtitle “Or, the Historian’s Revenge,” is still fizzy with intelligence and wit, his paeans to what we might think of as the architectural equivalent of the catchall category “world music”—particularly Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, published in 1975—haven’t aged as well. The final decades of his career saw an ill-fated embrace of New Urbanism, a movement whose cofounders, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, were Yale graduates and helped recruit him to Miami. Scully saw the New Urbanists not just as intellectual heirs to Venturi’s erudite populism but as American architecture’s great communitarian hope. We know how that turned out.
His approach to teaching and writing always struck me as essentially affirmative in spirit—the point was not to reject theory or the idea of disciplinary autonomy so much as to take on the full range of architecture’s influence and impact.
A remarkable number of Scully’s students, including Goldberger, Michael Kimmelman, Alexandra Lange, and Blair Kamin, went on to become architecture critics in the popular press (though several of us teach as well). Sykes is right that as a group we have tended to use our “platforms to emphasize social and political aspects of public space.” Perhaps more to the point, we share, or inherited, Scully’s emphasis on clarity and willingness to follow his intellectual curiosity wherever it led, two qualities that have always been more highly valued in journalism than in academia.
One of the underappreciated sources of Scully’s appeal as a teacher and public intellectual was the way his supreme, tweedy confidence was softened with a vulnerability and kind of underdog spirit. Scully at heart remained the only child and public-school kid who by necessity took a dining-hall job as a sixteen-year-old Yale freshman, serving his older and better-heeled classmates, an experience he later said had “poisoned” his undergraduate years.
Scully saw pedagogy and built architecture alike as having a fundamental responsibility to a wide public, and, Sykes notes, he “openly avoided theory, especially as it appeared on the architectural scene in the 1960s.” I might amend that sentence to say theory for its own sake. While as far I know he never contributed an essay to Oppositions, the journal founded by Peter Eisenman, Mario Gandelsonas, and Kenneth Frampton in 1973, he was happy to join public forums sponsored by its parent organization, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies.
At one of them, in 1980, he offered an energetic defense of Aldo Rossi’s work and its independence from Fascist precedent that thoroughly charmed an Oppositions correspondent, William Ellis. “For all his allusions to Rossi’s lyricism, rendered with characteristic theatricality and enthusiasm,” Ellis reported, “Scully’s position strikes a note of sanity amid an otherwise hysterical pattern of criticism. Thus Scully’s view of this master of the Tendenza is balanced, fresh, level-headed, and persuasively speculative.”
That was the Scully I knew. His approach to teaching and writing always struck me as essentially affirmative in spirit—the point was not to reject theory or the idea of disciplinary autonomy so much as to take on the full range of architecture’s influence and impact. (Sykes’s biography, to its credit, has a similarly ecumenical sensibility.) Perhaps because I was so immersed in this point of view at Yale, it never struck me as a choice or stance; it seemed instead quite naturally to reflect architecture’s position as the art form most deeply entangled with politics, money, power, and the fate of the planet.
As a result I was surprised to discover, once I left New Haven, that there were plenty of architects and critics who not only did not share this point of view but wanted, sometimes desperately, to argue about it, in final reviews or at cocktail parties (as opposed to in print, where they knew they were on shakier ground), and to disparage the idea that architecture might have any responsibility beyond itself. What I have come to realize over time is that they were also, in part, arguing with Scully, or with whatever caricature of him they were carrying around in their heads.