Vincent Scully: Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community 1350298379, 9781350298378

Citation preview

Vincent Scully

i

ii

Vincent Scully Architecture, Urbanism, and a Life in Search of Community A. KRISTA SYKES

iii

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © A. Krista Sykes, 2023 A. Krista Sykes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: Scully lecturing, c. 1970s. © William K. Sacco All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-9837-8 978-1-3502-9838-5 978-1-3502-9839-2

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

CONTENTS

Preface vi

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

1

Dogs and Books (1920–1940) 10 Then and Since (1940–1946) 19 Marinated in Modernism (1946–1949) 33 Laying the Foundations (1947–1950) 43 A Uniquely American Development (1948–1955) 53 Side by Side in Panorama (1947–1962) 65 Rewriting Modern Architecture (1955–1962) 81 The Death of the Street (late 1950s–1964) 102 Complexity and Contradiction (1964–1967) 122 Activism and Accommodation (1967–early 1970s) 141 A Great Shift Toward Realism (late 1960s–early 1970s) 155 The Historian’s Revenge (1964–mid-1970s) 165 What Seas, What Shores (late 1970s–1991) 184 New Urbanism, New Horizons (1980s–2000s) 199 We Can’t Say It’s a Career Cut Short (1991–2017) 216 Legacy 222

Notes 231 Index 265

v

PREFACE

I first encountered Vincent Scully in a library. While perusing architecture books as a college sophomore, I kept seeing his name as a contributor of introductions, postscripts, and more in publications on contemporary architects—Aldo Rossi, Philip Johnson, Robert Stern, and Michael Graves. “Who is this Scully guy?” I wondered. I soon found him further afield, in books on Palladian villas and Pueblo architecture, on Victorian cottages and French royal gardens, on modern architecture and New Urbanism. My initial “Who is this guy?” became “This guy is everywhere!” Then, fall of my junior year, during a lecture on Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, Scully’s name popped up in my classroom. Struck by Scully’s bold introduction to Venturi’s book, I was hooked. And now, after nearly three decades of reading, digging, interviewing, sifting, writing, and rewriting, this book on Scully’s life and work is the result. Many people have assisted and inspired me throughout this process, and I am grateful to them all. Thank you to Mark Wigley, who initially pointed me in Scully’s direction, and Michael Hays and Neil Levine for nurturing my research. Several of Scully’s colleagues, friends, and family members generously shared their knowledge and memories with me over the years, including Gail Becker, Mirka Beneš, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth LaRocco Boyce, Denise Scott Brown, Esther da Costa Meyer, Paul Goldberger, Michael Graves, Wilbur (Bil) Johnson, Alexandra Lange, Jim Moyer, Molly Nesbit, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Dan Scully, Robert A. M. Stern, Robert Venturi, Mary Vernon, Leo Villardi, Jonathan Weinberg, and Stuart Wrede. William Sacco graciously granted permission for the use of the book’s cover photo. Bill Connor (Harvard Fine Arts Library), Sylvia Chen (A+U), Isabelle Godineau (Fondation Le Corbusier), and Heather Schumacher (Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania) helped me procure the perfect images. The unsurpassed expertise, insight, and support provided by Nancy Eklund Later and Jennifer Hock proved invaluable in all stages of this project, from honing my argument to wordsmithing the final draft. Jennifer, Brockett Horne, Ophelia John, and Katie Marages—your acumen and comradery propelled me through the past two years. Christine Fichera, our discussions and friendship have kept me grounded for even longer. And thank you to James Thompson and Rosamunde O’Cleirigh at Bloomsbury, production manager Ken Bruce, project manager Merv Honeywood, copyeditor Ben Harris, and designer Eleanor Rose for all of your efforts on this book’s behalf. vi

PREFACE

vii

I’d like to offer a special note of appreciation to Catherine (Tappy) Lynn, Scully’s wife of thirty-seven years, for providing unfettered access to his papers, and for diving in alongside me to decode them. You are an astute scholar, a gracious host, and I feel fortunate to count you and Enzo as friends. Thank you for placing your trust in me. And thanks to your Lynchburg friends for their kindness and hospitality. Finally, I am fortunate to have an amazing family. To my parents and siblings, who have been unfailingly supportive over the years and have each helped me in their own unique ways, thank you, truly. Sophia and Ella, I am eternally grateful for your love and your willingness to tolerate my trips south. Sadie and Ginny, you are fantastic writing buddies. And Josh, I feel privileged to have you as my husband, sounding board, and best friend. I dedicate this book to you.

FIGURE 0.1 Vincent Scully, Assistant Professor of the History of Art & Architecture, Yale University, c. 1955. Alburtus, Yale News Bureau. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

viii

Introduction Architectural historian and contemporary critic, townie and Yalie, Marine Corp officer and anti-war activist, Ivy League professor and community advocate, modern architecture’s apologist and opponent, postmodernism’s patron saint and executioner—at various points in his life, and often simultaneously, Vincent Scully was all of these and more. That he defies easy categorization is perhaps the reason why, despite being recognized by Philip Johnson as “the most influential architecture teacher, ever” and by Ada Louise Huxtable as one of the “most influential historians” of his time, Scully and his impact on architecture and urbanism remain confusing territory.1 Scully stands as a singular and powerful figure in twentiethcentury American architecture, yet appears to be shrouded in mystery: many people (especially architects, art historians, and Yale alumni) have heard his name and know he has been “influential,” as Huxtable and Johnson have asserted, but no one quite knows why. And today, as his generation and the subsequent generation of his students pass away, Scully’s architectural and cultural contributions seem to become even more nebulous. Yet, a detailed exploration of Scully’s life dispels this cloud to reveal a remarkably consistent approach toward architecture and urbanism. Even as Scully advocated for different ideas at various points in time, his expansive approach remained grounded in humanism, empathy, and the need for community. A product of his formative experiences, temperament, and specific moment, Scully wasn’t content to simply document and narrate the past. Rather, he seemed compelled to find a way of interpreting architecture, new and old, in light of the changes he experienced in his lifetime, in terms of the profession, the built environment, and the culture and politics of the postwar era. Scully’s desire to do more than what was expected of historians drove him to engage with architects, communicate with the public, nurture students, defy disciplinary boundaries, extend his areas of expertise, and—perhaps most importantly—change his mind. Today we are dissecting the history that Scully wrote, rewriting it to better understand the world and our place in it. *

*

* 1

2

VINCENT SCULLY

Early in his academic career, Scully earned a reputation as a dynamic orator. In the darkened lecture hall, he was known to stalk the stage with a 10-foot wooden pointer in hand, gesturing wildly at the twin images projected behind him on a wall-sized screen. As Scully paced, emotional soliloquies rushed forth, filled with literary allusions from the past two thousand years; he encouraged students not to take notes, but to visually experience, to feel the works on screen. He spoke from memory, seemingly off the cuff, cued by the images that he had painstakingly sequenced in the slide library for hours preceding each lecture. And these were not conventional lectures that foregrounded facts, but were instead narratives marked by sweeping, subjective statements that underscored Scully’s attachment to, and passion for, art history: the discipline “deals with what the eye sees, the mind knows, and the heart feels to be true. It attracts a man who doesn’t want to make visual forms as much as to understand them,” he once declared.2 With a virtuoso’s knowledge and a showman’s aplomb, Scully entranced his audience, amassing widespread popularity across campus and beyond. In a 1959 Architectural Forum article, former Scully student and author David McCullough christened Scully an “Architectural Spellbinder.”3 This title proved quite apt, as by the mid-1960s, nearly one-fifth of the Yale undergraduate population took his courses each year. And his renown grew beyond Yale’s walls; in 1966, Scully graced the cover of Time Magazine as one of the era’s ten “Great Teachers,” and in 1975, People declared him one of “12 Great US Professors.” Scully’s success within and outside the classroom, and the eminence that accompanied it, was far from preordained. Born in 1920 to Irish Catholic working-class parents, Scully lived a childhood marked by loneliness and loss, even in the midst of a loving family. He came of age in post-Depressionera New Haven and earned a spot at Yale, funded by a merit scholarship for local boys. From his earliest days as an undergraduate, Scully felt himself to be an outsider among his well-heeled classmates, due not only to his lack of wealth but also to the fact that, matriculating at age 16, he was nearly two years younger than the majority of his peers. Despite the elite collegiate environment, Scully maintained a strong allegiance to his proletarian roots, even as he lettered in fencing, joined the exclusive Elizabethan club, and graduated near the top of his class. He was both of New Haven and of Yale, occupying two purportedly opposite yet not mutually exclusive roles. He would come to inhabit this position repeatedly throughout his life, gravitating to the interstitial spaces between more firmly established groups. Following his graduation from Yale in 1940, Scully continued on as a graduate student in English but withdrew after attending only one class to join the military. He spent the next five years as a US Marine Corps officer in the Second World War, struggling with illnesses that again left him navigating the divide between strong leader and ailing infirmary patient. Upon return to civilian life, Scully reenrolled at Yale, this time in the Department of the History of Art. There he found architectural history and

INTRODUCTION

3

became not only a celebrated lecturer but an accomplished scholar as well. By the mid-1980s, he had risen to the rank of Sterling Professor—Yale’s highest academic achievement—and had published on a broad range of subjects, from nineteenth-century Shingle Style homes and ancient Greek temples to French baroque gardens, fifteenth-century European fortifications, and the Pueblo architecture of the American Southwest. Connecting these outwardly disparate topics, which span centuries and civilizations, was Scully’s driving conviction that architecture and society share a give-andtake relationship—society shapes and is shaped by the architecture it creates. This means that architecture is both a reflection of its specific context— geographical, cultural, and political—and an agent of change within that context. This idea challenged existing concepts of architecture that saw it as either a purely aesthetic pursuit or, on the other extreme, as fully determinant of human behavior. The notion of a give-and-take between architecture and society, drawn in part from the French art historian Henri Focillon, guided Scully’s work as an historian and as an engaged critic who influenced contemporary architecture through an array of activities, including teaching tens of thousands of students, often in standing-room-only lecture halls; promoting emergent architects such as Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi; publicly debating Norman Mailer on the virtues of modern architecture; loudly opposing destructive urban renewal practices; advocating for a “both/and” accommodating architecture over an “either/or” confrontational approach; advising the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on low-income housing; publishing frequently on architecture’s positive social potential; and setting the theoretical foundations for postmodernism, which he would quickly repudiate for its superficiality, and New Urbanism, a community-focused movement he would champion for the final twentyfive years of his life. Yet, Scully’s reach extended beyond the academic and professional realms. An outspoken force in contemporary American architecture and urbanism, from the 1950s onward Scully performed the role of public intellectual. In line with his working-class roots, Scully made the built environment a topic of everyday discussion, publishing not only in specialized journals such as Architectural Forum and Architectural Record but in everyday outlets such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, Holiday, and Life Magazine. Scully starred in a PBS special on American art and architecture; he even appeared as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show, where he offered his definition of architecture and then narrated a slide show, much as he would in a Yale lecture hall, for the viewing public. Speaking to professional and popular audiences, he voiced his conviction that architecture shapes and is shaped by society, and that the best architecture responds, above all else, to the human need for community. What people build, and how people experience these environments, had real-life consequences. Scully’s influence on a nonspecialist audience set him apart from most academics of his time. Indeed, given Scully’s presence in American popular

4

VINCENT SCULLY

culture, it is apt to compare him to contemporary public intellectuals representing other academic fields. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.— Harvard professor and court historian to the John F. Kennedy administration—is one such figure. Schlesinger explored the past while shaping the present, writing a history of political events with which he was in direct contact. His award-winning books on (successively) Jackson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy molded public expectations of the presidential office and supported an interpretation of American politics as filtered through his own liberal lens. Scully had a similar impact on the public’s understanding of architecture and urbanism by shaping an appreciation for their potential. He underscored the human benefits that well-considered design could bring, and the tangible damage that ill-conceived design could do. Like the writer and public intellectual Gore Vidal, Scully represented a generation that emerged from the Second World War. As an essayist with a liberal bent, Vidal often critiqued social mores, political power, and cultural constructs from a progressive perspective. Indeed, Vidal suggested that his notoriety and that of other renowned late-twentieth-century novelists stemmed not from their written works but from their “life in the world,” in particular for saying “no” to the worst aspects in their society.4 Scully, too, became well versed at saying “no” to what he perceived as morally compromised social and political endeavors—urban renewal; discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation; aggressive foreign policy; flawed low-income housing policies; and more. For Scully, the confrontational stance America so virtuously adopted during the Second World War (which he often referred to as “his war”) gave way by the late 1950s to a more open-minded attitude that recognized the fallibility of federal policy.5 Speaking out against perceived wrongs enacted by the establishment— whether the United States or Yale University—came quite naturally to Scully as a means of protest. Another public intellectual who offers a telling point of comparison with Scully is Jane Jacobs, best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Employing grassroots advocacy, Jacobs garnered widespread support for her theory that a mixed variety of uses, ages, and building forms contribute to the development and survival of vibrant, healthy neighborhoods. Despite her lack of formal training as an urbanist or architect, she tremendously impacted how scholars and the general public viewed urbanism. Like Scully, Jacobs cultivated a broad general audience. In addition, strong moral convictions guided their respective activisms and architectural explorations. Finally, the personal loomed large in the writing of both Jacobs and Scully—for her, in her copious descriptions of daily life; for him, in an ever-present emotional connection with his subjects.6 Within the realm of trained architectural historians, Scully was not alone in engaging with contemporary practice. Predating Scully by a generation, Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion forged a strong connection

INTRODUCTION

5

with Walter Gropius and other Bauhaus architects, ultimately writing a history of modern architecture—Space, Time, and Architecture (1941)— that privileged the roles of his chosen protagonists. Unlike Scully, who shifted perspectives as years passed and circumstances changed, Giedion remained dogmatic in his views. The Englishman Reyner Banham, two years Scully’s junior, explored technology’s role in modern and contemporary architecture. While his activity as an architectural and urban critic, especially his later commentary on the urban ecologies of Los Angeles, placed him in the general eye more than the typical professor, he, too, failed to achieve Scully’s popular renown. Then there is Colin Rowe, who had much in common with Scully, including their year of birth, their work as historians and contemporary critics, and the fact that both men studied at Yale (Rowe for a year, Scully for his entire student career). And notably, by the mid1960s, the men had developed guru-like status among students at their respective institutions: Cornell for Rowe, Yale for Scully. Despite these shared attributes, though, the historians differed in their popular appeal. While Scully broadcast his views far and wide, Rowe fixed his attention on students and an academically minded group of practitioners; even a wellread public had little idea who he was. Aside from public engagement, a significant point of difference between Scully and Rowe—and Giedion and Banham, for that matter—involves their breadth of historical inquiry. Rowe’s investigations centered on classicism as a lens through which to view modern architecture and urbanism. This tracked with the conventional approach taken by historians to focus on a defined area of study. The same can be seen in the research undertaken by Giedion (baroque and modern architecture) and Banham (modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism). In contrast, Scully’s studies spanned more than two millennia, and they seemed to encompass nearly the whole Western architectural canon, infused with a healthy dose of Mesoamerican and North American Indigenous architecture. He approached these distinct cultures in almost anthropological terms, searching for the common underlying factors that speak to what it means to be human in Hellenic Greece, late-twentieth-century New England, and everything in between. And unlike most of his contemporaries, his studies drew on fields beyond those of art and architectural history—literature, anthropology, archaeology, and philosophy played significant roles in his understanding of the built environment. Approaching architecture in these terms—as in, we are all human, with the need to understand our place in the world—is in part what made Scully’s ideas so compelling, especially to nonarchitects and the general public. With our current emphasis on cultural specificity and difference, such universalizing tendencies seem out of date, particularly in academia. That said, Scully’s perspective and emotional delivery allowed nearly anyone, regardless of training, to tap into his passion for his subject matter, whether written or spoken aloud. Ironically, though, Scully’s impulse to communicate with a

6

VINCENT SCULLY

popular audience, and his talent for doing so, offered the grounds for his detractors’ most devastating critiques. While many found his enthusiasm infectious, others found it unprofessional. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that a portion of the Yale professorship—at mid-century, typically comprised of well-bred white men of means—would find Scully’s zealous lecturing style distasteful, if not entirely out of place. Ultimately, though, such misgivings may be irrelevant to a big-picture assessment of Scully’s contribution once it is acknowledged that, for Scully, his lectures and scholarly work were inseparable from his everyday life. For him, architecture could never be divorced from our daily existence. Architecture was not simply a backdrop for human activity; it was a shaping force in society, providing us with an understanding of who we are and who we wish to be. Hence the built environment, and Scully’s work of helping us decode and experience it, was an integral part of his world. He saw architecture as a sociopolitical act in line with the pressing issues of the day, such as the Vietnam War; civil, gay, and women’s rights movements; expanding consumer culture; and government-led housing reform. For six decades he taught students to view architecture as broad-reaching and inherently social, rather than disciplinary or technical. And this philosophy has had a true impact on the world we inhabit. For example, the British architect Norman Foster, who studied at Yale in the early 1960s and is responsible for more than 250 built projects the world over, from airports to cultural centers to skyscrapers, sees Scully as a mentor. “My work as an architect,” Foster asserted, “is anchored in a historical past, with an awareness of the present but pointing to an anticipation of the future. This is my debt to Vincent Scully—he opened my eyes and mind.”7 The work of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andrés Duany, Miami-based architects/planners who spearheaded the New Urbanism movement, is aesthetically quite different from Foster’s. Yet, they, too, cite Scully as a formative influence on their development. From Scully’s teachings they absorbed an interest in “the whole of American architecture, not just in public buildings and monuments, but in the American house and the American community,” an abiding concept that would guide their work in traditional and vernacular planning.8 Indeed, during Scully’s nearly century-long existence, an array of colleagues, students, friends, and foes—a veritable who’s who of twentiethcentury architecture and culture—moved through his orbit. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore, Jim Stirling, Richard Rogers, Peter Eisenman, Robert Stern, Aldo Rossi, David Childs, Maya Lin, David McCullough, Claus Oldenburg, Harold Bloom, and many more. In different ways, Scully affected—and was affected by—these figures. He learned from them all, and exerted his influence on them in return. In many cases, he guided how their individual works were received, both by the profession and the public at large. Locating Scully’s place in this constellation

INTRODUCTION

7

illuminates the foundations of our contemporary built environment. To borrow a phrase Scully once used, it reveals “how things got to be the way they are now.”9 It likewise outlines a perspective that helped shape our current top writers on architecture. Paul Goldberger, Christopher Hawthorne, Blair Kamin, Michael Kimmelman, and Alexandra Lange, all of whom were Scully’s students in some fashion, have used their platforms to emphasize social and political aspects of public space. By perpetuating Scully’s conviction that architecture must be considered, experienced, and discussed, these critics underscore the inherent power that the built environment holds. As Goldberger, former architecture critic for the New York Times and the New Yorker, commented following his mentor’s death, “[Scully] showed us that architecture is not just forms in a vacuum. It’s about what kind of society you want to build.”10 Following the Second World War, such a position—that architecture is about what kind of society one wants to build—became increasingly commonplace, even rising to a default in connection with modernism’s positivistic belief that science and technology would render the world’s problems obsolete. For Scully, though, his understanding of architecture as a reflection of societal aspirations was purely humanistic, locating the human experience front and center. Today as we struggle with environmental and health threats the globe over and grapple with the deep-seated effects of racism and inequity, Scully’s message—that the built environment at its best enhances human connection, and at its worst, stifles it—is perhaps more crucial and resonant than ever. *

*

*

On November 30, 2017, in Lynchburg, Virginia, Scully died at the age of 97 from complications related to Parkinson’s Disease. I read this sad news in my Cambridge, Massachusetts, living room and was filled with regret. In the early 2000s, an analysis of Scully’s professional work had featured prominently in my doctoral dissertation. As an undergraduate student in the mid-1990s, I had been struck by Scully’s prose; it conveyed an emotionality unusual for academic writing, and I felt compelled to learn more about his work. Ultimately that exploration became my senior thesis, which involved a 1997 interview with Scully and Catherine (Tappy) Lynn in Coral Gables, Florida. A decade later, after completing graduate school and planning to write a book on Scully’s scholarly contributions, I interviewed Scully and Tappy again, this time in their home in New Haven, Connecticut. While the intended book didn’t materialize, I hadn’t forgotten Scully. I had never been his student, yet the breadth and popular accessibility of his work had stayed with me through the years. His death in 2017 shook loose these thoughts and the languishing book beckoned. So I reached out to Tappy, to whom he had been married for nearly thirty-seven years, to request an interview. She kindly agreed, despite having met me only twice in the decades before, and in late March 2018 I traveled to Lynchburg for the

8

VINCENT SCULLY

scheduled date. The morning interview in her dining room turned into a fullday discussion. As we were wrapping up, Tappy mentioned that she had an attic full of Scully’s papers. He had never been an organized sort, and she feared that the remnants above harbored family photos and well-aged mementos she was loath to lose, for her sake and that of Scully’s children. Thus, before she donated the papers to Yale, the institution that had played a formative and perpetual role in her husband’s long life, Tappy felt compelled to go through them. Without hesitation, I volunteered to assist. She accepted my offer and invited me to stay during these trips south at the house with her and their Siberian Husky, Enzo. A few weeks later I returned to Lynchburg for four days, a pattern I repeated a half-dozen times over the next two years, to “clean Scully’s attic,” as my kids would tease. These trips prompted more research, including dozens of interviews with Scully’s former colleagues, students, and friends; visits to the archives at three universities; and the evocation of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain military records. My earlier explorations into Scully’s work had been my starting place, and these left-behind papers became my logical next step. My opening foray into the attic found it thick with the humidity of the Virginia spring and overflowing with vestiges of Scully’s career and life. Dusty plastic crates, rusting filing cabinets, two warped wooden chests, a large locked suitcase . . . Potential gems were likely hidden within each, buried among disintegrating lecture notes from the 1950s, faded 1960s handwritten manuscripts, and scrawled 1980s story ideas for Architectural Digest, all intermingled with decades-old parking tickets and discarded scraps of paper. I began to dig, choosing a wilted cardboard box for my initial excavation. Within minutes I came across my first find: a magazine cutting from People, the October 1975 issue, which profiled Scully as one of the country’s twelve “Great Professors.” I’d seen the article before, but the accompanying typed manuscript—the original text that author Marsha Cochran submitted for publication—was new. In an attached note Cochran explained that, to her dismay but not her surprise, the powers that be had drastically cut the piece for publication. She wanted her subject to have a copy of the unadulterated essay. As I scanned through the full-length article, a particular quote caught my attention: “ ‘My life started over in the 1960s,’ Scully admits. ‘I had to think through and out of the existential-confrontational view I’d developed in the 1950s. It turned me around.’ ”11 This was something. In my years of studying Scully’s work, it had become clear to me that, during the mid-1960s, his views on architecture had significantly changed—a 180-degree-pivot kind of change. He would begin to speak out against architectural developments that he had wholeheartedly embraced just a few years before. He would later say that he had shifted from a “confrontational” to an “accommodating” approach. What had prompted Scully’s reevaluation? And perhaps more

INTRODUCTION

9

importantly, what characteristics allowed him to comfortably reverse his stance? A willingness to change one’s mind is hardly the hallmark of an established historian, and yet here Scully was, nearing the top of his profession, doing just that. Furthermore, how could Scully undertake detailed research on such diverse topics, especially as, toward the end of the same century, the discipline was becoming increasingly specialized? How did Scully embody qualities that, when taken at face value, seemed blatantly contradictory? Likewise, what might it mean that some contemporary scholars characterized Scully as incredibly profound while others dismissed him as passé? Finally, what allowed his messages, even as they changed throughout his life, to simultaneously resonate with academics, architects, and the public? Now I stood in Lynchburg, in the attic of the home where Scully had died a mere six months prior. Scully had changed the course of American architecture, and I was about to learn how.

CHAPTER ONE

Dogs and Books (1920–1940) Later in life, writing a memoir that would never be published, Vincent Joseph Scully Jr. vividly remembered his childhood home in New Haven, Connecticut. Tall and pointed, the yellow two-family house stretched skyward, framed by twin majestic oaks. New Haven, however, wasn’t known for its oaks, but for the mature elm trees that flourished throughout the city, thanks to landowner and politician James Hillhouse, who in the 1780s used his influence (and rather plentiful funds) to launch the country’s first public tree-planting campaign. Around the New Haven Green, down Temple Street, and throughout the city, he coordinated the rhythmic placement of elm after elm, and continued to do so well into the next century. The thriving trees soon soared nearly 100 feet high, shading the growing settlement with their verdant canopies, transforming ordinary streets into regal thoroughfares and bestowing on the Connecticut town a lasting moniker—the Elm City. Home to multiple munitions factories and thousands of workers drawn from a deep pool of western European immigrants and southern Black transplants, New Haven in the early twentieth century was a diverse and burgeoning city, teeming with those looking to make good on the American dream. Amid this working-class citizenry rose Yale College, which had made New Haven its home shortly after the school’s founding in 1701. Initially Yale’s few structures, located just west of the New Haven Green, were part of this heaving mass of life, open to all who passed through, not simply the lucky (and typically wealthy) white young men who attended the school. Slowly, though, as the college grew, this would change. First a simple wooden fence appeared that framed the school’s grounds. By the mid-1800s, masonry structures incrementally replaced the fence, shielding what was now Yale University piece by piece from outsiders, creating a quadrangle largely walled off from the surrounding city. This breach between school and town was more than physical; by the early 1900s, a symbolic split governed nearly every facet of New Haven life, underscoring a persistent and lingering divide: high versus low, rich versus poor, white versus Black, Mayflower versus Ellis Island, Protestant versus Catholic, Yalie versus townie. 10

DOGS AND BOOKS (1920–1940)

11

As the son of Irish Catholic working-class parents, raised in that tall yellow house less than a mile from Yale’s campus, Scully was decidedly a townie. In the portion of his memoir entitled “New Haven Story,” penned on yellow legal pads in his enigmatic scrawl—generous loops and severe angles impatiently darting across the page—Scully made special mention of the elms, of how they lined his childhood lanes, rendering what might have been an ordinary place magical. The elms “roofed over almost every street,” he wrote, “even the poorest, with a rib-vaulted canopy like that of a Gothic cathedral.” This march of elms—leafy spreads in the summer, bare branches in the winter—established a structure for the streets, tamed their regiments of houses, whether modest or grand. Not only did the elms inspire an atmosphere of order and wonder, they instilled a sense of equality. Yalie or townie, rich or poor, the elms did not discriminate. “You didn’t have to be well off to live on streets like that,” noted Scully. “The structure was integral and democratic. It was for everybody.”1 During the warmer months, the open-sided trolleys were for everybody, too, as they flowed along the elm-edged streets. The same lanes would soon host growing numbers of automobiles, including the Model T Fords sold by Scully’s father. A New Haven native, Vincent Joseph Scully Sr. was born to shopkeepers who ran a used furniture store on Grand Avenue. Forced to leave school in the eighth grade after his father’s death, Vincent Sr. later became a traveling tobacco salesman. With sky-blue eyes and an earnest full-lipped smile, he traversed Connecticut via rail, indulging a love of travel while supporting his wife, Mary Catherine McCormick. After the birth of their first and only child in August 1920, Mary urged Vincent Sr. to spend more time at home. So he took a job selling Fords. Scully recalled his father pulling up in his lofty Model T, an auto envisioned by its makers as “a motor car for the great multitude.”2 Fifteen million Model Ts—all the color of coal—would be sold during the model’s nineteen-year run. “You can have any color you want,” Vincent Sr. would joke, echoing Henry Ford, “as long as it’s black.”3 The yellow house sat at 61 Derby Avenue. Dating from the turn of the century, this gallant wood-framed structure mirrored its neighbors, “high, spiky two-family houses with their gables fronting the streets,” stretching almost as tall as the trees.4 These homes featured horizontal wood siding, wooden-shingle accents, and an asymmetrical arrangement that Scully would, early in his career as an architectural historian, identify as hallmarks of unique kinds of nineteenth-century American architecture that he would name the Stick and Shingle Styles. The yellow house was preceded by a modest open porch sheltering twin doors, one for each of the house’s units. The Scullys supplemented their income by renting the first-floor apartment; young Scully and his parents lived on the second floor along with his mother’s unmarried sisters, Lil and Peg, who slept in the eave-pinched attic above. The McCormick sisters, also New Haveners by birth, had left grade school after their parents’ deaths. Lil went into bookkeeping, at which she

12

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 1.1 Scully on a tricycle next to his dog Molly, c. 1923. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

excelled, while Mary and Peg took jobs in the Nonpareil Laundry Company. By all accounts, Mary was the beauty of the three sisters. With a soft oval face and porcelain skin, she radiated the ephemerality of a Pre-Raphaelite model. On June 22, 1910, she wed Vincent Sr. and began her life on Derby Avenue. Mary remained close with Lil and Peg. The sisters’ social engagements revolved around the Catholic Church, which played a leading role in the women’s lives. Scully recalled that, in his youth, every Sunday evening a young priest would join his mother and aunts for a game of whist; throughout the week, the cleric’s presence was kept fresh by a silver-framed photograph of his moon-shaped, boyish face, which lived atop the family’s piano. Once married and free of the laundry company, Mary turned her sights to a singing career, filling the already crowded apartment with opera records. Exercising her light, nimble voice, she trained with Italian-émigré musician Enrico Batelli as a coloratura soprano, an operatic designation known for its upper range and vocal agility.5 Scully ruefully remembers clinging to her skirt as a child, begging her to stop singing; the high-pitched arias skewered his young ears. She performed for a time, once as Mimi in La Bohème, but for reasons unknown she abandoned her singing ambitions. Perhaps it had to do with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 when, like so many others, Vincent Sr. lost his job. Or perhaps it traced to Mary’s physical fragility, which got worse through the early 1930s and led to her premature death in 1936.

DOGS AND BOOKS (1920–1940)

13

FIGURE 1.2 A plan of the town of New Haven, by James Wadworth. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

As a child Scully lived with a hazy knowledge of his mother’s frailness, having overheard a whispered exchange in the kitchen between his mother and aunts about “some unimaginable danger of death.”6 Likely exacerbated by the haunting, ever-present notion of his mother’s illness, Scully’s youth was marked by loneliness. Counter to the well-known stereotype of rambling Irish Catholic clans, the Scully/McCormick family was self-contained, all under the same roof, one solitary child and four serious adults. There was vague talk of paternal relatives out of state, but they never materialized, leaving Scully without cousins to substitute for siblings. In elementary school he played pick-up baseball and football with neighborhood boys, including Paul Betz and John Ford, who remained his life-long friends. In particular, Scully spent ample time at the Ford house down the block, blending right in among the family’s ten children.7 Despite these local

14

VINCENT SCULLY

connections, however, Scully recalled finding his greatest companionship elsewhere. “The dogs were pretty much the center of my life as a boy, they and books,” he noted. A succession of dogs—Molly, Prince, Pal—peppered the scant pictures of Scully’s youth and occupied a good portion of his childhood memories. “I ran the dogs to Edgewood Park almost every day, thinking about the books.”8 As for the books, Vincent Sr. passed his love of the written word onto Scully, reading aloud to his young son every night, even after the precocious child began reading himself at age 4. Scully developed a voracious appetite for books and the imaginary worlds they were capable of constructing in his mind, which prompted his regular visits to New Haven Free Public Library fronting New Haven Green at the corner of Elm and Temple Streets. Forty years later, he would be instrumental in the campaign to save this same neoclassical building from the wrecking ball of modernist redevelopment. Around the same time he would develop an undying appreciation for the mid-seventeenth-century nine-square-grid centered on the town green that had anchored the city of New Haven as it matured. While Scully may have derived the most comfort from his dogs and books, the adults in his life by no means neglected him. During football season, he and his father regularly rode the trolley a short way down Derby Avenue to the Yale Bowl to watch the college games. And his aunts were ever present, eventually residing with, and living emotionally through, their sister’s husband and son. Gentle, round-faced, and prone to blushing, Peg wore her dark hair piled high in Gibson-girl fashion. As Scully neared the age of 10, every week she spirited him to the movies—a love of films would stay with him throughout his life—and treated him afterward to a chocolate éclair at the House of Hasselbach, a restaurant and ice cream parlor on Chapel Street. Lil, plain-faced and proud, spent even more time with her growing nephew, often gifting him thoughtful trinkets and scores of books. She had carved out a decent living managing the accounts for various store owners, at least until the Great Depression hit; Lil first lost her clients and then, when the local bank folded, her scant life savings. As the Depression deepened, the Scully family went from a comfortable working-class existence to a rather poor one. Vincent Sr. struggled to find work. In 1931, he received a much-needed boost of self-esteem when he was elected to the New Haven Board of Aldermen, a Democrat representing Ward 3. Kindhearted and well liked, he was immediately voted the board’s president, a post he held for the next twelve long, financially lean years. Though this was a nonpaying position, Vincent Sr. approached his alderman responsibilities quite seriously, and the entire family took great pride in his accomplishments. Decades later Scully would proudly recall that his father, despite receiving threatening phone calls in opposition, shepherded through the city’s first racially integrated public housing projects.9 Likewise, Vincent Sr. had New Haven’s future in mind when he presciently addressed the financial problems Yale could cause the city. Based on

DOGS AND BOOKS (1920–1940)

15

Connecticut state law, the educational institution pays no tax on its property. As the campus and its holdings grew, Vincent Sr. and others foresaw a time when Yale “might purchase and place on the [tax-]exempt list all the land in New Haven,” leaving the city without a commercial tax base to fund municipal services such as police, fire, sanitation, and public works departments.10 In 1933 Vincent Sr. and New Haven mayor John W. Murphy appealed to Yale’s ruling body, the Corporation, for funds to help support these services, from which Yale itself benefited. The Corporation issued a resounding “No.” New Haven’s citizens, it seems, were not Yale’s concern. Rather, the university’s attention was trained inward, focused on its own rising towers. Across the United States, the 1930s brought a cascade of faltering businesses, vanished savings, and destitute families. Yale, too, was affected by the Great Depression, left with reductions in endowment income, alumni donations, and student enrollment. On the campus grounds, however, a building boom was in full swing, thanks to a huge bequest from John William Sterling. After receiving his bachelor of arts from Yale in 1864, Sterling became a successful lawyer who, upon his death in 1918, left his alma mater nearly $18 million, equivalent to more than $200 million today. Conditions of the donation required Yale to build at least one building in Sterling’s name; with such vast funds, however, the Corporation built four and―per its benefactor’s request―set aside the remaining fortune to support scholarships, professorships, and special prizes.11 Thus, in addition to seeding endowed positions to assist future students and faculty—Scully would be a beneficiary of this good will more than once in his life—Sterling’s generosity resulted in the very visible eruption of new architecture across Yale’s grounds. Scully was aware of this seemingly continuous construction as he regularly made his way from his home on Derby Avenue to Hillhouse High School, which he entered, having just turned 12, in 1932.12 This daily walk of just over a mile, likely turning left on Chapel Street and then again on York Street, took him straight through Yale’s campus, past the block-long construction site where Davenport and Pierson Colleges were nearing completion, readying to house their inaugural students in 1933. Just as he had in grade school—the boy skipped two grades—Scully excelled at Hillhouse High.13 He was especially influenced by his teacher, chair of the English department Marion C. Sheridan. She earned her master’s degree from Yale in 1928 and continued on to receive her doctorate in 1934, midway through Scully’s tenure at the school. Sheridan was a keen appreciator of films, writing extensively on the medium as an art form. She touted the ways film could illustrate literary techniques in the classroom as well as its potential for elevating general public consciousness. In 1937, the year after Scully graduated from high school, she published an article entitled “Rescuing Civilization through Motion Pictures,” and she would continue to write on the topic for years to come.14 With his love of literature and the movies, it is no wonder Scully found a mentor in Sheridan. In 1959, when he was asked what teacher had been most influential in his life, he

16

VINCENT SCULLY

said, “Dr. Sheridan,” placing her ahead of the established professors at Yale with which he had studied. And when Scully himself was an established professor, he would write her a heartfelt thank-you letter citing her inspiration and guidance during his high school years.15 Scully’s final year at Hillhouse, 1936, turned out to be both an exciting and emotionally challenging year for the young man, who in the course of a few months would win a much-needed scholarship, gain acceptance to Yale, and unexpectedly lose half of his family. Mary, Scully’s mother, had become increasingly ill as the Depression progressed, retiring to her bed in 1934; as Scully remembered, “she never really got up again.” During early March 1936, Mary entered the hospital seemingly for observation and underwent surgery the following day. “She wouldn’t let me come see her. I didn’t know she was in danger,” Scully wrote, revisiting the event some fifty years later. Hence it came as a great shock to him when his father and Lil returned from the hospital the evening of March 4 and solemnly reported that his mother had died. “I never saw her die. I wasn’t with her at all,” he sorrowfully recalled. Nor did Scully ever learn her cause of death, despite questioning the doctor years later. Cancer? Peritonitis? Diverticulitis? “Complications,” he was told, but complications from what he never knew.16 While Mary languished in the hospital, a related tragedy played out on Derby Avenue. On hearing of her sister’s surgery, Peg—who was preparing supper at the time—lurched backward in surprise, crashed into the stove, and collapsed to the floor. She was moved into bed to recover, yet she never did. By the night of Mary’s funeral, Peg had slipped into a coma; she passed away before dawn, just three days after her sister.17 Thus, in a matter of days, Scully’s already small family was shorn in two, leaving him with only his father and a solitary aunt. Under these circumstances, Scully completed his senior year of high school during what was likely an emotionally desolate spring. A bright moment appeared when he was selected as a Sterling Memorial Scholar, a merit-based award for New Haven natives to fund a Yale collegiate education. Scully, the first member of his family to complete high school, had aspired to attend Yale since a young age. His university acceptance and the Sterling scholarship made this desire a reality. College, however, proved to be less than a dreamscape. At Yale—a veritable training ground for the nation’s Protestant, moneyed elite—Scully acutely felt his status as a poor Irish Catholic townie. Inadvertently underscoring his humble origins, he helped support himself his freshman year by serving meals in Yale’s main dining hall, the Commons, to his well-heeled classmates. “You said, ‘Will you have the meat of the day? Will you have the cold cuts?’ And I didn’t like it . . . I felt a lot of snobbery,” Scully recalled. “Whether real or imagined, it poisoned my [undergraduate] years at Yale.”18 As an adult, Scully repeatedly described his four-year college term as far less than idyllic; he was too immature, he said, and neglected his studies. In

DOGS AND BOOKS (1920–1940)

17

FIGURE 1.3 Scully, senior year of high school, c. 1936. Collection of C. W. Lynn. truth, he was quite young, having turned 16 only a few weeks before the start of the semester. “He was just a boy, really,” his wife Tappy would comment decades later. “He was so small freshman year, a child among men.”19 He was assigned to and lived in Jonathan Edwards College (one of Yale’s residential colleges), joined the fencing team, and made a few friends, but he often left campus in the evenings. These excursions typically ended in one of two places: at Derby Avenue, calling on his father, aunt, and beloved dog; or at one of New Haven’s six movie theaters, where he would attend every visiting film at least once. “I didn’t do any work in school,” Scully admitted, with a sly smile. “I went to the movies.”20 Yet, recommendations from university officials penned in 1940, shortly after Scully’s graduation, tell a different story. Joseph T. Curtiss, then assistant professor of English literature, fellow of Jonathan Edwards College, and Scully’s college advisor, declared that “intellectually, [Scully] belongs to the very top group. He was considerably younger than the class average, but

18

VINCENT SCULLY

his marks were very close to the top.”21 Yale’s then president, Charles Seymour, offering further details regarding Scully’s academic performance, described him as “an unusually fine student, graduating with honors.” In addition, Seymour continued, “he possessed unusual interest and ability in literature,” belonged to the Elizabethan Club, worked as a member of Jonathan Edwards’s College bursary staff, and participated in varsity athletics, “being an excellent fencer.”22 Scully’s enduring love of books drew him to major in English, where he encountered Chauncey Brewster Tinker. A dynamic teacher and wellrespected scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, Tink (as he was known) made a strong impression on the young Scully, who later described the aging professor as “basically my best friend when I was an undergraduate.”23 Tink was heavily involved with the Elizabethan Club (known as the Lizzie), an exclusive social society made up of select undergraduates (no more than forty-five from the entire student body), graduate students, and faculty members, who gathered regularly over afternoon tea in the Lizzie’s clubhouse to discuss literature and culture. Likely Scully’s connection with Tink paved the way for the young man’s induction into this invitation-only club. English literature was not Scully’s only academic pursuit during his undergraduate years. He likewise became enamored of all things French, an obsession that he initially acquired through his studies with French-born professor Henri Peyre, the chair of Yale’s French department. In his courses, Peyre brought French modern literature and culture to life, introducing Scully—who had barely traveled beyond New Haven—to an enchanting civilization across the Atlantic. Peyre’s vibrant lectures captured Scully’s attention, especially in the latter’s final year of college. During his last year as an undergraduate, Scully also dabbled in the realm of art history. To fill a void in his schedule left by a dropped playwriting class, Scully enrolled in an introductory history of art course, taught by Carroll L. V. Meeks.24 He felt an immediate affinity with the material and earned an A+ in the class. Perhaps more significant for Scully’s future was that he left a favorable impression on George Heard Hamilton, a teaching fellow for the class who was then completing his PhD in art history and would, in time, become one of the younger man’s mentors. Scully graduated from Yale College in the spring of 1940 at age 19. He set his sights on Yale’s English department and made plans to pursue his doctorate. Then, the Second World War—and art history—intervened.

CHAPTER TWO

Then and Since (1940–1946) The fall of 1940 began as anticipated for Scully, who matriculated at Yale as a newly minted graduate student. He had just turned 20 years old and had matured physically since his arrival on campus four years earlier. Now entering his third decade of life, Scully had grown to be an inch shy of six feet; he had a slender build, weighing 150 pounds, fair skin, hazel eyes, and side-swept brownish-red hair. Handsome and clean cut, his visage bore his father’s full lips and his mother’s fine nose. He had the appearance of an earnest, serious student as he returned to campus to continue his literary studies in the university’s English department. By the early 1940s, a movement in literary theory called New Criticism was steadily gaining traction in certain academic venues. Intentionally setting aside the historical and social circumstances that gave rise to a text, proponents of New Criticism focused on the text’s formal aspects—how a poem, for example, functioned as an artistic object on its own, divorced from outside references. In other words, New Criticism’s supporters felt that the text’s artistic value came from the structure and consequent meaning of the text itself, not from the context in which it was written or the personal history of the author who wrote it. For Scully’s friend Tink, who had dedicated himself to unpacking the works of British authors such as Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, discounting context and authorial experience was a foolhardy enterprise. Scully likewise took issue with New Criticism and its formalist approach to understanding literature, which was quickly infiltrating Yale’s English department. He had encountered New Criticism’s expanding reach during his final years as an undergraduate, yet it didn’t deter his desire to study English until the autumn of 1940. After attending only one class session, disillusioned by the growing dominance of New Criticism—and inspired by a righteous patriotism kindled by the war overseas—Scully left graduate school. He enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps as a flying cadet and reported for training on November 25, preparing to defend his country as it became increasingly enmeshed in the Second World War. The US Army’s aerial service was initially developed to support traditional ground-based infantry. Yet, as aviation technology evolved, so did the vision 19

20

VINCENT SCULLY

of airborne warfare’s role in combat, and the name bestowed on this aerial branch of the Army, formerly called the Air Service, was changed in 1926 to the Air Corps, to reflect its status as a combat unit. As the country geared up for likely involvement in the Second World War, the Air Corps expanded its numbers, tripling in size from just over 50,000 men in June 1940 to more than 150,000 a year later. Flying cadets were required to be male, between the ages of 19 and 25, physically fit, single, and have completed at least two years of college or three years of technical training. Scully checked all the boxes, and he signed up. Combat pilots—or any pilots during aviation’s infancy—faced incredible dangers; while soaring through the sky their metallic birds could be shot down or simply putter to a stop and plummet to the ground, maiming or killing them instantly. The movies of the era capitalized on the drama inherent in this kind of daring with a rash of major motion pictures focused on the exploits of military aviators. The first such film, Wings, was released in 1927. Coming just before “talkies” emerged on the scene, this silent film depicted two small-town men as they joined the US Air Service, trained as pilots, and engaged in battle over Germany and France. With its spectacular aerial footage, painstakingly recreated with the help of US Air Corps pilots, and its realistic combat scenes, Wings was a box-office success. Winning the first-ever bestowed Academy Award for Best Picture, it set the standard for future aviation films, of which there were many. Perhaps the most influential aviation flick for Scully, however, was The Dawn Patrol of 1938, starring Errol Flynn. A remake of a 1930 movie by the same name, it tells the story of the Royal Flying Corps 59th Squadron during the First World War. As the squadron loses its veteran pilots at an alarming rate, the commander is forced by his superiors to dispatch new and inexperienced replacement pilots, essentially sending them to their deaths. Meanwhile, the talented and irreverent Captain Courtney, played by Flynn, ignores orders and retaliates against a German top flyer who killed his friend. Despite Courtney’s disobedience, he becomes squadron commander and manages to save the life of another friend, but he ultimately is himself shot down and killed. As the film ends, the newest squadron commander (the man whom Courtney saved) is seen ordering green pilots on their next mission. The Dawn Patrol hit box offices December 24, 1938, on the eve of the Second World War. The film conveyed a decidedly pacifist message, underscoring the inanity of boardroom-based military higher-ups issuing orders that led to men’s deaths on the front lines. But even more so it foregrounded the heroic pilot—Flynn’s Captain Courtney—as a selfless flying ace willing to die for his friends and his country. This film helped establish the image of the dashing combat pilot who, armed with good looks, nerves of steel, and a billowing scarf, captured the American imagination. With this vision in mind, tens of thousands of men flocked to the US Army Air Corps, ready to fly to glory on mechanical wings. Scully was one of them.

THEN AND SINCE (1940–1946)

21

In an interview more than sixty-five years later, Scully recounted his time as a flying cadet with self-effacing humor. He trained on a PT-17 Stearman biplane, “wonderful aircraft, open cockpit, white scarf . . . You know, The Dawn Patrol. Errol Flynn. Who knows what all crap.”1 He lasted in training only six weeks, thanks to Scully’s self-described inherent lack of flying sense and difficulty in decoding the heavy southern accent of his flight instructor. The final straw appeared to be when, on a training run, Scully executed a skillful yet unsanctioned landing maneuver, terrifying his on-board instructor and securing himself an honorable Air Corps discharge for “flying deficiency.”2 Throughout his life, Scully would readily rehash “washing out” as a flying cadet. But he systematically sidestepped discussions of the subsequent five years, which he spent in the United States Marine Corps. When questioned about his Marine service, he would provide few answers, evading the topic by offering nonspecific truths such as “The war was such a complicated thing for me . . . It’s just all painful. You don’t mind?”3 A few years prior to his death, though, Tappy—his wife of almost four decades— pressed him on his wartime movements. His children, now grown, wanted to know where he had served; she wanted to know. Scully finally spoke, offering a brief account that reveals the sense of belonging he gained, and then ultimately lost, as a Marine.4 Scully began his story in September 1941, with his arrival at the Marine Barracks in New River, North Carolina, where he was assigned to lead a platoon in L Company, 5th Marines. Yet, his time in the Marines started months before, just weeks after his honorable discharge from the Air Corps. No longer an Army man, Scully returned home on January 7, 1941, and immediately applied to the Marine Corps with an eye toward becoming a commissioned officer. To prevent an anticipated shortage of officers, in September 1940 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed off on the Officer Candidates Program (also known as the Officer Candidates Class) to train recent college graduates for military leadership roles. Successful candidates emerged from the thirteen-week course with a rank of second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve and then underwent another fifteen weeks of training in the Reserve Officers Class, which upon successful completion elevated the candidate to combat-ready status in the Marine Corps, no longer a reserve. On January 14, the Marine Corps Headquarters received Scully’s officer candidate application, accompanied by glowing letters of recommendation from Yale president Charles Seymour, two Yale professors, New Haven mayor John Murphy, and Father John McLaughlin of St. Brendan’s Church. Candidates under 21 years of age needed a guardian’s permission to apply; a letter of consent from Vincent Sr., who was now selling Chevrolets, completed his son’s application. Scully reported to the Marine Corps School at Quantico, Virginia, on February 3. The incoming members of this Officer Candidates Class (OCC)—407 in total—arrived in waves throughout the month. Within the

22

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 2.1 Scully, United States Marine Corps, c. 1941. Collection of C. W. Lynn. first 24 hours candidates were issued uniforms and gear, given medical and dental exams, and assigned to platoons to begin their training in advance of the official class start date of March 14. The class consisted of four 100-men companies (labeled A through D) commanded by regular Marine Corps officers. Each company was divided into three platoons of 30 to 36 men, with platoons further split into 10- to 12-men squads. The class curriculum, modeled on the basic Marine Corps

THEN AND SINCE (1940–1946)

23

training program, totaled approximately 550 hours of classroom lectures, field demonstrations, and exercises during which candidates received instruction in “drills, marksmanship, small arms, parades and ceremonies, customs and traditions of the Corps, combat principles, and map reading.”5 Company commanders and platoon leaders graded candidates on their performance in two areas: General Characteristics, which involved the officers’ assessments of the candidate’s personality and leadership potential; and Military Qualifications, which reflected exam grades and skill tests. As winter thawed to spring, OCC training transformed these civilian college grads into military Reserve infantry. Thanks to rigorous standards, the number of candidates dwindled by more than 20 percent, with 322 men successful completing the class. On May 29, Scully and his fellow graduates were commissioned as second lieutenants in the Marine Corps Reserve. They received a week of well-earned leave and then returned to Quantico to begin the Reserve Officers Class (ROC). The stated purpose of the ROC was to prepare these newly minted Reserve officers to command troops in the field. The class lasted fifteen weeks and followed a similar organizational structure as had the OCC (companies, platoons, squads) with the candidates running through an additional 643 hours of advanced training in areas such as marksmanship, fortifications, and tactical maneuvers, scheduled from early morning to well after sundown.6 A typical day began with first call at 5:45 a.m., followed by roll call and a physical drill. Breakfast in the branch mess hall ran from 6:15 to 7:15 a.m.; at this and every meal, the men sat at 8-person tables, assigned alphabetically by last name. After breakfast, drills often took place between 7:30 and 8:20 a.m. School—which included classroom instruction as well as field exercises—generally lasted from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. reserved for lunch. Dinner was served from 6 to 7:30 p.m., followed by study hall from 8 to 9 p.m., when men could complete course work for the following day. Bunk check took place at 11 p.m., ensuring that everyone was in bed and as rested as possible for the next day’s training. While some off time was allotted during the weekends, overall the ROC candidates adhered to an exacting schedule designed to shape them— physically and mentally—into exceptional leaders. Only forty ROC members—12.5 percent of the class’s original 322— were approved for commission as second lieutenants in the regular Marine Corps.7 Scully was one of them. After completing the ROC in early September 1941 and being granted a two-week leave, he was detached to Marine Barracks New River. He arrived on September 29 and joined L Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Marine Barracks New River was a recently founded military camp. By the summer of 1940, with American involvement in the Second World War seeming increasingly likely, the Marine Corps decided to establish an amphibious training facility where they could instruct troops on overtaking enemy-occupied shores. Intense scouting revealed an undeveloped swath

24

VINCENT SCULLY

of coastal land in Onslow County, North Carolina, midway between the port cities of Wilmington and Morehead. Encompassing a protected inlet and a range of terrain from sandy beach and swampy marsh to wild underbrush and dense pine forest, this land—encased in humidity and swarming with bugs and snakes—was a perfect training ground for the amphibious and land-based military maneuvers Marines would execute overseas. Construction began in late April 1941 with the Tent Camp Area, designated to house the 1st Marine Division, with which Scully arrived in September. Secured on wooden platforms, canvas-covered wood-frame structures housed the lodging quarters and support facilities for the nearly 6,000 Marines then stationed at Marine Barracks.8 It was here that Second Lieutenant Vincent J. Scully was put in charge of L Company’s 3rd platoon, preparing some fifty young men for combat against the Axis Forces. The Marines who made up the platoon shipped in from Parris Island, South Carolina, where they had completed boot camp training that included intense physical conditioning and instruction in rifle, bayonet, and hand-to-hand combat. At New River, after being organized into platoons led by commissioned officers like Scully, these men underwent additional training involving weaponry, obstacle courses, and amphibious assault actions such as disembarking from ship cargo nets, storming the beach, and setting up camp in the boondocks of the Onslow coast.9 Scully commanded the 3rd platoon for four months, from late September 1941 through the end of January 1942. He went on to lead the 2nd and then the 1st platoons before a relentless, bone-racking cough landed him in New River’s field hospital in mid-February. After a week, he returned to his post. Likely Scully was still unwell; but as all Marines knew, if one was sidelined too long by illness or injury, his unit would move on without him and he would be reassigned, separated from his friends, the men with whom he had trained for the preceding months. A few days after Scully returned as commanding officer of 1st platoon, his cough returned with a vengeance and the battalion doctor forced him back to the hospital. This was early March; the following month, Scully’s platoon along with the rest of the 1st Marine Division were embarking via Pullman train for the West Coast, where they would ship out for battle in the Pacific. The doctor determined that Scully was too sick to travel. Scully pleaded his case; he wanted—he needed—to go with his men. He would be fine. He could recover on the train ride out . . . But the doctor held firm. “You tried to be patriotic,” the doctor told Scully. “This is no century to be patriotic.” As if to prove his point, the doctor would be killed a few months later, in the battle of Guadalcanal. Throughout the ages, war narratives reverberate with the deep, indescribable connections between an officer and his men, and in Scully’s case, it was no different. “I was a good second lieutenant,” he later told Tappy. “I loved the men, there was a real bond. It’s hard to explain . . . You’re responsible for the lives of men, and they like you, and you’re young.

THEN AND SINCE (1940–1946)

25

It’s a great thing.” Perhaps for the first time in his life, Scully felt himself to be part of something larger, integrally connected. He belonged. No longer a sole child among adults, a townie among Yalies, a working-class Irish Catholic among prep school WASPs—Scully was a commissioned Marine officer, a leader, a wise older brother of sorts, and he wholeheartedly believed in his purpose: to protect his men and his country with his life. Yet his body betrayed him, leaving him weak throughout the spring, forcing him to alternate between temporary posts at New River and a hospital bed. Scully eventually landed at the US Naval Hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia, where he convalesced from mid-June through early November. There, in the clean hospital ward, recovering from what was determined to be a tenacious case of chronic bronchitis, Scully would hear reports of how the 5th Marines—his friends, colleagues, charges—had stormed the beaches of Guadalcanal on August 7; how they had hacked through the jungle to fight savage, bloody battles; how they had been wounded, maimed, massacred; and how those who survived finally, four months later, had taken the island. Recounting his story to Tappy some seventy years later, Scully omitted these details, summing it all up with a simple statement. “When you lose your company, you might as well kill yourself. You become a supernumerary. What to do?” At the time, whether consciously or not, Scully’s answer was to find a new place to belong. He began by starting a family. In October 1942, during his

FIGURE 2.2 Scully and Susannah (Nancy) Keith, wedding photograph, October 1942. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

26

VINCENT SCULLY

final weeks in the hospital, Scully married Susannah (Nancy) Keith. Like Scully, Nancy was a New Havener by birth. The two met through Nancy’s younger brother, Rowley, whom Scully tutored for a time. Nancy attended Wellesley College, where she studied art history—a connection that would prove influential for Scully. She achieved honors in school but appears to have left Wellesley before her pending 1943 graduation, likely to marry.10 A wedding photo shows the young bride and groom, she with a flowing white veil and shoulder-length hair framing her makeup-free visage; he in dress blues with polished brass buttons, his smooth jaw baring no sign that shaving has yet become a daily necessity. He was 22 years old; she was just shy of 21. Together they stare into the camera with smiles that seem somehow both joyful and reticent, excited yet uncertain about what lies ahead. With the war in full swing, long-term plans were always somewhat provisional. In the short term, however, the path was more clear. When the hospital discharged Scully on November 9, the newlyweds headed to Camp Hood, Texas. Like Marine Barracks New River, Camp Hood was a newly established facility; whereas New River focused on amphibious assault training, the US Army’s mandate for Camp Hood involved devising methods to “seek, strike, and destroy tanks”—specifically the German Panzer division’s tanks, which appeared unstoppable, having plowed through Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France in the previous two years.11 In early 1942, an initial 110,000-acre area located 70 miles north of Austin, Texas, was selected as the site for the new tank-destroyer training camp. Construction swiftly began on the facilities to house and train 25,000 troops, a number that would soon swell to nearly 40,000, who began flooding into the camp by mid-August. Two months later, Scully and Nancy arrived at Camp Hood. By this point Scully had been promoted to the rank of Marine Corps captain, and he was instructed to attend the Officers Tactical Basics Class at the Tank Destroyer School, which ran from November 14 through February 6, 1943. By mid-February, Scully returned to Marine Barracks New River, which had been renamed Camp Lejeune. With the 5th Marines—his original regiment—already dispatched to the Pacific, he was placed with the 23rd Marines, 4th Marine Division, where he was assigned as an anti-aircraft and anti-tank officer in the Regimental Weapons company. For whatever reason, Scully wasn’t satisfied with this assignment; within days he requested consideration for parachute training. A physical submitted with his request reveals that, in the past two years, Scully had physically transformed, with a physique now more Marine than civilian. Whereas in May 1941 he had been listed as “slender,” he now possessed a “medium” build and an additional five pounds of muscle, with his waist measuring one inch slimmer and his chest two inches broader.12 Despite the months in and out of the hospital, he was deemed healthy and fit for duty as a paratrooper, known as a paramarine. Scully’s request was denied, however, with the explanation

THEN AND SINCE (1940–1946)

27

that he had “recently completed a course in the Tank Destroyer School and was assigned to this [weapons company] regiment with a view to future requirements.”13 By May 1943, Scully volunteered for and was assigned to a different, newly formed outfit—the Beach Jumper Unit. Earlier in the war, Hollywoodactor-turned-Navy-Lieutenant Douglas Fairbanks Jr. spent time overseas with British Commando forces, a select and highly trained unit that used sound and other diversionary tactics to harass enemies across the English Channel in Nazi-occupied France. Fairbanks returned to the United States and helped the Navy establish its own deceptive operations force, which would come to be known as the Beach Jumpers. In early March 1943, the Navy set about recruiting 180 officers and 300 enlisted men to make up this top-secret squad. At Camp Lejeune, likely sometime after Scully submitted his paramarine request, he spied a memo that piqued his interest. “The Navy is requesting volunteers for prolonged, hazardous, distant duty for a secret project.”14 Applicants needed to be immune to seasickness and possess small-boat handling skills, some understanding of radio electronics, and rudimentary knowledge of celestial navigation. Scully signed up, was selected, and by May 15 joined the nascent Beach Jumper Unit at the Navy’s Camp Bradford in Norfolk, Virginia. Of course, Scully and the other new recruits were not entirely sure what they had volunteered to do. When they arrived at the Amphibious Force Training Base at Camp Bradford, they soon discovered that they were to be trained in a range of skills, from seamanship and gunnery to pyrotechnics and meteorology, all for the purpose of providing tactical cover and diversion. Using 63-foot Air-Sea Rescue Boats (ARBs), each outfitted with a captain (officer), 6-man crew (enlisted men), special radar jamming and sound equipment, various artillery, smoke-making devices, and reflectors, the Beach Jumpers could create the impression that a 70,000-man force was coming ashore. The idea was that, confronted with this spectacle, the enemy forces would focus on repelling this false incursion while the real one, some distance away, went unopposed. This was the art of deceptive warfare, and the Beach Jumper Unit was to put it to good use. The Beach Jumpers’ primary weapon was sound, and certain members of the unit trained under expert engineers in sound labs with special radio and radar countermeasure instruction. A research team had recently created a device codenamed a heater, which was a recording/playback machine, adapted from a wire recorder machine developed by Bell Telephone Labs engineers, that used thin wire as its recording medium. The Beach Jumpers used the heater to record sounds that would accompany a large-scale invasion, such as clanking chains, boat engine noises, creaking tank treads, commander-issued orders, and the overall controlled mayhem of troops preparing for battle. Then, under cover of dark and smoke, as the Beach Jumpers approached the shore on their ARBs, they played the soundtrack,

28

VINCENT SCULLY

which would travel across the ocean’s surface and convince the enemy that a large fleet was heading their way. Beach Jumpers also jammed radio frequencies, much as an approaching fleet would, adding to the subterfuge. Finally, to round out the ruse they launched simulated artillery and explosions, which had been choreographed for maximum impact by a Hollywood special effects expert. The whole operation was a thoroughly conceived and strenuously planned demonstration to furnish the US invading forces with a tactical advantage. A memo dated May 27 assigned Captain Scully to the Beach Jumpers at Camp Bradford for a period of one to two months. At the end of this temporary duty, Scully was to visit the Marine Corps Headquarters and then return to his previous post at New River.15 Due to the confidentiality of the Navy’s Beach Jumper operation, and likely the intricacies of inter-branch correspondence, Scully’s military records then fall silent for some months. Luckily, his late-in-life revelations mapped alongside the movements of the initial Beach Jumper Unit (Unit 1) reveal a good piece of the missing story.16 Ensconced in Beach Jumper Unit 1, perhaps as a training commander as well as a participant observer, Scully—along with the rest of the unit and ten ARBs—left Norfolk on June 2 aboard the USS Thomas Jefferson, a converted American cruise ship, destined for North Africa. They docked in Oran (where Scully recalled seeing a pink castle up on a hill, likely the sixteenthcentury Spanish Fort of Santa Cruz), and then embarked on a hot, dusty train voyage along the coast. Over 700 miles later they reached the Tunisian city of Bizerte at the northernmost point in Africa. Marking the landscape were a mess of ruins and beat-up ships, remnants of a great battle that had taken place there two months earlier. Home to a key Allied naval facility, Bizerte was to be the Beach Jumpers’ base for the next four weeks. There, the men ran practice maneuvers with their fully equipped ARBs, awaiting instructions for their top-secret diversionary mission. They didn’t know it yet but, in mid-July, Beach Jumper Unit 1 would play a strategic role in Operation HUSKY, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Sicily. As the date of the Sicilian engagement approached, the Beach Jumpers relocated to Pantelleria, a small island halfway between Bizerte and Sicily that would serve as a launch point for Operation HUSKY. Despite the illusory character of the Beach Jumpers’ mission, the unit faced real and deadly serious risks. As if to underscore this fact, before leaving Bizerte, each man was issued a crate addressed to his next of kin in which to store his belongings. One participant recalled that the Navy feared the pending diversionary mission would face as high as a 50-percent casualty rate. As the unit set out by boat for Pantelleria, they looked back and saw their crates piled on the dock, a stark reminder of the uncertain and potentially grim future that lay ahead.17 On the evenings of July 11 and 12, Beach Jumper Unit 1 in their ARBs along with select Navy Patrol Torpedo (PT) boats simulated phantom landings off Cape San Marco, Cape Granitola, and Mazarra di Vallo, roughly 100 miles west of the planned Operation HUSKY landing site.

THEN AND SINCE (1940–1946)

29

These initial sorties were later deemed effective in that they confused German forces about the scale and locations of Operation HUSKY landings, thereby reducing Nazi opposition at the beaches where the real invasions took place. There were a few difficulties, however, including possibly unsanctioned (or at least misdirected) weaponry fire. One boat shot over another toward the shore, thereby endangering the latter boat’s occupants. This drew searchlights and enemy fire toward the ill-placed boat. For this and potentially other reasons, the Beach Jumpers’ commanding Naval officer felt that the early forays were not wholly successful. What happened next suggests that, while attached to the Beach Jumper Unit, Scully served some kind of observatory role intended to give an honest assessment of this Navy diversionary program to the Marine Corps’ top brass. Thus, from Pantelleria Scully was flown back to Carthage, a city on the Tunisian coast just south of Bizerte, with orders to make his way to the Allied Operational Headquarters in Algiers and then head west to the United States. He was to report to the US Marine Corps Headquarters in Washington, DC, to relay the mediocre results to his superiors at home.18 Without official transport after landing in Carthage, Scully got creative; he found an amenable French dispatch rider to give him a ride on the back of his motorcycle more than 500 miles to Algiers. Of the two roads linking Tunisia with Algiers at the time, the men likely traveled the northernmost one, which offered a meandering route along coastal lowlands that avoided mountainous or desert terrain. Nevertheless, the trip was by no means an easy one, especially on the rough, dusty road in the blazing sun through midday temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Depending on the make and model of motorcycle, the fastest the journey could have been is ten continuous hours of driving; more likely, it took twice that length of time. It was during this trip that Scully spied his first ancient ruins, the remains of Roman Carthage (c. 146 BCE to 439 CE), which archaeologists had begun excavating earlier in 1943. Remnants of the grand Antonine Baths—heavy, rounded arches, sunken beneath the ground; and standing columns, complete with Corinthian capitals—Scully saw all of these as they sped westward, dust billowing behind them. Once in Algiers, Scully traveled to Casablanca on a flying boat—essentially a plane with a hull that allowed it to sit directly in the water. His orders listed his rank as captain, which is higher in the Navy than in the Marines, and thus garnered Scully extra respect from the crew, who gave him his own stateroom for the trip. He then flew from Casablanca to the Naval Air Station at Port Lyautey in French Morocco, where he boarded yet another plane bound for Foyes, Ireland. Dressed in civilian clothes—a shirt and khaki-green raincoat purchased in Algiers—Scully visited a bar, where the patrons were delighted to meet him; they apparently believed him to be a German spy. Scully then took a long, uneventful transatlantic flight to Newfoundland, Canada, and eventually flew into New York Municipal Airport (later known as LaGuardia Airport) in New York City.

30

VINCENT SCULLY

Back in the United States at the end of July, Scully arrived at Marine Headquarters in Washington, DC, to report his own observations and the commanding Naval officer’s reservations regarding the Beach Jumpers’ early performance. A memo from July 29 states that Scully’s initial temporary duty with the Beach Jumpers was complete on July 28. Instead of returning to Camp Lejeune, however, Scully was ordered to report back to Camp Bradford, where he was to help train the next wave of Beach Jumpers, passing on valuable knowledge that he had acquired during his time in the Mediterranean with Beach Jumper Unit 1. This duty began on August 9 at the Amphibious Training Base to which Scully had initially reported the previous May. For purposes of secrecy and security, in December the Navy moved the Beach Jumpers School to the Advanced Amphibious Training Base (AATB) on Ocracoke, a barrier island 20 miles off the North Carolina coast, where a Coast Guard base and lighthouse already existed. Here the Beach Jumper training could go on at full blast and in relative privacy, with only the chattering seagulls to witness the smoke-screened practice demonstrations employing heaters, weaponry, and explosives. Scully, select Unit 1 veterans, and additional training staff helped prepare Beach Jumper Unit 2 for their planned deployment in the Pacific theater. During his time teaching at the Beach Jumper school, Scully again fell ill, first from mid-August through mid-September following his return from the Mediterranean with what was classified as “fatigue,” and then again for a few weeks in early January. In both instances, after time in the hospital, he recovered and returned to his temporary duty at the Beach Jumper school. In mid-March 1944, Scully was ordered to join the 5th Marine Division, this time as a member of the Weapons Company, 27th Marines, at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California. He boarded a train and headed west, arriving March 17, and was soon put in charge of the 1st Platoon, which specialized in operating 37mm anti-tank guns, putting his tank-destroyer training from Camp Hood to good use. In June he was elevated to the rank of major and the position of executive officer in his company, where he served admirably for the next few months, preparing his charges and himself for deployment in the Pacific. On August 12, Scully and his company set sail aboard the USS George F. Elliott from San Diego, California, to Hilo, Hawaii. When they arrived a week later, they established themselves at Camp Tarawa, where the 27th Marines—as part of the 5th Marines Division—were to train until they would depart in January 1945 via ship for Iwo Jima. As it turned out, however, Scully would not be with them. A fitness report covering six months of service, from April 1 to September 30, 1944—essentially the time from Scully’s arrival at Camp Pendleton through his initial six weeks at Camp Tarawa—shows Scully as a highly skilled officer. When asked to estimate Scully’s “General Value to the Service,” his commanding officer answered “very good to excellent,” noting that Scully’s performance of regular and additional duties as well as

THEN AND SINCE (1940–1946)

31

training troops was “excellent.” When assessing his qualifications, he rated further excellent marks for thorough and conscientious work, initiative, intelligence, loyalty, military bearing, and physical fitness. This last item, physical fitness, is explained as “physical stamina; endurance under hardship, adversity, or discouragement”; it is noteworthy because, sometime in the next month, this rating plummeted four notches from excellent to “unsatisfactory.”19 A few weeks after arriving in Hawaii in August 1944, Scully began experiencing headaches, difficulties eating, tremors, and increasingly severe night terrors. In mid-November he was admitted to the field hospital, where he was diagnosed with “psychoneurosis, anxiety neurosis.” After a few days showing no improvement, Scully was transferred to the US Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor. Writing two months later, the doctor noted that, on admission to the hospital, Scully “was tense, emotionally upset, depressed and agitated. Physical exam was essentially negative,” as were routine lab texts. “For some weeks he continued tense, emotionally unstable and periodically depressed and self-accusatory requiring nightly sedation. Lost 14 pounds in weight. Subsequently he showed moderate improvement, some gain in appetite and weight, but continued remorseful and self-depreciatory over his failure to keep on with his outfit.” The doctor recommended that, while his emotional bearing was improving, it would be unwise to return him to duty in a combat area. As Scully’s unit shipped out for Iwo Jima in early 1945, Scully boarded a different ship, bound for the American mainland. While the 5th Marine Division battled the Japanese and sustained devastatingly high casualties, Scully sat separated from his men, first in the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, California, and then in St. Albans, on New York’s Long Island, where he would remain for the next five months. In early August he would head home to New Haven to Nancy and his young son Daniel, who lived at 310 Prospect Avenue in the house in which Nancy was raised, to await the hearing that would grant him an honorable release from the military. On February 26, 1945—after five years as a Marine, first gaining and then losing and then searching for a place to belong—Scully retired with the rank of major from the United States Marine Corps. The term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, entered the US lexicon in 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association officially recognized the condition as a biological disorder. Yet, countless military members—likely including Scully—suffered from this ailment long before. Whether called shell shock (First World War), psychoneurosis or battle fatigue (Second World War), or combat stress reaction (Korean War), the symptoms were strikingly similar to those Scully experienced: anxiety, tremors, nightmares, depression. Sadly, while it was acknowledged that the traumas of wartime and battle could bring on the condition, the blame for this kind of suffering frequently fell on the sufferer himself. In other words, before PTSD became more widely understood, the illness was often thought to reveal a character

32

VINCENT SCULLY

flaw; the man who succumbed to psychoneurosis or battle fatigue possessed an inherent weakness. After all, so the reasoning went, others had experienced even worse situations, and they held it together. In August 1943, General Patton famously broadcast this sentiment when, while visiting sick men in a field hospital, he berated a soldier diagnosed with psychoneurosis and slapped him across the face. Even if they escaped such a public dressingdown by their superiors, the men who developed symptoms were left with the shameful and devastating idea that they had failed—their units, their commanders, their country. With recurring reproachful and self-accusatory thoughts, this dangerous myth must have haunted Scully. The nightmares would plague him for the remainder of his long life. Shortly before his death, recounting his time as a Marine, Scully didn’t mince words. He no longer dodged the topic of his war years, trying to evade the pain with which they were entangled. He held steady and spoke to his soon-to-be widow, the woman who had been by his side for nearly four decades but had never known the young man of whom Scully spoke. “I liked myself the way I was then,” he confessed. “I’ve never liked myself much since.”20 With these words, Scully acknowledged that the war had divided his life in two: before and after, then and since. At age 25, he had barely lived; yet, like many others who came back from war, he was forever changed. Returning to New Haven, Scully needed a new way to be at home in the world. Architecture, it turned out, would give him this chance.

CHAPTER THREE

Marinated in Modernism (1946–1949) While awaiting word on his retirement from the US Marine Corps, Scully returned to New Haven to begin a life with his new family—his wife Nancy and his almost-3-year-old son, Daniel, who had been born in October 1943. Scully reenrolled in graduate school, but instead of studying literature, he charted a different course. “When the war was over,” he would later say, “I wanted to do something specific, to pour myself into something real, not anything so allusive as literature. Art seemed solid.”1 Returning to New Haven, he saw that art history had been on his mind throughout his years as a Marine. “I thought about art history in one way or another all through World War II, from 1940 to 1945, and when I was released from the service and signed up for graduate school in English, I changed my mind at once and asked Chauncy Brewster Tinker to speak to George Heard Hamilton for me, and the Old Boy Network did the rest.”2 Thus, in January 1946, Scully returned to Yale as a doctoral student in the newly formed Department of the History of Art. “I have rarely been so happy as I was in graduate school,” Scully would later write. “The terrible sterile madness of the war years—in which it seemed to me that I had never had a single string of consecutive thoughts— was over, and I soaked everything up like a dry brick.”3 Under Hamilton’s tutelage, Scully first focused on modern French painting, immersing himself in the light- and texture-filled works of impressionism onward. This resonated with Scully’s Francophile nature, which only intensified as he dove into his art historical studies and discovered the ideas of the French scholar Henri Focillon, an art historian who lectured at Yale from 1933 until his death in 1943. Focillon had come to New Haven to teach and to help develop the university’s nascent program in art history. While Scully missed studying with Focillon himself, the master had presided over a generation of art history students—including Hamilton—who became Scully’s professors. Focillon’s philosophy of art, passed on by his former 33

34

VINCENT SCULLY

charges and perhaps even more so by his small but powerful text Vie des Formes (1934), would prove incredibly influential for Scully in the coming decades. By the time Scully discovered Vie des Formes in 1946, the slim volume had already been translated into English by George Kubler (yet another Yale professor and Focillon student) as The Life of Forms in Art (1942). Nevertheless, Scully devoured the French original and followed up with transcripts of Focillon’s other lectures, which in conjunction offered a framework for thinking about art within the whole of human civilization. In particular, Scully took from Focillon the idea that “meanings poured in and out of the same form as it was perceived by different persons across time.” In other words, an object’s meaning is not fixed, but rather fluctuates. Furthermore, meaning derives not solely from an object’s form but also from its context. A form’s meaning changes as society changes; meaning is cumulative, an amalgamation of meanings forged over time. This conception felt markedly different to Scully, who found the French scholar’s approach to be “enormously more useful” for him than that of the German art historian Erwin Panofsky, by then ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who’s “classical aesthetic . . . burrowed into every work of art to find its primal source, its ur meaning buried deep in time.” In contrast, Scully felt that “Focillon rolled forward always. Past time crowded up to push us into fresh experience.”4 Focillon’s philosophy of art resonated with Scully in part because it offered a more balanced understanding of an object than did, say, New Criticism’s perspective on literature. Recall that during his brief time in Yale’s English graduate program before the war, Scully had rejected New Criticism’s premise that a text’s meaning stemmed primarily from its form. Focillon, too, placed importance on form, yet his idea of form accounted for form’s constantly changing relationship to the societies and realities within which it existed. As art historian Molly Nesbit noted, “Focillon’s was a transdisciplinary vision of a field.” Focillon came to see art history as “the study of relations that put art into contact with material that was geographic, ethnic, sociological, economic, philosophical . . . He told his students to drop the idea of history as ‘background’ and to see instead ‘historic foundations’,” ever evolving.5 “Focillon saw form to be akin to matter; it was an idea that did not separate form from life but rather bound it to life’s very dynamic metamorphosis . . . Form was bound inextricably to the world, and . . . there was a world too of form, in form.”6 For Focillon, the relationship between form and meaning rested on the notion that art could not be separated from life, nor from the world. In adopting an attitude that art was bound with life, Focillon was not alone. After the First World War, parallel to the newly founded League of Nations arose an organization called the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), an organization that sought to encourage collaboration among international artists and intellectuals. In the late 1920s

MARINATED IN MODERNISM (1946–1949)

35

Focillon and writer Paul Valéry became co-chairs of the ICIC (renamed the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters), and they set about organizing gatherings, interviews, and publications on topics concerning the arts, humanity, and the modern condition.7 Focillon and Valéry made it clear that the purpose driving the committee moved beyond that of “study or pure speculation. He who says cooperation says action,” they declared.8 Thus, when Focillon arrived at Yale in 1933, he had already devoted much thought to the ways in which the arts and the world actively interrelate. For the next ten years, he would lecture at Yale on a variety of topics, from Spanish churches to the work of French author Honoré de Balzac, from medieval art to French impressionism, often tying the subject at hand to the realities of present-day life. A persistent theme involved the inseparability of art and life. This view, that art could not be divorced from life, would condition Scully’s approach to architecture. Another reason that Scully was receptive to Focillon’s philosophy involved sentiments that the older historian expressed concerning the horror of war. Focillon had been appalled by the brutality of the First World War, and he wrote very movingly about fallen French patriots as well as Nazi Germany’s invasion of France. Having recently returned from his own traumatic war experiences, Scully read these pieces; Focillon’s words strongly resonated with the young man who had lost so many of his Marine brothers.9 Another student-turned-colleague of Focillon, Carroll L. V. Meeks, would likewise play a formative role in Scully’s thought. Meeks had received his three-year bachelor of philosophy in 1928, bestowed by Yale’s Sheffield School, a precursor to the university’s School of Engineering. He followed this degree with two more, a bachelor of fine arts (1931) and a master of arts (1934), all the while teaching as Yale faculty, first in the architecture department and then also in the history of art department, established in 1940.10 By the time Scully arrived in the department in 1946, Meeks was preparing to earn his doctorate, which he received from Harvard University in 1948 after submitting a dissertation entitled “The Architectural Development of the American Railroad Station.”11 The fact that Meeks focused his attention on what had been seen as a rather mundane building type, and that Yale encouraged such endeavors, suggests an expanding awareness beyond the traditional fine arts of painting and sculpture and the growing acceptance of more everyday architecture as a legitimate topic of inquiry. This trend toward openness would benefit Scully as he settled into his own architectural explorations. While studying French modernist painting, Scully simultaneously took architectural history courses with Meeks, chair of the history of art department, during his initial year of graduate school, the spring and fall terms of 1946. Scully so impressively excelled in these classes that Meeks tapped the budding scholar to take over teaching the architectural history course for architecture students during the professor’s 1947/48 academic-year sabbatical. The course, Architecture 5: Fundamentals of Architecture, met

36

VINCENT SCULLY

three times a week for an hour to provide students with an illustrated introduction to “the principles of architectural composition and criticism, with an analytical study of the great periods of architecture in relation to cultural change.”12 In preparation for teaching this course, Meeks—who had himself trained as an architect before embarking on his professorial career— recommended that Scully enroll in an accelerated design studio at the architectural school for the summer of 1947, ostensibly to provide the fledgling instructor with a greater understanding of the design process. Flattered to have been entrusted with Meeks’s architectural history course and eager to try his hand at design, Scully happily obliged.13 He had always been a creative individual, a fact suggested by his old elementary-school notebooks, which contain sophisticated hand-drawn depictions of a Revolutionary War battle, and his wartime papers with lines of poems-in-progress peppering the margins. Thus Scully turned his attention to architectural design, which would be yet another formative experience for the young historian. The summer of 1947 proved a turning point—Scully enjoyed his weeks in the design studio, an experience that allowed him to shift his focus that fall from painting to architecture. What’s more, he wrote, “I made many friends among the architects, finding, as I have since, that their view of things tended to be more sympathetic to me than that of most art historians.”14 What about architects’ “view of things” resonated with Scully, more so than the perspectives of his fellow art historians? His words suggest that, even at this early stage in his career, Scully felt an inherent tension between the work of the historian and the architect: the historian, objective and detached, examined the past, while the architect—embedded in the present— designed for the future. Scully’s approach, developed during his years as a graduate student and refined thereafter, conflated the two; he used his explorations of the past to inform his activity in the present. For Scully, historical objects of art—and this included architecture—weren’t frozen; they could be an active force in contemporary life. Nearly sixty years later, Scully would expand on the power inherent in art and voice his discomfort with art historical approaches grounded purely in history, theory, or self-declared authorial intent. We have limited perceptive possibilities and intellectual processes, and we are surrounded by an insanely complicated world of reality. So we make a model of that world for ourselves. It’s like a shell of a lobster, and we live within that. It keeps us sane. And we can only ask questions that are suggested by that shell, and that limits us. Most people stay like that for life. But I think the aesthetic process may liberate you from that. It may liberate you if all of a sudden you are able to see really objectively, to see an object, perceive the reality of an object outside of yourself. Oscar Wilde once said that the aesthetic reaction really has nothing to do with the intellect or the emotions. I think he meant the one really objective thing where we affirm our sanity by being able to perceive

MARINATED IN MODERNISM (1946–1949)

37

something that really exists separate from us, separate from what we think, separate from what we believe in, separate from our experiences, as much as that is possible. And I believe that therein lies the real meaning of the word art, that it does things for us that can’t be done in any other way. That’s why I’m not happy about art history, which is purely related to the history, and the philosophy, and the “someone says this in a text, and that means the painter does that . . .” None of that gets to the heart of what this [art] is all about. We are missing the whole thing if that’s the way we think. And like lobsters, we can only grow when we break that shell. That’s the only way we can grow. And I think the only way to do that is to perceive a thing that is outside of that [shell], separate and real. That’s what moves us about works of art; all of the sudden you collapse, you really have an exciting experience.15 Much as Focillon had seen art as an active part of the world, itself changing while simultaneously opening the possibility for change, Scully would see the experience of art as a potential means of expanding one’s awareness. This idea, which evolved throughout the next two decades to be more or less solidified by the mid-1960s, appears to have been seeded in Scully’s mind in his early graduate years. For him, the study of art would prove to be far from an objective experience; rather, his explorations of art and architecture, experienced as an historian among architects, would transform his mind and forge his own cohesive views. Such a maturation would come. As a young graduate student, however, the state of being in between—of having a foot in two worlds but feeling at home in neither—no doubt felt familiar for Scully: a townie and a Yalie; a scholarship student among prep-school scions; a Marine officer unfit for battle. Now, as an art historian, Scully again straddled the line as he became a strong proponent of modern architecture, then often presented and interpreted as a rejection of the past. Indeed, as Scully threw himself in studio culture that summer of 1947, he found himself immersed in the intentionally a-historic world of modern architecture. *

*

*

Modern architecture made its way into the American consciousness by way of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which opened in New York City in 1929 under founding directorship of Alfred H. Barr.16 MoMA’s mission was to showcase, and thereby build an American audience for, modern art. The museum’s first show featured the post-impressionist works of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and others, and drew more than 47,000 visitors who marveled at the unparalleled collection of modern European art. MoMA instantly became the cultural forerunner for all things avant-garde on this side of the Atlantic; this would soon include architecture. Like the contemporary fields of painting and sculpture, architecture had developed its own modern design approach, its aesthetic dominated by

38

VINCENT SCULLY

exposed concrete, steel, plate glass, white walls, flat roofs, and minimal decoration. Foremost among those practicing this new architecture was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss national who, while living in Paris, had adopted the name of Le Corbusier. In 1923 Le Corbusier published Vers une architecture (translated into English in 1927 as Towards a New Architecture), a revolutionary book in which he argued that architecture, in keeping with modern technological advances, should align with its intended use. In other words, a house should be designed for maximum efficiency, both in terms of the occupants’ needs and the manner in which it is constructed, employing new materials and fabrication techniques. Throughout the 1920s Le Corbusier refined these ideas into his Five Points of Architecture, which, he declared, “in no way relate to aesthetic fantasies or a striving for fashionable effects, but concern architectural facts that imply an entirely new kind of building.”17 A reinforced-concrete structural support system was the first and most essential of the Five Points, the primary condition that allowed the remaining four points—free floor plan, free facade, horizontal windows, and roof garden—to exist. Thanks to its reinforced-concrete frame, a house could have any interior configuration, with walls placed according to the occupants’ desired arrangement instead of the building’s structural demands. In addition to liberating the plan from load-bearing walls, the reinforcedconcrete frame freed the facade, allowing the use of various materials—such as cast-off bricks or rubble from war-destroyed buildings—to enclose the

FIGURE 3.1 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1931, by Le Corbusier. Bildarchiv Monheim GmbH / Alamy.

MARINATED IN MODERNISM (1946–1949)

39

interior. Carried further, as the idea would be by Le Corbusier over the next decade, the structural frame opened new possibilities for windows, which could now span larger horizontal distances than were possible when window sizes were limited by what could safely be cut out from load-bearing walls. Finally, in place of a pitched or angled roof, Le Corbusier embraced the flat roof that naturally resulted from a prone concrete slab, using this surface as outdoor space for the house’s inhabitants. In the late 1920s, a commission to design the Villa Savoye, a wealthy family’s retreat on the bucolic outskirts of Paris, gave Le Corbusier the chance to fully illustrate his Five Points. The challenges posed to traditional conceptions of architecture extended beyond France. For example, in Germany in 1919, the architect Walter Gropius and likeminded artists had established the Staatliches Bauhaus. The underlying premise of the Bauhaus involved merging art and craftsmanship in all realms—from painting to pottery, furniture to fabrics—in order to create total works of art imbued with the spirit of the modern age. In 1926, the school moved into a Gropius-designed building in Dessau that showcased this unity of art and machine culture. The new Bauhaus featured three multistory blocks, each designated as studio space for different artistic disciplines, organized in a pinwheel fashion. These wings, connected by an elevated corridor that allowed cars to pass beneath, featured cantilevered concrete floor slabs, large expanses of glass, flat roofs, and an overall aesthetic that echoed contemporary factory design.

FIGURE 3.2 Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany, 1926, by Walter Gropius. Collection Artedia / Bridgeman Images.

40

VINCENT SCULLY

While the Bauhaus in Dessau differed in scale, use, and social motivation from Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the two buildings shared significant aspects such as the use of materials (concrete, steel, and glass), structural framing in place of load-bearing-wall construction, and industrial elements like tubular metal railings and factory-esque window frames. Barr found this novel architectural aesthetic quite extraordinary. He decided that this new architecture should be the topic of an exhibition at MoMA, and he called on his friends Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson to make it happen. Known to colleagues as Russell, Hitchcock was a Harvard-trained architectural historian and newly minted professor, already recognized for writing about modern design. Johnson was a wealthy dilettante and erstwhile Harvard student who would become one of the most famous American architects of the twentieth century. Together they curated Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, which opened on February 10, 1932. The groundbreaking show featured photographs, plans, and models by architects from Europe, America, and Asia, all practicing in the new modern style. Hitchcock and Johnson identified three main characteristics of this new architecture.18 First, instead of mass, the new architecture focused on volume. So, unlike the grand neoclassical structures furthered by the architectural instruction of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, this new architecture emphasized the enclosure of interior space, often presenting what looked to be a thin, enveloping skin instead of a solid, load-bearing facade. Second, in place of symmetry, the new architecture strove for balance, or an overall equilibrium achieved without the symmetrical arrangement of parts. And finally, the new architecture did away with overt ornament; gone were the leaf-like column capitals, lacey stone tracery, and other seemingly decorative additions, inside and out. What remained were monochromatic (often white) walls, structural steel, and large expanses of glass. In Hitchcock and Johnson’s estimation, this new architecture—while novel to many in the United States— was appearing the world over, disregarding country borders and continental boundaries. This architecture was the future, and it needed a name. They christened it the International Style.19 Throughout its six-week run at MoMA and its subsequent six years touring the country, gaining in influence and reshaping public opinion, Hitchcock and Johnson’s exhibition triggered a seismic shift in the American architectural landscape. Revivalism—overt inspiration drawn from Gothic, neoclassical, or other older architectural styles—went out the (now large, plate-glass) window. The show also forged a path for émigré architects fleeing the increasingly restrictive grasp of the rising Nazi party. Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, two of the featured architects in the MoMA International Style show, embarked westward; the architecture they had helped to pioneer in Europe would be used to great effect in postwar reconstruction the following decade, but these men would not be part of that effort. Rather, they had landed in the United States at educational institutions:

MARINATED IN MODERNISM (1946–1949)

41

in 1937, Gropius joined Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and in 1938, Mies took the helm of the Armour Institute of Technology, recently relocated to Chicago and soon to be renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The appointment of two foreign architects—both former directors of the Bauhaus—to lead prestigious American architectural programs simultaneously reflected and furthered the country’s growing embrace of modern architecture. By the time Scully enrolled in Yale’s intensive architectural design studio in the summer of 1947, modern architecture—namely the International Style—had become a dominant influence on architectural education within US institutions. While Yale initially shied away from the stridently dogmatic modernism that emerged at the GSD and IIT, the school had nonetheless shifted to a more contemporary approach, slowly overriding the nineteenth-century École des Beaux-Arts educational model to embrace a modernism that Yale’s leadership deemed “essentially American in composition and ideals.”20 And in due course, a doctrinaire modernism soon found its way into Yale’s curriculum, albeit as one approach among many. Scully would later write that, during his 1947 studio experience, he met an individual—unnamed, yet no doubt Eugene Nalle—whom he initially admired but soon came to view as “a highly destructive teacher who embodied the iconoclasm of modernism to its fullest or its meagerest extent.”21 Nalle was completing his architecture degree at the time Scully took the studio, and when Nalle graduated the following year, he began co-teaching the first-year Basic Design course for architecture students, which was extended to a two-year sequence in the early 1950s. In Scully’s assessment, Nalle “was highly effective in engaging the interest of the students, but he refused to feed it with anything but the most primitive materials.” Nalle was a primitivist. Fiji huts were in; Michelangelo . . . was definitely out, as was the whole Renaissance and almost everything else Western. He discouraged the students from using the library and would, I think, have burned the books if he could. He exemplified all the worst features of the auto-didact and soon came to symbolize for me everything that was limited in the architectural modernism of that awful time directly after the war.22 Scully and a preponderance of American architectural students came of age during this postwar era, which rejected, at times with an almost religious fervor, the revivalist architecture of the past two hundred years as well as overt references to earlier historical precedents. Alongside many of his architect colleagues, Scully bought into this creed, at least to some degree, and a least for a time. It must have been a confusing moment for Scully: simultaneously training as an art historian and undergoing modernist indoctrination. Nearly a half-century later, Scully would recall his own rigidity during that era—for example, his initial dismissal, in keeping with the modernist

42

VINCENT SCULLY

tone of the time, of James Gamble Rogers’s 1930s neo-Gothic additions to campus.23 Elsewhere he would note that, in those days, “we were intolerant in ways that I can’t apologize for enough.”24 For Scully, his eventual rejection of this modernist credo appeared as if an epiphany. “Everything that the International Style hated, everything that the ‘zeitgeist’ had so Germanically consigned to death, came alive again,” he recalled. “For me, marinated in modernism, it was the revelation of a new life in everything. There was no reason whatever why the best of everything had to be consigned to the past. Everything was available to be used again; now, as always in architecture, there were models to go by, types to employ.”25 It would take Scully over a decade to come to this conclusion, though. In the meantime, he was left to navigate a precarious tightrope between history and architecture, the past and the present.

CHAPTER FOUR

Laying the Foundations (1947–1950) With only eighteen months of graduate school under his belt, Scully began teaching in September 1947. In addition to Carroll Meeks’s course for architects, at the request of professors Sumner Crosby and George Kubler (both former students of Focillon), Scully agreed to lead a portion of a new team-taught art history survey course that same year, History of Art 12: Introduction to the History of Art.1 Meanwhile, Scully was on the lookout for a dissertation topic. Despite his love for all things French, he pragmatically opted to find an American topic because he lacked the funds to undertake research overseas. Hamilton urged him to write on the nineteenth-century Hudson River school painter Frederic Church, who—like Scully—was born and bred in Connecticut. Notwithstanding an appreciation for Church’s luminescent depictions of the natural landscape, this topic didn’t feel quite right, and Scully set out to find something about which he was more passionate. Perhaps it was the proximity to the subject of architecture—the summer design studio, the courses he had taken and currently taught—that primed Scully to explore an architectural dissertation subject. He discovered the perfect topic while leafing through Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s Rhode Island Architecture. Hitchcock’s book, which had accompanied a 1939 exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design, offered a brief overview of the state’s architecture of the past two hundred years. Yet, it was a single image that caught Scully’s eye: the W. H. Low House in Bristol, Rhode Island, designed by the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1887. How had the broad, expansive gable—long and robust, seeming to erupt from the ground below—come to be? “I thought that I had never seen so powerful a form in America or anywhere else,” Scully recalled. “I resolved to find out where it came from and what it led to.”2 Hamilton, Scully’s graduate advisor and an expert in nineteenth-century painting, felt that Scully would benefit from consultation with an authority on late-nineteenth-century American architecture. So Hamilton approached 43

44

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 4.1 W. H. Low House, Bristol, Rhode Island, 1887, by McKim, Mead & White. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS RI, 1-BRIST, 18–3. Photo by Cervin Robinson.

Hitchcock, who was on the faculty at Wesleyan University, less than 30 miles from Yale, and the distinguished historian readily agreed to serve as Scully’s unofficial dissertation advisor. Since the Modern Architecture exhibition and the naming of the International Style fifteen years before, Hitchcock had gone on to investigate the evolution of American architecture, a subject that few had approached. He ultimately established the legacy of the American architect Henry Hobson Richardson, whom Hitchcock positioned as a crucial intermediary between staid nineteenth-century revivalism and inventive twentieth-century modernism. In The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times (1936), written in conjunction with an exhibition on Richardson at MoMA, Hitchcock explored the architect’s work and impact, underscoring the ingenuity that he brought to his buildings, from the multicolored, rusticated stonework of Trinity Church in Boston (1872) to the void/solid interplay and lack of decoration evident in the Marshall Field’s Warehouse in Chicago (1887), a structure that had greatly influenced architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Hitchcock extended this line of thought in his 1942 book, In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887–1941, where he established Wright, building on a foundation laid in part by Richardson, as

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS (1947–1950)

45

an originator of European modernism—namely the architecture that Hitchcock and Johnson introduced to the United States as International Style. Hitchcock had touched on this theme in his 1929 Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, and he and Johnson had included Wright’s work in the MoMA show.3 In his treatment on Wright in the Modern Architecture exhibition catalog, Hitchcock had made it clear that while they considered Wright to be a forerunner for the International Style, he was no longer in the vanguard. He wrote, “The day of the lone pioneer is past . . . Throughout the world there are others beside Wright to lead the way toward the future.”4 In short, they viewed Wright’s career as largely bygone. Born in 1867, the architect was in his mid-sixties by the time of the International Style exhibition and many assumed that his best work—such as the Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York (1904); the Robie House in Oak Park, Illinois (1909); and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Japan (1922)—was behind him. Wright’s career, however, was far from over. In 1937 he completed Fallingwater, the Kauffman family’s woodland retreat that, thanks to its siting atop a waterfall—and its being featured on a Time magazine cover in January 1938—captured the American imagination. The same month, MoMA hosted A New House on Bear Run, Pennsylvania, by Frank Lloyd Wright, a one-building show accompanied by a picture book. And in 1940, as if to further broadcast Wright’s triumphant return to the architectural playing field, MoMA staged a major exhibition of his work. The marketing material described Wright as “America’s greatest architect for half a century”; “the world’s greatest living architect”; “the Master”; “a living and great prophet.” “Now at the age of seventy-one,” the press release crowed, “Wright is still experimenting far into the vanguard and every year produces architecture with the creative freshness and originality of perennial youth.”5 It was this reinvigorated Wright who invited Hitchcock to write In the Nature of Materials, which appeared on the heels of the MoMA show.6 By the time Scully was introduced to Hitchcock five years later, the older scholar was regarded as the foremost American architectural historian, presiding over intellectual property that stretched from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Hitchcock became a mentor for Scully, offering his young protégé unfettered access to his own private library, which contained extensive photographs, drawings, and publications on American architecture not yet available in public collections. With Hitchcock’s guidance and wealth of materials, supplemented by months of digging through Yale’s library, “the position of the Low House in American architecture began to emerge.” Scully would later write that his “various publications during the fifties, among them [the articles] ‘The Stick Style,’ and ‘The Shingle Style,’ ‘American Villas,’ and The Shingle Style [based on his dissertation, completed 1949], all essentially derived from this beginning, which was due to Hitchcock’s example and assistance.”7 Yet, even before Scully dove headlong into his dissertation research, Hitchcock acted as a crucial point of connection for Scully, drawing the

46

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 4.2 Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1937, by Frank Lloyd Wright. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS PA, 26-OHPY.V, 1–3.

young historian into the contemporary architectural scene and introducing him to its prime players, including Philip Johnson. After staging MoMA’s Modern Architecture exhibition with Barr and Hitchcock in 1932 and copublishing International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922 with Hitchcock, Johnson had remained in New York as MoMA’s first director of the architecture department. In 1934 he left this post, and the world of architecture, and spent the remainder of the decade dallying in fascist politics. By the early 1940s Johnson had decided to return to architecture, and he enrolled at the Harvard GSD. Despite studying there under Gropius

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS (1947–1950)

47

and Marcel Breuer, two Bauhaus masters who had fled Nazi Germany, Johnson’s aesthetic allegiance was to Mies van der Rohe, whose work inspired Johnson’s first constructed full-scale design—a house for himself in Cambridge, at 9 Ash Street, completed in 1942. The house was accepted by the GSD faculty as Johnson’s thesis project, and he emerged with his bachelor of architecture degree in 1943, after which he served stateside in the army during the Second World War. Following the war’s conclusion, Johnson returned to New York and, in 1946, while building his architectural practice, resumed his role as director of MoMA’s architecture department. It was toward the end of 1947, on the grounds of one of his earliest projects—a home for himself in rural Connecticut he would call the Glass House—that Johnson was introduced to Scully. It was around this time, fall 1947, that Lewis Mumford, architecture critic for the New Yorker, used his “Sky Line” column to skewer the International Style, describing it as modern architecture’s “adolescent period, with its quixotic purities, its awkward self-consciousness, its assertive dogmatism.” As illustrative of a more mature modern architecture, Mumford offered “that native and humane form of modernism which one might call the Bay Region style,” which he saw as derived from Eastern and Western traditions

FIGURE 4.3 Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949, by Philip Johnson. Fall view, photographed in 2006. Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

48

VINCENT SCULLY

and open to “regional adaptations and modifications.” Mumford concluded that the Bay Region Style “is far more truly a universal style than the socalled international style of the nineteen-thirties.”8 MoMA, the institution through which Hitchcock, Johnson, and Barr packaged and propagated the International Style, promptly began to organize a symposium in response. On the evening of February 11, 1948, a group of distinguished designers, scholars, and critics gathered in MoMA’s auditorium to address the issue set forth by Mumford’s article and aptly captured by the symposium’s title: What Is Happening to Modern Architecture? The esteemed panel included Hitchcock, Johnson, Mumford, Barr (MoMA’s director of museum collections), Gropius (then chairman of the GSD), architects Breuer and Eero Saarinen, and second-year graduate student Vincent Scully.9 They and other panelists—all of greater notoriety than Scully—had been envisioned as either aligned with “the originators of the term ‘International Style’,” or the “upholders of [a] . . . reaction to it.”10 This latter position was linked to the English-named New Empiricism (referring to the work of Scandinavian architects) and the Bay Region Style (as discussed by Mumford). Once the symposium got underway, though, it became clear that the two sides were arguing the same position: that their respective version of modern architecture was, in fact, most responsive to individual user needs and geographic locations. Both originators and reactionaries alike rejected prescriptive design formulas and claimed humanist underpinnings for their modern architectures.11 As the evening’s first speaker, Barr emphasized that the International Style—broadly theorized by himself, Hitchcock, and Johnson for the 1932 MoMA show—had indeed developed and changed, but it still largely abided by the principles of volume, regularity, and lack of applied decoration set out over a decade and a half before. For Barr, Mumford’s Bay Region Style was, in fact, a domestication of the International Style in wood, which Barr called the “International Cottage Style.”12 Hitchcock then built on this idea, arguing that the “new Cottage Style” was actually prefigured by none other than Le Corbusier with his stone villas of the late 1930s, in which the Swiss architect began to explore the problem of how to express monumentality and domesticity in modern architecture. Indeed, Hitchcock asserted, the terms International Style and modern architecture had become so aligned since 1932 as to be interchangeable, one and the same. Thus the Cottage Style, Mumford’s so-called Bay Region Style, was not a reaction to the International Style; it was simply a continuation of it, focused on the problem of expression, just as Le Corbusier’s work had begun to do a decade before. Furthering this line of thought, Hitchcock next pointed to Wright, “the Michelangelo of the twentieth century” and the only architect, in Hitchcock’s estimation, capable of providing “wealth or variety or range of expression in modern architecture” at that point in time.13 Here Hitchcock continued his reassessment of Wright, begun half a decade earlier with In The Nature of Materials, recasting the master architect as an ongoing and integral part

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS (1947–1950)

49

of International Style developments, as opposed to the position to which he and Johnson had relegated Wright in the 1932 show—that of a precursor and inspirational figure, not an active participant. And it is this privileging of Wright, coupled with the assertion that the Cottage Style is merely a continuation or evolution of the International Style, that frames Scully’s inclusion in the symposium. Scully’s very involvement as a young graduate student in the symposium alongside luminaries such as Gropius, Breuer, and Saarinen, not to mention Barr, Hitchcock, and Johnson, is remarkable. It seems highly likely that Hitchcock urged Johnson and Barr to include the precocious scholar in this lively discussion regarding the contemporary state of modern architecture. Scully’s participation no doubt helped to get his name out quite early in his career. While it is uncertain whether Gropius and Breuer, for example, knew of Scully before the symposium, they certainly were aware of him after, as Scully reportedly criticized these two men—former Bauhaus leaders and now fixtures at Harvard—for dismissing Wright’s unique contributions to modern architecture. As architectural historian Neil Levine noted, the symposium marked “the first of many public statements of animus [by Scully] toward the neo-Bauhaus of Harvard.”14 Scully’s support of Wright at the conference was memorable as well, to the point that when Scully was reintroduced to Saarinen a few years later, the architect remarked, “Oh! You’re the Frank Lloyd Wright fanatic!”15 Scully would become increasingly wary of Wright’s nationalist political inclinations and abrasive personality, especially as the legendary architect aged. Nevertheless, Scully had long been an enthusiast of Wright’s work. Returning home from the Second World War in late 1945, before his own studies of architecture began, Scully had known enough of Wright to recognize the flamboyant, caped figure as the master swept through New York’s Penn Station, likely on business related to his recent Guggenheim Museum commission.16 By the time of the symposium, the graduate student had gained an even greater appreciation for Wright’s domestic architecture. As Hitchcock had begun to map with his investigations of Richardson and Wright, and as Scully would soon continue with his research, an inextricable web of influence linked the architecture of the American past with that of the global present. Scully’s work would further highlight that connection. Scully’s participation in the What is Happening in Modern Architecture? symposium placed him at a critical nexus, where the architecture of the past came to bear on the present. It was no accident that the MoMA panel gathered to discuss the Bay Region or Cottage Style; after the war, housing served as the proving ground for modern architecture. More specifically, by the late 1940s, as Levine pointed out, “the single-family suburban or country house had become the main site for the proliferation of modern ideas in architecture in the United States as well as many places abroad.”17 Scully’s dissertation, which he completed in 1949 under the title “The Cottage Style: An Organic Development in Later Nineteenth-Century

50

VINCENT SCULLY

Wooden Domestic Architecture in the Eastern United States,” traced the origins, nearly a century earlier, of the very Cottage Style under discussion at the 1948 symposium. For Scully, the act of investigating and relating historic movements to relevant contemporary concerns would become a lasting hallmark, with ideas of the past and the present simultaneously circulating in his mind. From this early stage in his career, Scully would be both an historian, interpreting the past, and a contemporary actor, informing the present. The work of Wright, an architectural icon who, by the midtwentieth century, had left his mark on both the past and the present, can be seen as an obvious and appropriate training ground for Scully, a visible embodiment of the historical/contemporary connection that he would pursue throughout his life. Hitchcock likewise served as a crucial point of connection for Scully by arranging for Scully and his wife Nancy to meet Wright at his home and studio in Wisconsin, a trip they undertook in the summer of 1948. Scully’s recollection of the visit involved some uncomfortable conversations with Wright’s acolytes and a cold shoulder from Olgivanna after Scully’s cigarette nearly started a house fire. Nevertheless, a pleasant-enough interaction with the master led Scully to commission him, the following year, to design a house for his young family. Intended originally for a town lot in Hamden and then adapted for a suburban site in Woodbridge, Connecticut, Wright’s design featured the long horizontal rooflines and projecting overhangs characteristic of his domestic work. Despite cost-cutting measures, the house as designed by Wright proved too expensive for the newly minted associate professor’s salary—“champagne taste on a beer budget,” the Taliesin fellows

FIGURE 4.4 Proposed Vincent J. Scully House, 1949, by Frank Lloyd Wright. © 2022 Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Licensed by Artists Rights Society.

LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS (1947–1950)

51

sarcastically chided. Scully paid Wright for the plan and then abandoned it, instead designing his own home, which he ultimately constructed in 1951 for $19,500, just $500 shy of his total budget.18 Taking cues from the recent New England houses designed by Breuer, Scully adapted diagonal wood siding and glazed floor-to-ceiling voids as the primary external features of his 1,800 square-foot rectangular house. The interior was largely open, a one-room house with a masonry core containing the bathroom and mechanical equipment. Movable partial-height storage cabinets and bookshelves delineated the sleeping areas, resulting in a flexible yet increasingly impractical arrangement as Scully’s sons grew older and, to their father’s chagrin, often blasted rock music.19 After the house’s completion, Architectural Forum featured it in a three-page-spread in its June 1951 issue, prompting regular inquiries from people interested in constructing a similar home. One man attempted to purchase the plans from Scully; another woman wrote to ask about the logistics of living with a family of five in an open-planned home without fixed bedrooms. Scully himself characterized his only built design as “a poor man’s Glass House,” referencing Johnson’s contemporaneous country residence in New Canaan, 35 miles south. Johnson would travel through Scully’s life for decades to come. Beginning in 1950, Johnson would teach at Yale’s School of Architecture, where he

FIGURE 4.5 Vincent J. Scully House, Woodbridge, Connecticut, 1950. Photo by Ben Schnall. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

52

VINCENT SCULLY

would maintain a forceful presence into the next century, regularly holding court for faculty and students at his New Canaan home. In the summer of 1952, Scully and Nancy would run into Johnson in Venice, where Scully would urge him to visit Hadrian’s Villa in Rome.20 In 1955, Scully and Johnson would welcome Wright to lecture at Yale’s campus. Ever the consummate performer, Johnson proclaimed in 1959 to a full lecture hall, “Hurray for history. Thank God for Hadrian, for Bernini, Le Corbusier, and for Vincent Scully.”21 In 1986, Scully would sit at Johnson’s table, next to Jackie Kennedy Onassis during the architect’s elaborate birthday party, held at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building in New York City (which Johnson had designed, some forty years earlier, with Mies van der Rohe).22 In 2005, Scully would deliver the keynote address at a memorial symposium after Johnson’s death, which brought their decades-long “mutually respectful and cordial relationship” to a close.23

CHAPTER FIVE

A Uniquely American Development (1948–1955) In the summer of 1948 Scully began his dissertation research in earnest, tracing the evolution of nineteenth-century wooden domestic architecture in the American Northeast, at that point a largely unexplored topic. This subject was of more than scholarly interest to Scully; peppering the streets of his New Haven youth, these wooden homes were an integral part of his personal history. As a child Scully had admired Edgewood Avenue, a stately, elm-bordered, Omstedian street divided by a grassy median and lined by what he would later call Stick Style and Shingle Style homes. Nearly every day he would travel this boulevard with his dogs to reach Edgewood Park, an undeveloped area adjacent to the West River and the Yale Bowl, just a few blocks from his house on Derby Avenue. Traversing Edgewood Avenue, young Scully would try to work out the buildings’ interior arrangements based on their exterior forms, positing what rooms sat behind paired windows or a rounded corner bay.1 This memory no doubt played a role in Scully’s quest to decode—and ultimately revive the languishing reputation of—these late-nineteenth-century wooden houses, so impressive in their day and, since the rise of modern architecture, so widely disavowed. “At that time,” he would later say, “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.”2 Entitled “The Cottage Style: An Organic Development in Later 19th Century Wooden Domestic Architecture in the Eastern United States,” Scully’s dissertation presented an investigation of mid- to late-nineteenthcentury wooden homes, most of which were located from New Jersey through Maine. Aside from Hitchcock’s comparatively cursory treatment, these houses—ranging from humble bungalows to grand ocean-front villas—had been overlooked, if not ignored. In the text, Scully traced the evolution of the Cottage Style, parsing these works into successive and slightly overlapping categories that he named the Stick and Shingle Styles, 53

54

VINCENT SCULLY

the former covering 1840 through 1876, the latter 1872 through 1889. What’s more, he established the Stick and Shingle Styles as products of a unique, specifically American architectural sensibility. Scully began his investigation with Andrew Jackson Downing, an American designer and horticulturalist who published house-pattern books, complete with plans and designs for builders to follow, beginning in the mid-1840s. A landscape designer, Downing preferred the seemingly natural, picturesque qualities of the Gothic revival as opposed to the classicism inherent in contemporary Greek revival trends. Many of Downing’s house designs, modest in size and minimal in ornament, achieved balance through asymmetrical arrangements and privileged wood as a readily available and inexpensive building material. Often the cottages’ vertical wooden structure was apparent on the exterior, with the space between structural members filled with horizontal wood siding, slightly overlapped to prevent water from reaching the seams. Wood boards could also be laid vertically to enclose the interior space; in these cases, smaller vertical wood strips— battens—were used to cover the seams where the larger boards met. Whether using horizontal or vertical siding, though, the major structural elements remained visible, creating what Scully described as “a skinless architecture with all its nerves and tendons exposed. It is an architecture of sticks, expressing the structural fact of the members of its frame.”3 Scully dubbed these wooden homes—including the yellow one he lived in as a child on Derby Avenue—Stick Style, and he cited them as a basis of the soon-tofollow late-nineteenth-century Shingle Style. Aside from the Stick Style, Scully discussed other Shingle Style influences including colonial revival architecture, Japanese pagoda design, and the Queen Anne revival movement of architect Richard Norman Shaw, whose picturesque English country houses juxtaposed elements such as exposed wood framing, heavy stone or brick masonry, jutting gables, and prominent chimneys.4 These inspirations fused to clear the way for new, distinctively American architectural developments. As Scully summarized, “Democratic, agrarian utilitarian, and preoccupied with American framing techniques, the builders of the stick style broke with the grand styles of the past . . . Most of all, they brought the long and complex development of Renaissance design to a close and opened the field to new invention along 19th-century American lines.” He continued, “Thus, by the 70s all paths seemed open to the future, and America was provided with a vernacular base of design which, as a hostile critic admitted in 1876, was ‘enterprising, inventive even, full of vivacity . . . and . . . it has life in it’.”5 Then Henry Hobson Richardson entered the picture, initiating “a new line of domestic planning in America.”6 In the late 1860s, Richardson’s work merged the Stick Style of the mid-1800s and a mannerist derivation of Shaw’s English Queen Anne revival architecture, making way for the appearance of the Codman House of 1871. There Scully identified two major innovations—one in planning, the other in massing—that would

A UNIQUELY AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT (1948–1955)

55

FIGURE 5.1 “A Villa in the Italian Style, Bracketed,” Design VI, A. J. Downing Cottage Residences (New York and London: Wiley & Putnam, 1842).

56

VINCENT SCULLY

come to characterize the Shingle Style. In terms of plan, Richardson developed the grand living hall, a room that served as an entrance vestibule and a circulation area through which other rooms are accessed. The living hall also housed a grand staircase and the fireplace. Before this time, the living hall had encompassed only one or two of these various functions. With the Codman House, Richardson married these elements—entrance hall, circulation area, staircase, and fireplace—to create a space that would become an important feature of the newly developing Shingle Style. The resulting interior spaces read as a free-flowing volume enclosed by an exterior skin as opposed to the tensile skeletal structure of the Stick Style. These two innovations—the living hall and the emphasis on volume—served as key elements of the Shingle Style designs that followed.7 They both would be visible in Richardson’s Watts Sherman House of 1875. Scully credited Richardson not only with these design contributions but also with influencing two of the most prominent architects to work in the Shingle Style tradition, Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White. After a few years of employment in Richardson’s office, McKim and White left and entered into practice with William Rutherford Mead.8 McKim, Mead & White went on to create the Low House of 1887, the very structure that, with its long, broad gable, would spring from the pages of Hitchcock’s

FIGURE 5.2 Watts Sherman House, Newport, Rhode Island, 1875, by Henry Hobson Richardson. A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library.

A UNIQUELY AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT (1948–1955)

57

FIGURE 5.3 Watts Sherman House, plan. Antoinette Forrester Downing and Vincent Scully, The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), pl. 189, detail.

FIGURE 5.4 Watts Sherman House, staircase and hall, drawing likely by Stanford White. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Staircase and Hall in Cottage for W. Watts Sherman, Newport, R.I.” New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9f552706-24cf-e3b3e040-e00a18062da9.

58

VINCENT SCULLY

Rhode Island Architecture some sixty years later to capture Scully’s imagination and become the iconic house of the original Shingle Style. According to Scully, the characteristics of this late-nineteenth-century wooden domestic architecture included the exterior layering of spaces and asymmetrical, picturesque massing; a deep sheltering veranda or porch that often marked the residence’s main entrance; and large chimneys, prominently displayed, that punctuated a strong gable roof. In almost all cases, the interior arrangement consisted of a free-flowing plan situated around a living hall with a grand stair and fireplace. The exterior was generally covered with wooden shingles or, in reference to the older Stick Style, vertical wooden boards and battens. Scully argued that an inventive freedom and a democratic intent that echoed the founding American political spirit underlaid these physical characteristics.9 In Scully’s view, the Shingle Style reached its pinnacle in 1889 with Frank Lloyd Wright’s own house in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. With its steeply pitched roof, main-floor projecting bay windows, and facade punctuated by a lunette window, Scully recognized the Wright House as an adaptation of architect Bruce Price’s Kent and Chandler Houses in Tuxedo Park, New York, of 1885 and 1886, respectively. The Wright House likewise built on the Low House, thereby combining its taught surface and

FIGURE 5.5 Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois, 1889, by Frank Lloyd Wright. Photo by AlasdairW / CC-BY-3.0.

A UNIQUELY AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT (1948–1955)

59

FIGURE 5.6 Chandler House, Tuxedo Park, New York, 1886, by Bruce Price. Architecture vol. 1, no. 5 (May 1900): 166.

crisp detailing with the Kent House’s verticality. Wright’s final product, sleek and refined, incorporated the essential features of the mature Shingle Style and took the design one step further with a flowing plan influenced by the Japanese pagoda.10 Wright’s architecture stemmed in large part from the Shingle Style tradition, according to Scully. He then rounded out his analysis by asserting that a classical revival led by the developing firm of McKim, Mead & White eventually eclipsed, and effectively put an end to, the mature Shingle Style in the late nineteenth century. Yet, Scully concluded, in the twentieth-century work of Wright, the Shingle Style’s experimentation, ingenuity, and unique American character would live on.11 *

*

*

Scully submitted his dissertation in the spring of 1949, after less than a year of research and writing. In addition to Hitchcock and Hamilton—Scully’s unofficial and official advisor, respectively—Yale professors Lewis Curtis (in the Department of History, specializing in eighteenth-century England), Sumner McKnight Crosby (in the Department of the History of Art, focused on medieval architecture), and George Kubler (also in the Department of the History of Art, with an expertise in Pre-Columbian art and architecture) all read and commented on a draft of the dissertation. Scully also thanked three

60

VINCENT SCULLY

additional Yale professors—Carroll Meeks, art historian Theodore Sizer, and director of the University Art Gallery John Marshall Philips—for their contributions.12 This remarkably fast turnaround Scully credited to three things: his geographical proximity to Newport, Rhode Island, the town in which many of his subjects stood, which lay 100 miles northwest of New Haven; Yale’s well-stocked library, where he undertook the majority of his research; and Hitchcock’s preceding scholarship and unfailing generosity with his private collection of sources. Even with these advantages, the speed with which Scully completed his dissertation was noteworthy. It was likely a hectic year, considering that— during the eight-month span from September, when he began, to April, when he turned in the final dissertation—Scully not only researched and wrote the text, but he also took a month off from writing to take his oral exams; completed manuscript revisions as suggested by Hamilton, Curtis, Crosby, and Kubler; and had three young sons at home (Daniel, who turned 6 in 1949, was joined by younger brothers Stephen [June 1947] and John [June 1948]). The brunt of the family care fell to Nancy; she likely received little physical assistance from Scully, who—in addition to forging ahead with his dissertation—taught throughout the 1948/49 academic year.13 Scully no doubt appreciated Nancy’s efforts, not only on behalf of the family but also with his dissertation. Five years later, when a portion of the text was published as Scully’s first stand-alone book, he thanked Nancy in the preface: “To my wife who has, since 1948 when this work was begun, checked references, taken photographs, criticized the text, and otherwise assisted in numberless ways, goes much more appreciation that can easily be acknowledged here.”14 After its submission to Yale University to fulfill requirements for Scully’s degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the manuscript traveled a circuitous route to publication. In 1952, a portion of Scully’s text appeared in Antoinette F. Downing’s The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1915, issued by Harvard University Press. The well-received book was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award by the Society of Architectural Historians the year of its publication, and reviews praised Scully’s contribution, describing his “remarkable essay” as a “brilliant . . . analysis of an ill-defined, underappreciated phase of nineteenth century architecture.” The reviewer continued, Scully has attacked in an entirely new way the period hitherto referred to as “Victorian.” He sees in it the generation of a new architecture and not just the final moment in the battle of styles. His recognition and definition of what he calls the “stick style” and the “shingle style,” wherein the seeds are sown which soon afterwards mature into the genius of F. L. Wright, is a major step towards re-evaluating this difficult period in architectural history.15 In 1953, an article based on the dissertation’s first chapter appeared in Art Bulletin as “Romantic-Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood:

A UNIQUELY AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT (1948–1955)

61

Downing, Wheeler, Gardner, and the ‘Stick Style,’ 1840–1876.” The following year, an abbreviated version of the entire dissertation was published as “American Villas: Inventiveness in the American Suburb from Downing to Wright” in Architectural Review. Then, in 1955, Yale University Press issued the majority of the manuscript, sans the initial chapter, as The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright. Fifteen years later Yale would publish an expanded and revised edition under the slightly changed title of The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Downing to the Origins of Wright, thus reuniting the dissertation's first chapter with the remainder of the text.16 As it appeared in 1955, The Shingle Style was praised throughout the art historical community. The College Art Association honored the book with its Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, bestowed annually upon “an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language,” commenting that with his text, Scully brought “new life to aspects of the past . . . in a way few historians of art in our day are able to do.”17 Assessments of the book were positive as well. One reviewer called the work “among the most seminal yet done in nineteenth-century American architecture.” Furthermore, he continued, The Shingle Style is much more than merely a specialized study of a particular moment in American architectural history . . . it comments on the dynamics of American culture as these affected creative expression at a critical moment in our cultural history. Everyone interested in American culture should read this book, the more so because Mr. Scully’s theme has implications for our cultural future as well.18 Another reviewer described The Shingle Style as “a pioneer work, which presents an important part of the story of architecture in the second half of the nineteenth century.”19 A third concluded that Scully’s argument, and the wealth of material he amassed, rendered the book “of positive value to the specialist in American architecture.”20 Amid these favorable sentiments, however, rose two critiques, both related to the propriety of Scully’s enthusiastic engagement with his subject matter. The first specifically concerned what the reviewer interpreted as a “lack of sympathy for the Beaux Arts” throughout the book, in particular in discussions surrounding the training of American architect Richard Morris Hunt, who trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, and when expounding on the academic classicism, as practiced by McKim, Mead & White, that brought about the end of the mature Shingle Style. Indeed, the reviewer opined that Scully’s “view is often that of a modern critic interested in advanced ideas of the past that have a link with the present.”21 In other words, in eschewing historicism as embraced by Beaux-Arts tradition, Scully aligned himself with the modernists and their attempts to break away from the confines of the past. Ironically, though, Scully was attempting to

62

VINCENT SCULLY

legitimatize a form of architecture that modernists had rejected. Nevertheless, that Scully conflated his role as an historian with that of a critic was a reproof he would face throughout his career. The second criticism leveled at Scully, which would likewise maintain staying power thought the historian’s long life, involved his exuberance. After conceding that The Shingle Style’s thesis and scholarly apparatus had merit, a different reviewer declared these achievements to be “overshadowed by the ‘Scully style’ of writing.” He explained, Truly valuable insights and perceptive juxtapositions were submerged by an all too recent reliance upon extravagant phraseology which impaired the scholarly character of the book. Scholarship and literary style are not necessarily antagonistic, but if the former is to be burdened by a presentation which, while it does not challenge credulity, does tax the reader’s willingness to accept premises and arguments because they are too often clothed in a near evangelical fervor, then dry pedanticism is to be preferred. The reviewer then offered specific examples of the objectionable language: We seriously question the value and desirability of using, in what is basically a highly technical and detailed examination of evidence leading to the definition of an architectural style, distracting and frivolous language such that: a building is “frightful”; a fireplace is “a noble monument”; the American Builder is “rough and ready,” and “head over heels in love with the Queen Anne”; and the architect Robert Swain Peabody “coos,” and “wallows unashamedly in . . . a desire for the picturesque that has now become semi hysterical.” The reviewer concluded that “a serious reader could easily become discouraged by the somewhat polemical literary style that keeps asserting itself at the expense of Professor Scully’s thesis.”22 Scully’s linguistic “exuberance” and “extravagant phraseology” notwithstanding, the 1955 publication of The Shingle Style reverberated throughout the architectural world in three distinct yet interrelated ways. First, Scully’s establishment of the Shingle Style as a unique American achievement rewrote the previously dominant narrative that American architecture merely derived from European models—medieval, Gothic, neoclassical, Georgian, and otherwise. Well into the late nineteenth century, even after the creation of architecture schools at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; 1868), Cornell (1871), and others, men of any means who aspired to study architecture traveled to Europe, primarily to the École des Beaux-Arts. There, most believed, they received a valuable architectural education steeped in the history and heritage that only a centuries-old establishment could deliver. In keeping with Beaux-Arts educational

A UNIQUELY AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT (1948–1955)

63

tradition, many felt that a proper architectural education of necessity involved a grand tour throughout Europe to see the classics first hand. America’s architectural achievements paled by comparison. In the 1910s and 1920s, Gropius and Le Corbusier paid homage to industrial structures— for example, grain elevators and factories—which they viewed as direct formal responses to their intended uses.23 Tall, windowless cylindrical enclosures housed grain, and broad, open factory floors admitted plentiful natural light to facilitate mass-production assembly lines. Scully’s investigations, however, highlighted the Shingle Style as an earlier American accomplishment. Yes, the Shingle Style incorporated a range of sources, many of them European; yet, American ingenuity and democratic spirit, Scully declared, brought the Shingle Style itself into being. Thus, the Shingle Style appeared as America’s first true architectural contribution. In reality, the Shingle Style was by no means America’s first architectural contribution. The creations of Indigenous peoples populated the continent long before the Shingle Style took shape. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, little thought was given to such works. Growing awareness of Indigenous architectural accomplishments would become apparent in the 1960s—for example, with explorations such as Bernard Rudolfsky’s MoMA exhibition and accompanying publication, Architecture without Architects (1964). Likewise, in 1964, Scully would begin investigating the Pueblos of the American Southwest. Ten years earlier, though, as Scully readied his dissertation for publication, his mind had yet to consider the rich contributions he would come to explore the following decade. A second resonance prompted by the publication of The Shingle Style involved the idea of the Shingle Style’s impact on Wright’s work and on modern architecture in general. The argument that Wright had a formative influence on the development of modern European architecture (or International Style architecture, in Hitchcock and Johnson’s lingo) was nothing new. By the time Scully published The Shingle Style in 1955, many others—including Hitchcock and the renowned German-British architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner—had already noted Wright’s impact across the Atlantic.24 It was generally understood, then, that Wright played a foundational role in modern architecture in Europe. Scully’s contribution to the discussion was to draw an immediate connection between Wright and the Shingle Style. After tracing Wright’s early career and comparing designs by Wright’s hand to those he undoubtedly saw in mentors’ offices and architectural publications, Scully concluded that Wright “was thus seeking direct inspiration from the masters of the developed shingle style.”25 Scully then took the Shingle Styleas-source idea a step further, declaring that, in conjunction with a host of other influences—from nineteenth-century theoreticians Viollet-le-Duc and Owen Jones to Thomas Jefferson’s agrarianism and Japanese and colonial revival architecture—“the domestic architectural tradition of the later 19th century [the Shingle Style] . . . fused in [Wright], and through him it formed one of the bases for the modern architecture of the 20th century.”26

64

VINCENT SCULLY

Likewise, Scully advanced the notion that the Shingle Style directly informed the International Style with his choice of descriptive words, which established a parallel between the two architectures. Indeed, while seemingly dissimilar—as was preliminarily suggested by participants such as Hitchcock, Barr, and Johnson at MoMA’s February 1948 What Is Happening with Modern Architecture? symposium as they discussed the Cottage Style—the Shingle and International Styles shared significant fundamental characteristics. For example, both architectural expressions placed an emphasis on volume, with the exterior surface reading as a thin skin (whether of wood or glass) that wrapped the interior space. Likewise, compositional balance in both cases was usually achieved not through symmetry, but rather through picturesque (Shingle Style) or irregular (International Style) arrangements of parts. Finally, the concept of the open plan, which featured prominently in International Style works, was prefigured in the Shingle Style living hall, where functions such as circulation and congregation mingled freely, no longer relegated to distinct zones. When viewed with these characteristics in mind, the Shingle Style appeared as a precursor to its International Style offspring. Finally, in addition to establishing the Shingle Style as a unique American architectural contribution responsible in part for the development of modern architecture itself, The Shingle Style as published in 1955 would serve as inspiration for a new chapter of mid-century American architecture. This would become apparent to Scully and others in the next decade. In the meantime, the 1950s would deliver Scully to new avenues of exploration— at home in the present, and abroad in the past.

CHAPTER SIX

Side by Side in Panorama (1947–1962) Autumn 1947 proved momentous for Scully. He began teaching—a profession he would adore and at which he would excel—and he zeroed in on what would come to be known as Shingle Style architecture, a topic that would establish him as a serious scholar within the realm of architectural history. In addition, that fall Scully formed a significant friendship with the architect Louis I. Kahn, a relationship that permanently tethered Scully to the architecture of the present and of the past. Recently hired as a visiting design critic in the Department of Architecture, Kahn appeared on Yale’s campus at the beginning of the fall term. While he had yet to adopt his characteristically enigmatic patterns of speech or achieve his guru-like status, Kahn nevertheless made a singular first impression, so much so that Scully’s wife Nancy, before making Kahn’s acquaintance, caught sight of him in town and felt compelled to follow him down the street.1 Kahn “had a wonderful walk,” Scully would recall decades later. “He’d take these great strides. He was small, but he was like a wrestler.”2 Indeed, Kahn had been a wrestler in his younger years, and he maintained an athletic grace as he aged. What captured Nancy’s attention, though, was the whole unlikely amalgamation—a diminutive, utterly confident man with a halo of fiery red hair, bright blue eyes, and a severely scarred face. She was not alone in being drawn to Kahn; throughout his life the architect would exhibit a magnetism that pulled others—students, colleagues like Scully, and talented, enamored women—into his orbit. Born in Estonia in 1901, Kahn emigrated to the United States with his family as a young child. They settled in Philadelphia where they struggled with extreme poverty, as was the fate of many immigrant families. Kahn showed an inclination for art and music from an early age, and toward the end of high school he developed a passion for architecture. He worked odd jobs, such as playing piano and organ accompaniment for silent films, to fund his way through the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied 65

66

VINCENT SCULLY

architecture under Paul Philippe Cret. The French-born Cret schooled his pupils in a stripped-down version of Beaux-Arts classicism that relied on symmetry, solidity, and a dearth of ornament. Kahn graduated with a bachelor of architecture in 1924, worked as a draughtsman, and then traveled through Europe in late 1928 and early 1929. He returned to Philadelphia and took a position in Cret’s office during a time when the elder architect was engaged with some of his most notable projects, including the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. As the Depression deepened and commissions evaporated, Kahn left Cret’s employ and shifted focus to federal housing projects, which gained a new urgency as people lost their jobs, homes, and life savings. Around the same time, International Style architecture, filtering into the United States by way of MoMA and other avenues, was gaining traction. From his travels a few years prior Kahn was familiar with these modern design efforts, and their dissemination on this side of the Atlantic compounded his interest. Indeed, part of the narrative surrounding International Style architecture was that, unlike more traditional architecture—such as the pared-down classicism in which Kahn had been trained—this new architecture could be produced more rapidly and at less expense. When faced with the need for quick, economical, and progressive housing, designers saw in the International Style idiom a natural fit. Thus, as Kahn turned his attention to the design of public housing projects, he pivoted from the mass and solidity of his classical training to the thin planes and slender columns of the new, light architecture. Kahn was intermittently employed throughout the 1930s. His paying positions involved the design of public housing, either for government agencies such as the Philadelphia Housing Authority or partnered with architects like George Howe. With Swiss architect William Lescaze, earlier in the decade Howe had designed the Philadelphia Savings and Fund Society (PSFS) Building, recognized as the first International Style high-rise in the United States and included in Hitchcock and Johnson’s Modern Architecture exhibition. In 1940, Howe solicited Kahn and the German-born architect Oscar Stonorov to design federal housing projects with him. The most noteworthy result of this three-man alliance was Carver Court, located in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, 45 minutes west of Philadelphia. Encompassing 100 one- and two-story units set amid a landscaped green, Carver Court provided African-American defense workers and their families with modern, affordable housing.3 After undertaking this project, Kahn continued to design collaboratively with Stonorov and other architects through the late 1940s. He also accepted a teaching position as a design critic in Yale’s Department of Architecture, where he met Scully. With a joint appointment to teach in the Departments of the History of Art and of Architecture, Scully frequently encountered Kahn during the fall of 1947 and, in his own words, “got to like him a lot.”4 “It was clear,” Scully would later write, that Kahn “was a man who’d lost an order and was looking for it everywhere. What that order was nobody knew. He didn’t know himself,

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

67

but he constantly talked about it.”5 In hindsight, Scully understood Kahn’s search for order as an attempt to reconcile his classical Beaux-Arts training with modern architecture’s demand for innovation. In short, Kahn was looking for architecture’s next step. Scully, it would turn out, was about to embark on a similar quest. Both men would find their answers overseas. After three years at Yale and rising to the position of chief design critic, Kahn was joined at the Department of Architecture by his friend and former collaborator Howe, who arrived to serve as departmental chair in 1950. Fresh from spending two years as architect-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome, Howe arranged for Kahn to occupy his recently vacated position. Thus, in December 1950, Kahn left his practice, his family, and Yale for a three-month stint abroad. While in Rome Kahn wandered through the city, sketching in pastel and rendering in watercolor the magnificent monuments he encountered. He spent ample time with Frank E. Brown, a Yale-trained archaeologist who, for the previous five years on behalf of the American Academy, led excavations at the ancient Roman outpost of Cosa on Tuscany’s southwestern coast. As Brown toured Kahn through the sites in and around Rome, masonry ruins such as the Palatine Hill and Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli made a lasting impression on the architect. On a brief jaunt to Egypt, Kahn became even more enamored of the Great Pyramids, which he described as “the most wonderful things I have seen so far.”6 In both Rome and Egypt, Kahn

FIGURE 6.1 Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, France, 1952, by Le Corbusier. Geoffrey Taunton / Alamy.

68

VINCENT SCULLY

was struck by the monumentality of these creations—their weight and heft, specific qualities that he and others had cast aside as they adopted the International Style vocabulary of thin planes and point supports, glass and steel. As Wendy Lesser noted in her biography of the architect, “Mass and weight became especially important to [Kahn] during this period; so did the materials that possessed and embodied these qualities, like brick and concrete.” She continued, “Inspired by Frank Brown, who spoke about anonymous Roman architects of the Hellenic and High Empire periods as if they were still alive, Kahn began to envision a way in which his deep-seated affection for the old and his admiration for the new could come together.”7 Indeed, by the late 1940s, some architects’ attention had shifted toward creating more weighty, sculptural work. Examples included Alvar Aalto’s brick Baker Dormitory (1948) for MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (1952) in Marseilles, France, which Kahn visited in 1951 while it was under construction.8 Between the exposure to the ancient ruins’ majesty and the burgeoning trend for monumentality among forward-thinking architects, it is not surprising that Kahn’s way of seeing and understanding architecture shifted during this period. Thus, with archaic masonry techniques and contemporary architectural developments whirling in his mind, Kahn made his way back to the United States, arriving in March 1951 to his first major commission: the Yale University Art Gallery. Again, Kahn’s friend Howe came through for him, reportedly having lobbied for Kahn as the building’s architect, a move Scully—by that point an associate professor in the Department of the History of Art—fully supported.9 Kahn received word of this honor as his time in Italy neared its end, and he returned to Yale brimming with thoughts on how to incorporate his new-found appreciation for solidity and mass into his design for a building that was to house open exhibition space as well as studios and classrooms for art and architecture students. Kahn’s solution produced Yale’s first modern building, itself a mixture of mass and volume, solid and void. Along Chapel Street the Art Gallery presented an unyielding brick facade divided by horizontal string courses, which took cues from the neo-Gothic building next door and denoted the building’s four stories. The brick wall stepped back to reveal the front entry, a black-mullioned glass expanse that continued the lines of the string courses and wrapped the building’s side and courtyard facades. Inside the mass/volume and solid/void contrasts continued. Two features in particular demonstrated the strong impact on Kahn of his recent travels: the tetrahedral ceiling and the cylindrical stairwell. Composed of hollow threedimensional tetrahedrons, the concrete slab ceiling was both a sculptural and a structural marvel. Not only did it span the open-plan gallery with a minimum of columns, the channeled ceiling concealed wiring and duct work, allowing the mechanical equipment to become “an integral part of the building’s hollow fabric.”10 As Scully would later point out, the tetrahedrons, made up of equilateral triangles, echoed the form of the pyramids with which Kahn

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

69

FIGURE 6.2 Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1953, by Louis I. Kahn. Enzo Figueres / Getty.

was so taken during his time in Egypt. Likely another source of inspiration for the tetrahedron slab ceiling was the geodesic domes and space frames of Buckminster Fuller, who had recently visited Yale, as well as the impact Fuller’s work had on the architect Anne Tyng, Kahn’s protégé and lover.11 Powerful geometry likewise appeared in the concrete circular stairwell that rose the height of the building. Within the thick cylinder, which recalled the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, stair treads spiraled upward toward an equilateral triangle inscribed within a circle of daylight above. The Yale Art Gallery opened to great acclaim in 1953, ushering Kahn into the next phase of his career, which included projects such the Trenton Bath House (1955) for the Jewish Community Center in Trenton, New Jersey, and Richards Medical Laboratory (1960) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, both of which drew national attention. Scully, who quickly emerged as one of Kahn’s most vocal champions, would later conclude that, by shaking off established conventions and questioning everything anew, Kahn had discovered the order for which he had so fervently searched. In 1962, Scully published the first book on Kahn’s architecture. In the historian’s assessment, Kahn, by 1955, had worked himself back [in time] to a point where he could begin to design architecture afresh, literally from the ground up, accepting no preconceptions, fashions, or habits of design without

70

VINCENT SCULLY

questioning them profoundly . . . Every question would be asked: What is a space, a wall, a window, a drain? How does a building begin? How end? . . . He was beginning where almost nobody ever gets to be: at the beginning.12 While writing about Kahn, Scully could just as well have been describing his own architectural investigations over the past fifteen years. Scully, too, had begun to question preconceived notions about architecture, beginning with the maligned Shingle Style and then stepping back in time to the temples of classical Greece. *

*

*

Having earned his doctorate from Yale in spring 1949, Scully officially joined the history of art faculty that fall. He team-taught History of Art 12: Introduction to the History of Art, with Sumner Crosby and Charles Seymour; History of Art 53a: North American Architecture; and History of Art 153b: Modern American Architecture, an advanced class for upperclassmen. Scully would continue to teach versions of these courses for years to come. Through the early 1950s, he had a joint appointment with the architecture department as well, where he taught Architecture 20b: Theories of Architecture, which traced developments from Vitruvius through Le Corbusier; and at times cotaught Architecture 11: Basic Architecture Design, with Eugene Nalle. Throughout the 1949/50 academic year, while teaching multiple classes, designing his house, and supervising its construction, Scully was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to support him and his family for a year in France, where he planned to study Gothic architecture. Upon learning that his absence for the 1950/51 academic year would prove a hardship for the history of art department, Scully deferred the fellowship. During that intervening year, a shift in mindset—perhaps due to his friendship with Kahn, who had recently returned from his three-month stay at the American Academy in Rome—prompted a change in plans; Italy became Scully’s new Fulbright-sponsored destination, where he planned to study the relationship of the city to the natural landscape. Thus, in late summer 1951, Scully, Nancy, and their three sons—Daniel (7), Stephen (4), and John (3)—set sail across the Atlantic to begin their Italian adventure. The family took up residence in a small flat in a villa in Bellosguardo, an area on the outskirts of Florence north of the Pitti Palace, Boboli Gardens, and Arno River. It was quite cold that winter; the Scullys often played soccer with their small sons in the villa’s courtyard to keep warm, and spent much of their meager funds buying coal to heat their piano nobile apartment.13 Daniel, the oldest, recalled traversing the Ponte Vecchio and pausing to visit the store of a stamp collector whom he had befriended as he made his way daily to his English-speaking school.14 Ensconced in this remarkable environment, Scully spent the year immersed in all the culture, art, and history Italy had to offer, visiting

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

71

museums, celebrated buildings, and storied locations surrounding Florence, Venice, Rome, and elsewhere. In the company of Frank Brown, the archaeologist who had bonded with Kahn the previous year and would become Scully’s life-long friend, Scully combed through ancient Roman sites, like Hadrian’s Villa and Cosa. He likewise explored small hill towns such as San Gimignano and medieval cities such as Siena. In the Palazzo Pubblico of the latter, Scully encountered Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government (also known as the Ideal Republican City in Its Landscape), a fourteenth-century fresco series that adorned the council hall, reportedly to remind the ruling magistrates of their responsibility to provide sound and compassionate leadership. In particular, Scully was struck by the Good Government panels, which depicted a prosperous, peaceful city populated by well-cared-for, industrious citizens, some of whom dance in the streets. This “good” town was set amid a verdant, hilled landscape and nestled within protective walls; yet the main gate remained open and people passed through at will, reflecting a freedom resulting from beneficent governance. For Scully, Lorenzetti’s frescoes offered “a vision of how a town, as a communal place, should work and relate to its natural setting.”15 This concept would come to occupy a privileged place in his vision of community and urban development. This time abroad, and coming stays in Europe during the 1950s and early 1960s, would leave an indelible mark on Scully. “Italy and Greece,” he would later write, “were surely the central events of my intellectual life; they

FIGURE 6.3 Effects of Good Government in the City, detail from Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government in the City and the Country, 1343, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, fresco. Hall of Peace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. DeAgostini / Getty.

72

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 6.4 Effects of Good Government in the Country, detail from Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government in the City and the Country, 1343, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, fresco. Hall of Peace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. DeAgostini / Getty. started me up again at another scale after my early concentration on American architecture.”16 Indeed, beginning with this Fulbright year in Italy, Scully’s focus expanded from the architectural object to encompass a broader context: the relationship between architecture, cities, and nature. As Scully would recall, it was in Italy that I first began to focus on the city in [the] landscape. It was while driving in the Val d’Orcia that my wife Nancy said to me, “You must take photographs side by side in panorama to get the building with the landscape and the city in its place.” She was right, and armed with that simple technique, I went to Paestum and saw Greek temples for the first time.17

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

73

This trip to Paestum—an ancient Greek settlement on the southwestern Italian coast—and Scully’s time in Italy more generally sparked an understanding of architecture that would guide his subsequent thought and organize his work into a grand, overarching narrative about what architecture is and what it should do. More than twenty years later, in 1979, Scully would summarize his perspective on national television, on Dick Cavett’s eponymous talk show. Asked to define architecture for the program’s popular audience, Scully passionately and patiently explained, in his slightly nasal New England accent, Architecture is the construction of the entire environment. It’s not just single buildings or individual buildings; it’s everything man-made in relation to the natural world. It’s the setting for all the action of humanity. So that the first component of architecture is nature itself, it’s the landscape; and the second point is the relation of everything constructed to the landscape. And every culture has had a different way of creating that relationship because it embodies what they feel about their existence in the world.18 Scully caught the first glimmer of this idea when he visited Paestum, and he further developed it as he simultaneously worked his way through ancient Greek architecture and the contemporary architectural developments of the 1950s. *

*

*

Following his return to New Haven in the summer of 1952, Scully immersed himself in the study of historic Greek architecture. He applied for and received grants that allowed him to spend two summers and two additional academic years overseas. A Billings Memorial Fellowship from Yale financed Scully’s Greek travels for the summer of 1955, which he undertook alone. The following summer, Nancy joined him for at least part of the trip through southern Italy and Sicily, funded by the George A. and Eliza Howard Foundation Fellowship through Brown University. Scully worked this new accumulated knowledge into courses on Greek and Roman art and architecture, which he added to his teaching repertoire at Yale in the mid-1950s with the History of Art 23: The Art of Greece and Rome, a course that was cross listed in the classical civilization concentration.19 A year-long sabbatical and a Bollingen Foundation Fellowship allowed Scully and his family the opportunity to live in Greece from August 1957 to July 1958.20 Much as Frank Brown had mentored Scully during his Fulbright year in Rome, in Greece the American archaeologist Eugene Vanderpool, affiliated with the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, took Scully under his wing. Vanderpool, whom Scully described as possessing an

74

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 6.5 Second Temple of Hera at Paestum, c. 460–450 BCE, showing its placement with respect to the eastern hill. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

“unsurpassed knowledge of the topography of Greece and its resonance in ancient literature,” would become Scully’s life-long friend.21 It was during this 1957/58 academic year that Scully researched and wrote the bulk of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, which he dedicated to Brown and Vanderpool, as well as his sons. Published in 1962 by Yale, Scully’s ambitious tome explored the “belief that Greek temples needed to be looked at afresh in terms of their own forms and meanings and in relation to those of the landscape in which they are set.”22 By considering Greek architecture with respect to its natural and cultural environment, Scully challenged a dominant view among archaeologists, who approached temples as formal objects unrelated to their site and context. In the preface, Scully declared his intent to fill a void left by “the histories of Greek architecture so far published [which] have largely

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

75

treated the monuments as dismembered, as items in a series, as technological problems, or as isolated objects.”23 Rather, Scully explained that to fully understand Greek architecture and religious structures, they must be seen as intricately connected to their landscapes and societal beliefs. All Greek sacred architecture explores and praises the character of a god or a group of gods in a specific place. That place is itself holy and, before the temple was built upon it, embodied the whole of the deity as a recognized natural force. With the coming of the temple, housing its image within it and itself developed as a sculptural embodiment of the god’s presence and character, the meaning becomes double, both of the deity as in nature and the god as imagined by men. Therefore, the formal elements of any Greek sanctuary are, first, the specifically sacred landscape in which it is set and, second, the buildings that are placed within it. The landscape and the temples form an architectural whole, were intended by the Greeks to do so, and must therefore be seen in relation to each other.24 While this idea—that the Greek temples, or any man-made structures, must be considered within their specific context—may seem obvious today, it was not a prevailing artistic view in the mid-twentieth century. Recall New Criticism in the early 1940s, the theoretical approach that looked for meaning in the formal qualities of a poem or piece of writing, excluding the cultural, social, and historical context that gave rise to the work. Such a perspective struck Scully as nonsensical; yes, it was important to examine the form and structure of a work, but to ignore the context in which it was produced was to jettison critical knowledge about the work’s meaning. Here Focillon’s philosophy came into play, the idea that a work’s meaning comes from the interplay of form and context. Building on this, Scully proposed that for Greek sacred architecture, “the action of the building and landscape was fully reciprocal in meaning as in form.” In other words, “the form and meaning were the same.” He went on to explain that the study of Greek temples therefore must be based on an examination of both form (“morphology”) and underlying cultural/social/historical themes (“iconology”). “The form,” Scully declared, “is the meaning.”25 Indeed, while engaged in his Greek studies context rose to the fore in cultural, social, and geographical terms, with landscape playing a crucial role. Scully looked back to the “human consciousness” of Paleolithic huntergatherer societies, as extrapolated by scholars from cave drawings and other artwork. “The essential belief,” Scully summarized, “seems to have been in the earth as a mother . . . upon whose continued presence human life depended.” To illustrate this concept’s continued import in the Greek world, Scully referenced a hymn by Homer called “To Earth the Mother of All”: “well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings . . . Mother of the gods, wife of starry Heaven . . .”26 Even prior to the Greeks, certain symbols

76

VINCENT SCULLY

of the earth goddess or mother emerged through reverence and ritual—in particular, those based on the female figure, “breasts, hips, and mons Veneris,” as well as those based on horns, which perhaps derived from the sacred bull or the open embrace of outstretched arms, representative of the goddess’s active power. Examining Cretan palaces, which gave way to Greek temples, Scully identified these symbols in recurring landscape features associated with the complexes, specifically axial alignment with “a gently mounded or conical hill” followed by “a higher, double-peaked or cleft mountain some distance beyond the hill but on the same axis.”27 He visited and photographed more than 150 sites. Again and again Scully discovered these forms, the mounded cone fronting the cleft mountain, connected with Greek temples, forming an integral part of the temple’s context and meaning. And, as the idea of the earth goddess gave way to the pantheon of Greek gods, additional landscape features came to be associated with specific gods’ temples. Scully compiled hundreds of pictures offering visual evidence that temples to Hera displayed the mounded cone/cleft mountain connection. Those of Aphrodite were often sited amid aggressive forms, such as craggy cliffs or massive rock outcroppings. And those of Zeus crowned sites most holy to the original earth goddess, such as atop the highest mountains. In all, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods put forth the then-novel premise that Greek sacred architecture derived its meaning from both its physical form and its siting within the landscape, and that this architecture was, at once, a foundation for and a product of the society that created it. With the publication of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, Scully once again found himself straddling different communities—that of art historians and that of classicists and archaeologists. While members of both disciplines tended to agree that, in the words of one reviewer, Scully brought “vigor and ingenuity” to his investigation, the art historians and archaeologists differed greatly in the value they attributed to the book’s overall contribution to the field.28 On the whole, art historians—in particular those with architectural training—praised the book. Paul Zucker, professor of architecture at Cooper Union in New York City, described The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods as a book that “opens new deep perspectives” and suggested that it belonged to a unique category of works that connected “the history of architecture and the history of ideas.”29 Peter Collins, professor in the Department of History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal, took this line of thought a step further, noting that Scully’s was probably “the most distinguished book of its kind to be published in the English language since the publication of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice [of 1851],” one that will be “highly valued as a completely new and refreshing interpretation of Greek architectural ideals.” “One cannot but marvel,” Collins continued, “that it has taken two centuries of staring at ruins and rummaging amongst fallen stones for an architectural historian to raise his eyes at last to the horizon and see the Greek temple in its totality, that is to say, as forming, with its environment, an inseparable whole, whereby earth, temple, and god

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

77

are but one.” Indeed, Scully “possesses the rarest of all the abilities to be found among archaeologists, namely the gift of historical imagination.”30 In addition to their lack of “historical imagination,” archaeologists—at least those commissioned to review The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods— lacked an appreciation for Scully’s foray into their field of study. The same held true for those focused on classics and classical art. As a whole they were quite critical of the book. As had happened with reviews of The Shingle Style, Scully’s literary style came under attack. While Zucker praised Scully’s “dignity of language” and Collins appreciated his “dazzling prose,” the classicists categorically decried Scully’s use of “personal rhetoric.”31 “And what rhetoric it is!” University of Pennsylvania classicist Michael H. Jameson exclaimed. Clearly exasperated with Scully’s language (and his overall argument), he declared that Scully “has tried to convert metaphor into scholarship and to prove his case by increasing verbosity at every site he could explore in the Greek world. He almost drowns out the good things he has to say.”32 Scully’s lively prose had been condemned before, and it would happen again. Yet the tone of his writing remained consistent throughout his lifetime, if anything growing increasingly exuberant and personal as he aged. Thus it’s likely that such criticisms carried little weight for him. The same cannot be said of the larger charge leveled at The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods—that Scully lacked sufficient evidence to support his thesis, a charge repeated in various ways by his detractors. Robert Scranton, a professor of classical art and archaeology at the University of Chicago, suggested that Scully’s argument rested on “defective logic,” and that he saw what he wanted to see in terms of how the Greek sacred architecture was sited.33 Seymour Howard, professor of classical art at University of California, Davis, phrased this sentiment quite succinctly, noting that “the interpretations often seem pressed to fit the preconceptions.”34 Homer Thompson, a classical archaeologist associated with Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, declared, “The reader familiar at first hand with the Mediterranean scene will object that conical mounds and cleft-mountain profiles are features of such universal occurrence that they must inevitably appear in relation to almost any temple.”35 In other words, wasn’t it likely that what Scully saw as intentional building placement within the landscape was merely coincidence? Thompson and Jameson certainly thought so, with the latter noting that Greece’s mountainous geography meant that its “cones, curves, and clefts are inescapable.”36 Encompassed in the “he sees what he wants to see” critique was the charge that Scully imposed contemporary ideas on historical eras. In the eyes of his detractors, Scully’s argument assumed an understanding of concepts such as axiality, landscape, and space that, in their opinions, postdated the ancient Greeks.37 Thompson noted that, not only did Scully’s visual evidence—photographs of temples in their landscape—fall short, but the authors of the day and those that followed said nothing to support Scully’s argument. Thompson’s analysis was blunt: Scully’s “hypothesis is

78

VINCENT SCULLY

the fabrication of a modern mind to suit a modern interpretation of a given set of ancient phenomena.” Furthermore, If Scully is right, we must assume that in one branch of architecture very great importance was attached by the Greeks to the natural setting of man’s activities at a time when the same subject was receiving only the most summary attention from Greek writers, sculptors, and painters . . . It is scarcely conceivable that such a principle as that enunciated by Scully should have been formulated [as early as Scully suggests], and the silence of subsequent authors both Greek and Roman make its existence even in later antiquity at best dubious.”38 For Thompson and Jameson, who impugned Scully’s “knowledge of Greek culture” and “poor grasp” of the Greek language, Scully’s argument was grounded in sloppy scholarship and wishful thinking.39 With its sneering tone and outright mockery, Jameson’s review bordered on cruel. Those of Scranton and Howard, while more balanced, were kinder yet ultimately quite critical. Yet, it was Thompson’s review that seemed to stick in Scully’s craw. Perhaps this was because it had appeared in the Art Bulletin, a publication in Scully’s own field that was widely read by his colleagues (at least more so than Classical Philology, which carried Jameson’s review.) Possibly even more upsetting for Scully was that Thompson, who for decades had led excavations at the Agora of ancient Athens, was understood to be “the outstanding classical archeologist of his generation, perhaps of two generations.”40 Scully had been panned by the world-renowned authority on classical archaeology. What likely distressed Scully the most, though, was that he felt Thompson’s objections—particularly those concerning Greek and Roman literature—were unjust, based on their own faulty logic. Thus Scully submitted a letter to the editor of Art Bulletin to explain that, not only did he disagree with Thompson’s interpretation of these sources, the older scholar’s reliance on that material was “wholly irrelevant.” While drawing on art and literature of the ancients, Scully’s approach to the Greek architecture in its landscape was “an objectively visual one,” the historian asserted, and Thompson failed to grasp that. Finally, Scully raised a larger concern about the methodological approach to the analysis of art: Are we to derive no meanings from the visual arts unless literary texts tell us what those meanings are supposed to be? Are we [as Thompson does] to refuse to identify a sequence of forms unless a text informs us that it exists . . . ? Are we, finally, to substitute the famous ‘intentional fallacy’ for an analysis of the work of art itself? . . . To do so systematically would eventually obliterate that particular way of perceiving reality through plastic experience which is the soul of art and with which it is obvious that the Greeks were even more concerned than we—who must expend our best efforts toward trying to follow them there.41

SIDE BY SIDE IN PANORAMA (1947–1962)

79

Despite the controversy surrounding the book, or perhaps in part because of it, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods sold well enough that, only a year after its initial appearance in 1962, Yale issued a second printing. In 1969, Fredrick A. Praeger, Inc., published a revised edition, which they again reprinted a decade later. This respectable publishing record, however, did little to soothe the hurt Scully suffered from the book’s initial negative reception. While he felt that he was treated unfairly by the classical archaeologists, he nevertheless stood by his conclusions. Decades later Scully would write of the experience, noting that his book’s premise—involving a recognition of topographically distinctive sacred sites and the embodiment of the gods in them as well as in the temples— seemed to me then and seems to me now to be absolutely correct, and I have never understood how anyone could fail to recognize that fact which is so abundantly obvious in landscape and temple alike. So categorical a statement can hardly breed confidence in my objectivity, but it is an honest reflection of my belief and my anger.42 Regardless of the book’s harsh reception and the associated memories, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods remained dear to Scully for the entirety of his life, and it was the work of which he was ultimately the proudest. This may be partially explained by the fact that Scully formulated his ambitious assessment of how architecture functioned in classical Greek society during a time in which he was on a quest to understand the same for his own era. In his Greek explorations, the idea that architecture shapes and is shaped by society reemerges, having already appeared during Scully’s investigations of the late-nineteenth-century wooden domestic architecture of the American Northeast. There Scully had argued that democratic intent, echoing the founding American political spirit, undergirded the physical characteristics of the Shingle Style—the expansive porch, the multifunctional entrance hall, the towering hearth that anchored the home to its site. These architectural expressions both reflected and furthered the prevailing democratic mindset of their society. As a graduate student, Scully had read Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (1914). In this book, the Englishman Scott introduced the nineteenth-century concept of empathy as central to the experience of architecture, asserting that architecture’s meaning stems in part from the human functions it supports and the emotions it evokes. “We have transcribed ourselves into terms of architecture,” Scott proposed, and “architecture into terms of ourselves.”43 While this notion of empathy may have been percolating in Scully’s mind for a few years, it was his encounter with the Temples of Hera at Paestum in 1951 that highlighted the significance of empathy for Scully.44 Indeed, in the temples he recognized a perfect demonstration of Scott’s empathy, of the Greeks constructing a strong, upright form to personify and honor their

80

VINCENT SCULLY

deity Hera. From this point forward, Scully embraced empathy as integral to the human experience of architecture. It continued to shape his future scholarship, teaching, and understanding of the built environment. Greek sacred architecture embodied the culture’s beliefs, the inherited reverence for the earth goddess passed on through the Olympian gods, whom the Greeks recognized in topographical features and honored with strong, representative forms strategically placed within the natural, and already holy, landscape. As the notion of reciprocity between architecture and society guided Scully’s ancient Greek studies, as it had his Shingle Style explorations, the concept became more fine-tuned by expanding the idea of what architecture is—not merely the man-made structure itself, but the interplay between the environment (natural or man-made) and human intervention. For Scully, the idea of reciprocity between architecture and society would apply to all eras, including his own. Indeed, from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, as he worked his way through the study of antiquity, Scully simultaneously reassessed modern architecture. This double focus emerged in his writings and lectures, which overwhelmingly centered on contemporary topics yet frequently referenced antiquity—the Acropolis in Athens when discussing Le Corbusier’s later, sculptural work; the majesty of the First and Second Temples of Hera at Paestum, as expressed by Kahn’s emphasis on the column; the earth goddess Astarte’s conical mountain and horned enclosure in connection with Wright’s Beth Sholom Synagogue of 1959 outside Philadelphia.45 Thus, Scully’s rebuttal to Thompson, published in Art Bulletin in 1964, can be seen as more than a defense of the architectural historian’s own position. It can be read as a broader statement about how Scully viewed art.46 Scully’s approach merged Scott’s notion of empathy, Focillon’s emphasis on form and meaning, and the Greeks’ interwoven view of the natural and man-made world to identify a means by which, through the experience of art, humans could perceive reality. It is also worth noting that Scully’s understanding of art bore historical and contemporary relevance. Scully noted that the generations succeeding the classical Greeks too often separated form and meaning.47 He would recognize and rebel against this tendency in the work of modernist architects, many of whom he saw as overly focused on buildings as formal objects and inattentive to the contexts for which they designed. In seeing a historical phenomenon at play in his own time, Scully had established a pattern that would remain throughout his professional life: he would traverse epochs and civilizations and span millennia, ultimately conflating the past with the present.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Rewriting Modern Architecture (1955–1962) From the mid-1950s through the early 1960s, as Scully worked his way through antiquity, he maintained a firm footing in the present. In conjunction with his completed Shingle Style investigation and his ongoing work on Greek sacred architecture, Scully had begun to rethink modern architecture, both how it had evolved and where it might be going. Scully’s inquiry into modern architecture dovetailed with a second MoMArelated career-building opportunity: Hitchcock and Johnson convinced MoMA director Alfred Barr to commission from Scully a short book called “What is Modern Architecture?” as a follow-up to the Modern Architecture catalog that had been published with the famed exhibition in 1932.1 Johnson submitted Scully’s sixty-four-page manuscript to Arthur Drexler, MoMA’s incoming chief curator, in 1955, and Barr ultimately declined to publish the book.2 Barr’s rejection, while likely disheartening, did not deter Scully from continuing with the topic. Rather, he presented his conclusions in January 1957 in Detroit, Michigan, at a joint meeting of the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians.3 With a paper entitled “Modern Architecture: Toward a Redefinition of Style,” the recently tenured professor, aged 36, offered a new history of modern architecture’s evolution, a version grounded in the Western societal impulse for democracy, to replace the dominant narrative established in the early 1940s by the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion. Scully had long taken issue with Giedion’s and his cohorts’ approach to modern architecture. He had voiced such thoughts a decade earlier at the What is Happening to Modern Architecture? symposium in 1948, making clear his discomfort with “the neo-Bauhaus of Harvard”; in that case, Scully lambasted Gropius and Breuer for disregarding Wright’s contribution to contemporary architecture.4 Indeed, Giedion was intimately connected to both the original Bauhaus and its American manifestation at the GSD, thanks in large part to Gropius. 81

82

VINCENT SCULLY

Gropius and Giedion met in the spring of 1923 in Weimar at the first Bauhaus exhibition. In subsequent years the men became friends, a relationship fortified by their involvement with the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), an influential group of European architects who gathered every few years from 1928 through 1959 to exchange ideas about key topics in modern architecture and urban planning, from existenceminimum housing to the future of the city.5 By the late 1930s, ensconced at the GSD as the chair of the architecture department, Gropius discovered an opportunity to achieve two goals at once: secure a prestigious position for his friend Giedion, who had had limited professional success to that point; and more importantly, bolster the architectural modern movement with a strong and coherent backstory, which Giedion could provide. Harvard’s Charles Elliot Norton Professorship, a year-long position that required the recipient to give at least six lectures on his area of expertise, afforded the perfect mechanism to carry out these objectives.6 On Gropius’s weighty recommendation, GSD Dean Joseph Hudnut, a proponent of modern architecture and a member of the Norton selection committee, persuaded his fellow committee members to award the 1938/39 professorship to the relatively unknown Giedion over the famous writer Thomas Mann. At stake for Gropius, aside from helping his friend, was the widespread acceptance of and appreciation for the modern movement. The correspondence between Gropius and Giedion in the months preceding the latter’s arrival at Harvard conveyed the immense importance both men placed on Giedion’s pending Norton lectures. In one letter, Gropius wrote to Giedion, “Since by my coming [to Harvard] and the presence of Hudnut the entire question of architecture has become topical here in all heads, I thought, nobody could better engage the breach and give really fundamental explanations for our movement than you.”7 Giedion was to carry out the very crucial work of synthesizing the modern movement and underscoring the essential differences between the old, historicist, and style-driven approaches to architecture—that which came before—and the technologically and socially progressive modern movement. Likewise, the idea of packaging the modern movement as a coherent whole—and a historically mandated whole at that—occupied the forefront of Giedion’s mind. “I want to simplify things as far as I am capable, and for once to try actually to obtain a total overview,” Giedion wrote. “In this manner the students should get the awareness and above all the reassurance that they truly stand in a tradition and that it is their task, now finally, to arrive at . . . a synthesis.”8 Indeed, as architectural historian Eduard F. Sekler pointed out, Giedion sought to “create a new kind of Zeitgeschichte (history of one’s own time), a discipline designed to help one’s own period to achieve a consciousness of itself.”9 Giedion’s Norton lectures, which would total twelve in all, were his initial attempt. Between inexpert translations from their German originals and Giedion’s less-than-fluent English, the lectures drew a steadily dwindling audience as the series progressed. Yet, once heavily

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

83

edited and published two years later as Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Giedion’s history of modern architecture found firm purchase. As Gropius wrote to Giedion following the book’s appearance, “People absolutely did not understand you after your lectures, but now they slowly gain respect; there is a lot of talk about your book and this with respect even in the camp of the enemy.”10 In March 1943, Harvard University Press issued Space, Time and Architecture, a 601-page tome featuring 321 black-and-white illustrations integrated throughout the text (an improvement over the then-typical architectural-book layout, which isolated the text from the images in the rear of the book, forcing the reader to flip back and forth). Despite its size and wealth of images, the book sold for only five dollars, which felt like a bargain to reviewers, including Hitchcock.11 Growing interest in the topic of modern architecture coupled with the book’s low cost necessitated a second printing in August 1941, just five months after the book initially appeared. By 1954, the book was in the third of its eventual five editions, and its tenth printing.12 Space, Time and Architecture would continue to have an immense impact, offering a history of the modern movement that sought to unite architecture and science, largely crediting the latter with the maturation of the former. During the book’s first twenty years in print, it sold almost 65,000 copies; in hindsight, one commentator would describe it as “the bible for a generation of architects.”13 Despite its universalist aspirations, Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture was a highly personal book. At its core rested the author’s belief that, in the nineteenth century, a problematic rift emerged between thought (science) and feeling (art) and that contemporary society would inevitably reconcile the two. During the late baroque period, according to Giedion, “an astonishing unity subsist[ed] between methods of thought and of feeling,” with the mentalities of the scientist and artist frequently extant within the same person. Since the time of the Industrial Revolution in the mideighteenth century, however, the alignment of thought and feeling had declined, eroding entirely by the nineteenth century, with people increasingly siloed within one mentality to the detriment of the other. Yet, in the early twentieth century, a synthesis of thought and feeling emerged in Cubist painting and sculpture, the multifaceted planes of which depicted many perspectives simultaneously, flattening space and time into a flowing continuum. Giedion likewise identified this space/time convergence in architecture, a synthesis of thought and feeling, science and art, made possible by technological advances and exemplified in the work of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and others. Thus we arrived at the midtwentieth century as the modern movement broke through the thought/ feeling divide to achieve a merger of art and science not seen since the late baroque masters three centuries before. Modern architecture, thanks to technological prowess and the “universality” of men like Gropius, would usher us into our next great phase as a progressive society.14

84

VINCENT SCULLY

Scully read Giedion’s treatise within his first year as an art history graduate student at Yale, before he took the summer design studio in preparation for teaching Carroll Meeks’s course for architects in the fall of 1947. In the spring of 1948, three months after the What is Happening to Modern Architecture? panel at MoMA, Scully published his first article, “Architecture as a Science: Is the Scientific Method Applicable to Architectural Design?” in Yale Scientific Magazine. Scully’s answer to the question his title posed was a resounding “No,” despite the fact that, he believed, “today the vast body of architectural thought equates science and architecture more rigorously than at any time in the past.”15 He offered a reasoned analysis of architectural thinkers—beginning with Vitruvius and moving through Alberti, Palladio, Laugier, and “an odd assortment of bedfellows” up through the present day—to support his conclusion that “architecture is not formula but form . . . immediate, actual, and various . . . It is neither concepts nor intentions but buildings, each of which is absolute in itself but which at the same time exists in a relative relationship to other buildings and to other works of art.” And unlike scientific formulae, which may be proved experimentally but are often dealt with in abstract terms, Scully believed that architecture “must be seen and experienced.”16 He positioned the architect as more than a scientist: indeed, while the scientist works with fixed givens—H20 is always the formula for water, for example—the architect has no such luxury. “Forms grow each time [they are used] from processes of conception and evaluation which are not susceptible to rule and which cannot be automatically reproduced.” Furthermore, the architect’s “evaluation at each moment is tied to a variety of actualities—programs, economies, materials, structural possibilities—but most of all to man and the constant changing necessities of man. For man he creates an environment. He forms man and he creates human culture . . . At each moment, [the architect] is a responsible man.” Scully continued, “This quality of constant reevaluation and analysis can best be seen in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright . . . who brings forward richly into our own time that capacity to reevaluate and to grow.”17 Note that here, in Scully’s first publication, he emphasized reevaluation and growth as critical aspects of architectural creation. As his own career progressed, Scully would likewise see the ability to assess and change direction as a crucial element of his own creative activity. In addition, the connection between architecture and responsibility to humankind that Scully set forth in the article would persist as a guiding feature of his life’s work. In hindsight, it is easy to read in Scully’s indictment of the scientific method an implicit criticism of Giedion, whose Space, Time and Architecture prioritized technological and functional aspects of architecture over the discipline’s social and experiential elements. For Scully the intimate relationship between architecture and society was no doubt reinforced by the time he spent immersed in the antiquities of Italy and Greece, which he was finally able to visit in the early 1950s. Thus, when he presented the

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

85

revamped “What is Modern Architecture?” manuscript as “Modern Architecture: Toward a Redefinition of Style” to an audience of his peers in January 1957, Scully had been working through Giedion’s arguments for nearly a decade, and his criticism was no longer subtle. From the start of his lecture, Scully made it clear that his goal was to put forth an alternate history of modern architecture to challenge Giedion’s. He began by skewing the latter’s notion of “Space-Time” and suggested a seemingly simpler explanation: Giedion’s view of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural development has been especially influential among architects who— through an iconoclasm they have imbibed from some of their pedagogical masters—have otherwise tended to be suspicious of historical investigation in any form. Their approval of Space, Time and Architecture would seem to have arisen from the fact that it gave them what they wanted: a strong technological determinism, a sense of their lonely, rational heroism in the face of an unintegrated world. But it gave them more: myths and martyrs, and a new past all their own. It presented them with a historical mirror, so adjusted as to reflect only their own images in its glass. What they did not want was to be told that they were working in a style. That is, they wished to be recognized but not identified, and for this there were many reasons, some superficial and some profound. Space, Time and Architecture brilliantly avoided the difficulty of identification by producing instead a formula, that is, “Space-Time.” This cabalistic conjunction (or collision) had both the qualities necessary for an acceptable architectural slogan: at once a spurious relation to science and a certain incomprehensibility except in terms of faith. Like all the best slogans it could mean anything because, even as one shouted it, one might entertain the comfortable suspicion that it need not, in fact, mean anything at all. For example, the events of the years around 1910, which do in fact culminate a long development, may be described in simpler and more generally applicable words, such as fragmentation and continuity: fragmentation of objects into their components and the redirection of these elements into a continuous movement in space.18 Thus began Scully’s revised history of modern architecture, which encompassed the major Western architectural developments from the mideighteenth century to his present day, and he labeled it the “Architecture of Democracy.”19 “This architecture,” he explained, “has grown out of the programs of modern mass democracy and it demonstrates the character of that democracy”—namely the impulse toward equality and freedom that drove the French and the American Revolutions in the later eighteenth century. Scully thus aligned modern architecture not with the Space-Time thought/feeling convergence of Giedion, but with the overriding social and political ideal of the past two centuries.

86

VINCENT SCULLY

Scully’s 1957 “Modern Architecture: Towards a Redefinition of Style” reached far beyond its initial conference audience; it was published as an article that year in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal and twice the following year, in Susanne K. Langer’s edited collection Reflections on Art and in the College Art Journal.20 And then in 1961, New York publisher George Braziller issued Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, a short book that, as an installment of The Great Ages of World Architecture series, aimed to bring to the general public new and original ideas in literature, art, and architecture. In the introduction to Modern Architecture, Scully declared that the book grew out of the 1957 talk, and while the text had been “entirely rewritten, much expanded, and considerably rethought,” it nonetheless expressed the “essentially unchanged historical view upon which the original talk was based.”21 In two parts, the book addressed the history of modern architecture (Part 1. Fragmentation and Continuity) and contemporary architectural developments (Part 2. Order and Act). In essence, Scully had refined his thoughts and tailored them to an interested lay readership. Unlike Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, which required the reader to wade through hundreds of pages, Scully’s Modern Architecture’s mere thirty-nine pages of text could be covered in an afternoon. And as Scully had intended, his book described an architectural modern movement that privileged man, not science and technology, as Giedion had proffered. Above all, Scully crafted a narrative that placed humanity, society, and community front and center. The opening paragraph set the stage for this new history, which is undeniably sociological and psychological as well as architectural. It began, Modern architecture is a product of Western civilization. It began to take shape during the later eighteenth century, with the democratic and industrial revolutions that formed the modern age. Like all architecture, it has attempted to create a special environment for human life and to image the thoughts and actions of human beings as they have wished to believe themselves to be. In these two fundamental attempts the modern man has faced psychic difficulties unparalleled in the West since the time of the breakup of Rome. The old, Christian, preindustrial, predemocratic way of life has progressively broken away around him so that he has come to stand in a place no human beings have ever quite occupied before. He has become at once a tiny atom in a vast sea of humanity and an individual who recognizes himself as being utterly alone. He has therefore vacillated between a frantic desire to find something comprehensible to belong to and an equally consuming passion to express his own individuality and to act on his own. Modern architecture has mirrored the tensions of this state of mind and has itself embodied the character of the age that produced them. It has acted as much more than a simple reflection of its society. Like all art, it has revealed some of the basic truths of the human condition and, again like all art, has played a

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

87

part in changing and reforming that condition itself. From its first beginnings it has shown us ourselves as modern men and told us what we are and want to be.22 With this opening, Scully established the context for his narrative that traced the evolution of modern architecture. Yet, he did something more— he described his life-long struggle, which paralleled that of the modern human: lost in the crowd, one of many, looking for something to belong to yet longing to be unique. Scully saw this mortal plight writ large in the built environment, with architecture at once reflecting and reforming how we understand ourselves and our place in the world. Recall that years before— after his lonely childhood, difficult college years, and horrifying war encounters—grasping for something to ground him, Scully landed on architecture. And so it is through architecture that he would see the world and understand his place in it, in both a global and an intimate sense. Architecture shapes and is shaped by the society in which it arises. While never overtly announced as such, Modern Architecture was more than the history of modern architecture; it was the story of Scully himself. Indeed, Scully made no attempt to divorce himself from his history of modern architecture; “us,” “ourselves,” and “we” unabashedly peppered his prose, and he acknowledged as much: “The ‘we,’ though dangerous methodologically for the historian, is necessary in speaking of modern architecture, as is the present tense, because it is an image we can recognize as ourselves that we must seek as we attempt to define the beginning of an art that is our own.” It follows that, to identify the beginning of this modern age, we needed to look backward until we found an architecture that did not project a modern image—namely the mid-eighteenth century with the late baroque.23 In the Spanish Steps (1725) in Rome, Scully identified an environment that embodied both freedom and order, that appeared unregulated yet was highly controlled. Despite the stairs’ sinuous form, the composition flowed around a singular point, the central obelisk. As Scully described, “The order is absolutely firm, but against it an illusion of freedom is played.” What’s more, during the late baroque era, he argued, the solid elements—in this case the obelisk—served to dramatize and organize the space, not as a sculptural element in and of itself. It is therefore an architecture that is intended to enclose and shelter human beings in a psychic sense, to order them absolutely so that they can always find a known conclusion at the end of any journey, but finally to let them play at freedom and action all the while. Everything works out; the play seems tumultuous but nobody gets hurt and everybody wins. It is a paternal, or perhaps better a maternal architecture, and creates a world with which, today, only children, if they are lucky, could identify.24

88

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 7.1 Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy, 1725, by Francesco de Sanctis. Photo by Nicolo Campo / Light Rocket / Getty.

In contrast to this spatially organizing and psychically sheltering architecture, Scully offered Le Corbusier’s High Court in Chandigarh, India, as an example of a modern creation in which solids, not the space, have become dominant in form. Thus the building, though helping to define a vast plaza, is also an isolated sculptural image, so designed as to be seen in relation to the profiles of the mountain masses to the north. The space between the natural and the manmade forms is essentially a void between opposing solids, so that the human beings that occupy it are neither sheltered nor brought to a single conclusion. Instead they are exposed to the two separate and hostile realities of human life: what nature is and what men want and do. In the Baroque, as at the Spanish [Steps] or at Versailles, all, even nature, is controlled by the human will. At Chandigarh the human act in the building, itself harsher and more elemental than baroque opera could have imagined, is exposed to the reciprocal action of the natural world. A more tragic view of human fate than held by the early eighteenth century prevails. The balance that results had the effect of a pact between antagonists. There is no outcome, no victory, only the splendid, precarious treaty and the blinding light of recognition of what the realities are.25

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

89

FIGURE 7.2 High Court of Justice, Chandigarh, India, 1952, by Le Corbusier; perspective view of facade facing the basin with silhouettes, vegetation, and the “open hand.” © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.

Within these first three pages of the book, then, Scully provided an overview of where his book would begin—the dissolution of baroque harmony into modern uncertainty—and where it would end—with Le Corbusier as the contemporary architect par excellence. Drawing from the work of older generations of historians, such as Emil Kauffman and HenryRussell Hitchcock, Scully then traced the architectural developments that emerged with the late baroque explosion that swept away the old, existing order. He recognized the emergence of two movements, which he termed Romantic Naturalism and Romantic Classicism—both “romantic,” he explained, because they zeroed in “with exaggerated emotional intensity on a single restricted aspect of human experience.”26 Romantic Naturalism fell on the side of continuity; it embraced freedom, rejected mathematical rigor, and tended toward asymmetry and picturesqueness. Its lineage ran from Marie Antoinette’s rustic Hameau (1782), nineteenth-century English country villas, and Olmsted's landscape designs through the nineteenthcentury Stick and Shingle Styles, the West Coast “cottage style” of Greene and Greene, and twentieth-century American suburbs. In contrast, Romantic Classicism, with its emphasis on clear geometry, linearity, and symmetry, was aligned with order and enclosure; it charted a course from the publications of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett (mid-eighteenth-century British excavators of ancient Greek architecture) and the designs of French revolutionary architects such as Ledoux to the idealized designs of Thomas

90

VINCENT SCULLY

Jefferson in the early nineteenth century and young Le Corbusier in the early twentieth century. Alongside Romantic Naturalism and Romantic Classicism Scully identified yet another movement, namely a penchant for eclecticism that arose in the nineteenth century. He suggested that this impulse to select architectural elements and combine them at will, regardless of their origin or original purpose, mirrored contemporaneous interests in continuity and evolutionary change.27 This emphasis on continuity was especially strong for those on the American continent, Scully posited, where the figurative Open Road of Walt Whitman and the actual open road westward called to pioneering souls, and art and literature “celebrated images of homelessness, movement, and continuous flow.”28 The rest of Part 1 finds Scully parsing architectural developments leading up to the 1940s as various permutations of continuity and order. These include a union of the two—as seen in Wright’s early work in America. They also include reactions to continuity, namely the structural rationalism of Viollet-le-Duc and the stripped-down classicism of Adolf Loos, which merged into a “Romanticism of the Machine,” seen in Gropius’s Model Factory in Cologne, Germany (1914).29 The penultimate synthesis of continuity and order then emerged in the work of Mies van der Rowe in the late 1920s. In his German Pavilion (known as the Barcelona Pavilion) at the 1929 World’s Fair in Barcelona, Mies masterfully balanced the American

FIGURE 7.3 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain, 1929, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; re-creation. Ashley Pomeroy at English Wikipedia; Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0).

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

91

FIGURE 7.4 Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York, 1959, by Frank Lloyd Wright. Bettman / Getty.

instinct for continuity with the European drive for order. Nearly thirty years later, in the United States, Wright brought this whole era of experimentation with continuity to a close with the Guggenheim Museum (1959) in New York City, a building that became pure interior, turning entirely inward. Scully characterized the Guggenheim as Wright’s final architectural gesture, as “a wish-fulfilling environment, in which everything flows together and no individual act is possible or necessary. As such, it is the final monument to the mobile, mass-moving aspect of American democratic mythology and it brings the spatially continuous phase of modern architecture . . . to its only possible denouement and, probably, to its close.”30 Thus ended Scully’s treatment of the history of modern architecture. In Part 2, Order and Act, Scully addressed recent architectural developments, from the 1940s through his time of writing in 1960. He began by noting that the International Style compromise—the attempted balance of continuity and enclosure—splintered by the mid-twentieth century. The uneasy result appeared in works like Gropius’s Harvard Graduate Center (1950) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in Scully’s estimation Gropius’s asymmetrical arrangement of closed, rectangular buildings failed to achieve the desired harmony of opposites. Mies, operating

92

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 7.5 Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, 1951, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS ILL,47PLAN.V,1–4, photo by Jack E. Boucher.

in America, offered a solution soon adopted by many, as his work turned increasingly classical and ordered, his forms reduced to a steel framework enclosing interior space, such as the Farnsworth House (1951) in Plano, Illinois. Offering a classically inspired path forward, adopted and experimented with in the 1950s by architects such as Philip Johnson and Eero Saarinen, Mies’s designs gave rise to a host of single-pavilion structures wrapped in thin, linear skins, variations on the Miesian theme. In Scully’s assessment, Buckminster Fuller’s space-frame geodesic domes—though far from classically inspired—arrived at the same end. The resulting spaces were too simplistic to functionally support or encourage human activity.31 Rather, Scully saw most promise in architecture concerned with human action. The work of Alvar Aalto offered a prime example. In the past twenty years, Scully wrote, Aalto’s buildings . . . have all seemed to grow out of a direct response to the kind of human action they were intended to provide for. They do not embody such action in a figural sense, but they contain, encourage, and dramatize it, and their shapes seem to derive from it . . . Aalto’s design is convincing because unlike the new classicism, it is interested in what people do, and, unlike Wright’s work, does not attempt to smooth out individual actions into a single rhythmic movement.32

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

93

FIGURE 7.6 Säynätsalo Town Hall, Finland, 1952, by Alvar Aalto. Tiia Monto, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A seeming failure of Aalto’s work, though, was that its structure wasn’t an integral part of the building’s internal logic; instead, structure was at the whim of compositional effect. This next step, to integrate structure and human function within a design, fell to Louis Kahn. While completing Modern Architecture, Scully was mentally processing what would become the first monograph on Kahn, published by Braziller in 1962. His discussion of Kahn in Modern Architecture offered a condensed version of the monograph’s argument, which positioned Kahn as integrating space, massing, and structure. “Thus the setting [Kahn has] created for human action does not seem an arbitrary extension of the human desire for utterly untrammeled perfection—as those by Mies do—but has a challenging, rational, and solemnly active reality of its own.” In the Richards Medical Laboratory (1960) at the University of Pennsylvania, with its delineated served and service spaces, the design “reinforces human recognition of an environment both meticulously realistic and heroic in itself: one which is intended to make the scientist feel not in command but both mysteriously and comprehensively challenged.” Scully continued, so Kahn’s buildings are reverently built, monumentally constructed of toughly jointed parts. They reject the easier releases of spatial continuity [as attempted by Gropius and his acolytes building on the International Style] and neo-classicism [as practiced by Mies and his followers] alike,

94

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 7.7 Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1960, by Louis I. Kahn. Collection of C. W. Lynn. and most architects seem to regard the method which is producing them as the most potentially creative, truly “objective” one in use today.33 Scully clearly agreed, positioning Kahn as architecture’s next step. Of course, there was the unique case of Le Corbusier, whom Scully next considered as he ended his discussion of contemporary architecture. “Le Corbusier has been the most influential architect of the past forty years,” Scully declared. He went on to address only a single, and what he felt to be perhaps least understood, aspect of his work. Le Corbusier, after a lifetime of consistent effort, finally discovered a means for embodying the human act in architectural form . . . [His] method became one which made a building not only a container for human beings and their functions—as most buildings are—but also—as

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

95

most buildings are not—a sculptural unity that itself seems to act, like figural sculpture, and so acting to embody the peculiarly human meaning of the function it contains.34 Before exploring Scully’s claim that Le Corbusier’s later work moved beyond the focus on space to act as sculpture, it is worth pausing a moment to explore why the emphasis on space—or put another way, the lack of attention on sculpture—is an issue in the first place. The brief answer is that, since the 1940s, designers and critics had been exploring the idea of contemporary monuments, how architectural works—in the past creations ranging from the Parthenon in Athens to the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC—could symbolically embody the aspirations of modern society without relying on historicist imagery, such as columns and porticos, which too closely echoed the stripped classicism adopted by Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascist regimes.35 Here Scully landed on Scott’s notion of empathy as central to the experience of architecture, where architecture can evoke human emotions and states of being, as monuments are wont to do.36 In Scully’s assessment, the way to achieve a new monumentality was through an amalgamation of interior and exterior, space and sculpture, volume and mass. And he identified one contemporary architect—Le Corbusier—whose mature work blended space and sculpture in an exemplary manner. Of course, Le Corbusier’s designs did not appear, fully formed, as simultaneously spatial and sculptural; he progressed from a focus on interior space in his early works, such as the prototypical design of the Citrohan House (1920), to an exploratory combination of space and sculpture, as in the Swiss Pavilion (1931) in Paris, to a convincing merger of the two in the Unité d’Habitation (1952) in Marseilles, France, creating a building that was neither solid nor void, both space and sculpture, an embodiment of active monumentality. As Scully explained, the rough poured-concrete structure, raised on its thick piloti, contained the interlocking apartment units, but the brise-soleil sunscreens along the facades removed human-scale elements such as doors and windows, rendering the overall building as a sculptural entity, not a container for human activity. The Unité “thus stands upon its muscular legs as an image of human uprightness and dignifies all its individual units within a single embodiment of the monumental human force which makes them possible.” Each unit overlooked the neighboring mountains and the sea, and it is in relation to this natural context that it must be viewed—just as ancient Greek temples, as Scully posited in The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, must be seen in their larger natural environment to be fully understood. “So perceived, [the Unité] is a humanist building, as we empathetically associate ourselves with it, in the contrasting landscape, as a standing body analogous to our own.”37 Again, here Scully turned to Scott, quoting his discussion of empathy. Scott wrote of humanist architecture in 1914: “The center of that architecture was the human body; its method to transcribe in stone the

96

VINCENT SCULLY

body’s favorable states; and the moods of the spirit took visible shape along its borders, power and laughter, strength and terror and calm.” Scott then went on, “Ancient architecture excels in its perfect definition; Renaissance architecture in the width and courage of its choice.” In these terms, Le Corbusier would seem to have passed beyond choice, beyond Renaissance humanism, to the essentials of a more nakedly Greek “definition,” as his Unité arrives at the embodiment of an act. The space-dominated, environmental continuity of the materialistically confident late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which the image of man normally disappeared from architecture, was thus cast aside in favor of a new, midtwentieth-century image of the embattled human presence in the world.38 After Unité, Le Corbusier’s union of opposites continued with NotreDame du Haut (1955), a Roman Catholic chapel commonly referred to by its location in Ronchamp, France. The chapel, in form reminiscent of both a great bell and a wind-propelled ship, seems to shift before the viewer’s eyes between space and sculpture, enclosure and action, protective cavern and explosive force. Canted walls simultaneously contract and expand, lunge and rise, while the roof dips down and swoops up as if the prow of a ship riding stormy seas. From one angle, the building reads as a bulging hollow shell (cave), while from another it appears as a thrusting vertical force (column). “It is most of all,” Scully asserted, an image of modern man, full of memories, with an ironic view of himself, no longer believing that he occupies the center of the world by right. He is under pressure in the interior of Ronchamp, which does not swell outward from him but presses in upon him . . . He can only act, or gesture; and that act . . . has no defined boundary and is open-ended toward the ultimate reaches of space. As with Unité and the Greek temple, the human act must be understood in relation to the natural landscape, “which is separate from it, possibly hostile to it, but which, for us as for the Greeks, is real.”39 This unavoidable interaction between humans and nature featured strongly in Le Corbusier’s works following Ronchamp, in particular the Monastery of La Tourette—a concrete cube clinging to a steeply sloped hillside—and the Capitol Complex at Chandigarh, India, where the collected buildings work in concert, against the grand backdrop of the Himalayas, as spatial and sculptural creations. Scully singled out the High Court, which acts as both hollowed shell and upward force, to depict Le Corbusier’s ability to fashion “monumental architecture in modern terms,” as so many other architects and political groups such as the Nazis and fascists had attempted but failed to do. The static columned facades of the neoclassical buildings, he explained, “do not value the individual act; but Le Corbusier’s [High Court’s piers] aggrandize the man who stands before them by stretching his own

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

97

FIGURE 7.8 Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1955, by Le Corbusier. Laslo Irmes / RDB / ullstein bild / Getty.

FIGURE 7.9 Plan of Capitol Complex, Chandigarh, India, 1952, by Le Corbusier. © F. L. C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.

98

VINCENT SCULLY

force empathetically upward with them. In this way, in balance with the landscape forms, they embody the human act of authority in the Court.”40 Having underscored Le Corbusier’s value and the role of empathy in architectural experience, Scully then circled back to his introductory declaration that architecture has “shown us to ourselves as modern men and told us what we are and want to be.”41 Architecture can show us the way forward. He concluded with an existentialist nod, ultimately quoting Albert Camus. Men thus return to earth as men. They no longer either ignore it for a dream of ideal formal or mechanical perfection or seek to evade human identification by dissolving into it through other, “natural,” or evolutionary, dreams. They appear to reject perfect protection and mobility alike—so leave the cave, come off the road, forsake the river, and take a stand. This seems the fullest realization in architecture so far of the new humanity, self-governing and expecting no favors, which first began to be imagined two hundred years ago and sought its ancestry in Greece: “a shaft . . . inflexible and free.”42 Modern Architecture garnered positive reviews overall. Peter Collins of McGill University noted that Scully’s book was “suffused with insight” and predicted that readers would be “captivated by [Scully’s] power and lucidity of verbal expression, as well as by his forcefulness of literary style.”43 Walter L. Creese of the University of Illinois characterized Modern Architecture as a “brilliant and incisive exposition” that closed Braziller’s The Great Ages of World Architecture series “with a bang, not a whimper.” Indeed, Creese’s assessment—printed in the College Art Association’s Art Journal—was intended to cover the Great Ages series as published to that point, which included volumes on Roman architecture by Frank Brown, Greek architecture by Robert Scranton (who would soon pen a biting review of Scully’s The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods), and baroque and rococo architecture by Henry A. Millon. Yet, Creese committed only a few sentences each to the seven other books in the series, dedicating more than half of the review’s four columns to Modern Architecture. He concluded that Scully’s book, which “in its freshness and originality [is] the archetype of the whole series,” offered “a new synthesis of ideas fused with such a glowing light over such a wide platform that it is bound to be a beacon.”44 Alongside the praise bestowed on Modern Architecture, the reviewers registered a handful of reservations. Both Collins and Creese noted the brevity of the text, which was in keeping with the series format. Nevertheless, the unevenness with which Scully allocated the book’s thirty-nine pages was the main point of criticism for Collins who pointed out that Scully devoted nine pages to Le Corbusier yet only five pages to the 100-year span from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. Collins also mentioned “minor lapses and contradictions” within the text—for example, the fact that Scully characterized modern architecture as “a product of Western civilization” despite Scully’s own acknowledgement of Wright’s debt to Pre-Columbian

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

99

and Japanese cultures for his own architectural creations.45 Meanwhile, Creese took issue with a perceived inconsistency around Scully’s gendering of architecture, in particular that his use of “feminine” to describe the baroque and Romantic positions implied that “all future architecture would have to be by gender masculine.”46 Ironically, both reviewers critiques prefigured criticisms that Scully and other historians would face in coming decades—namely an over-reliance on the Western architectural canon and questions of sexism, implicit or overt. Yet, neither of these issues were at the forefront of discussion in the mid-twentieth century, and they did little to negatively impact the book’s reception. With its 152 black-and-white images and audience-grabbing prose, Modern Architecture proved itself worthy of keeping on shelves. Braziller issued the book in five printings during the decade following its publication, and in 1974, he put forth a revised edition comprising the original two-part book and a new third section in which Scully reviewed the architectural developments since the early 1960s. *

*

*

Meanwhile, straddling the 1961 appearance of Modern Architecture, Scully published two additional books with Braziller, each part of related collections aimed toward popular audiences: Frank Lloyd Wright (1960), a volume in the Masters of World Architecture series; and Louis I. Kahn (1962), in the Makers of Contemporary Architecture series. In these brief treatments, Scully positioned the individual architects as case studies that supported his argument in Modern Architecture; for Scully, Wright and Kahn embarked on their own generational searches for order, both embodying and furthering the sociocultural concerns of their times. The book on Wright, which appeared after the architect’s death in 1959, was the first to examine Wright’s process and his large body of work, from his early houses in Oak Park to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Scully asserted that, in his thought and designs, Wright encompassed two latenineteenth-century American attitudes: “continuous becoming,” described as “the flux and flow which characterize modern times and the compulsion toward unity which is the democratic will,” combined with a “Nietzschean individualism.” These dual mentalities merged in Wright to create “the mobile individual, estranged from all that is not himself, who must go forward forever, continuously forward alone, beyond both nature and civilization, which are the two major ‘holds’ on him. It is a most persuasive image of modern man.”47 Scully concluded that, through his architecture, Wright simultaneously reflected his time and propelled it forward. Scully’s book on Wright—comprised of twenty-two pages of text, 128 black-and-white illustrations, and a chronological list of the architect’s major buildings and projects—received mixed reviews, with architectural historians offering more negative critiques than the nonarchitectural commentators. For example, Grant C. Mason, who had published on Wright’s early architecture, wrote a largely critical review of Scully’s book for the Journal of the Society

100

VINCENT SCULLY

of Architectural Historians. Mason noted that “for the reader who knows something about Wright to begin with [the book] adds little to the already considerable literature on the subject” and results in “a somewhat superficial romp through Wright [that] . . . prick[s] the interest only to be dropped as the text rushes on to the ‘next phase’ of the career.”48 Likewise, David Gebhard— who would soon begin a long career teaching architectural history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote in the College Art Association’s Art Journal that Scully had provided only a “fragmentary picture of Wright” that “distort[ed] the significance of his work and contributions.” Furthermore, Gebhard suggested Mumord’s treatments of Wright in the New Yorker magazine as preferable for both historians and the general public.49 In contrast, James R. Kerr, a professor in political science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, found Scully’s overview of Wright to be quite compelling, noting that Scully had “carefully examined the influences that shaped [Wright’s] works” while “avoid[ing] the easy generalities and clichés that characterize so many studies of this late American genius.”50 Scully’s book on Kahn, published in 1962, found a more receptive audience among architectural historians. While noting that Scully’s interpretation of Kahn was “abstruse,” reviewer John Jacobus complemented Scully’s treatment of Kahn as “penetrating” and marveled that “it illuminates much of contemporary design that reached far beyond . . . Kahn to take in the work of Mies, Johnson, Bunshaft, indeed, of Eero Saarinen . . . !” Jacobus concluded that Scully’s book, in spite of “minor inconsistencies,” was “the basic work on Kahn today.”51 Jacobus’s endorsement must be tempered by the knowledge that Scully’s book-length study of Kahn’s architecture was the only such work at that point.52 And, in keeping with the Braziller series’ format, the book was rather diminutive in size—a mere thirty-four pages supplemented by 130 black-andwhite illustrations, chronologies of Kahn’s life and his projects, and two esoteric statements by the architect himself. The primary difference between Scully’s volumes on Wright and Kahn, though, was that while the book on Wright catalogued the architect’s impact after death, Kahn was still very much alive when Scully’s text appeared. Additionally, Kahn’s success, unlike Wright’s, had been rather recent, only a decade in the making; thus, a large part of Scully’s task was to establish Kahn as a successful architect and rectify “that [Kahn] has been seriously underrated” in the United States. “To begin to understand Kahn requires a major intellectual effort,” Scully argued on the initial page of the text, “and indeed it ultimately involves the rewriting of contemporary architectural history,” a feat that Scully had already attempted in his Modern Architecture of a year earlier. But in case the reader had yet to encounter Modern Architecture, Scully opened his book on Kahn with an overview. A generation brought up on Hitchcock’s and Johnson’s International Style, of 1932, or even Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, of 1941, could hardly hope to perceive Kahn’s quality at once. Nor could he, more

REWRITING MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1955–1962)

101

importantly, have been able to find himself easily in it. From this observation, one of the major factors contributing to Kahn’s lack of significant production during the thirties and forties comes to light. Kahn was, in large part, a part of that academic education, centered upon the French École des Beaux-Arts and called in America, generically, Beaux-Arts, whose later phases many historians of modern architecture, including myself, had so long ago regarded as bankrupt of ideas. In a formal, symbolic, and sociological sense the Beaux-Arts probably was bankrupt by the early 20th century, not least in the 1920s in America. But [contemporary research] now force[s] us to recognize the tenacious solidity of much of its academic theory . . . That theory insisted upon a masonry architecture of palpable mass and weight wherein clearly defined and ordered spaces were to be formed and characterized by the structural solids themselves.53 It is in Kahn’s work that Scully saw this historical concept of order and solidity, seemingly rejected for decades by modernist practitioners, reemerge. Kahn’s architecture, like Wright’s, was marked by and left its mark on the world in which he lived. Yet Kahn’s story spoke of a younger generation’s quest to bridge the perceived chasm between Beaux Arts classicism and International Style modernism, and in doing so, provided an architecture that could forge a path toward a new humanism. Thus, from the mid-1950s through early 1960s, Scully was thinking through and composing four distinct books that, as a whole, united his understanding of architecture—its relationship to humanity, its relationship to society, what it had been, and what it could do. Scully’s Modern Architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis I. Kahn rested on the same philosophical platform as did The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. Perhaps most noteworthy about this convergence is that, whether considering an ancient society governed by a panoply of all-powerful gods or a contemporary society grappling with globalization and mass urbanization, Scully approached them in the same terms: architecture as a way for humanity to understand and define itself in the world at large. Architecture thus embodies how a society feels about its existence in the world. This idea echoes Scott’s assertion, in his The Architecture of Humanism (1914), that “we have transcribed ourselves into terms of architecture” and “we transcribe architecture in terms of ourselves.” “This,” Scott declared, “is the humanism of architecture.”54 With the mid-eighteenth-century rise of reason, Western societies turned to science as a means to control nature and the world around them. Likewise, Giedion presented modern architecture as a convergence of artistic and scientific thought, feeling and thinking, putting his utmost faith in the idea that technological advances would inevitably lead to human progress. Instead, Scully located contemporary salvation in humanity itself, in the societal quest for democracy and freedom. Scully had his eye on a new humanism, and he would soon play a formative role in its creation.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Death of the Street (late 1950s–1964) In the preface to Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy of 1961, Scully cautioned the reader that he had “rigorously excluded” from the book “almost all city planning,” presumably to focus on modern architecture’s larger historical dimensions and its role in contemporary life.1 The preface to the revised edition, however, published in 1974, announced the arrival of the precise opposite—additional text that “includes as much city planning as could be crammed into it.”2 Scully articulated the reason for his about-face in yet another preface, in 1967, in an all-together different book, American Architecture and Urbanism (1969). Here he declared, “No history of architecture can deal any longer with individual buildings only, or with buildings in a vacuum. There is no difference between architecture and city planning; all must now—or, rather, again—be treated as one.” For Scully, the stakes were high. “Every citizen must now share an active and critical responsibility for the future of the American city, as for that of the American community as a whole. His vote and his direct personal intervention in his own community can help determine the kind of world we will make, and we are in the bitter crisis of that making now.”3 What during the past decade had prompted Scully to go from extolling the virtues of the Architecture of Democracy to fearing for the fate of the American city, the notion of community, and the welfare of society as a whole? This shift reflected a convergence of events, it turns out, beginning with an assault on the city—an attempted remaking of Scully’s beloved New Haven, which had resulted in dire physical and social consequences. *

*

*

In 1954, Richard (Dick) Lee assumed his mayoral post in New Haven. Lee, an Irish/English working-class Catholic, was a natural politician. He parlayed his familiarity with the city, his work experiences at the New Haven Courier Journal and a Yale wartime publication, and his fourteen-year run as 102

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

103

alderman representing the Democratic 17th ward—no doubt interacting with Vincent Scully Sr., who served as the board’s president during some of these years—into a successful run for the city’s top governmental position. A city of nearly 165,000 people, New Haven largely comprised a tight patchwork of streets that had grown up around the town’s original seventeenth-century nine-square grid centered on the Green.4 Lee’s campaign platform focused on the need to rebuild and reinvigorate the flagging New Haven, which had experienced a steady economic decline since the 1920s with the dissolution of its industrial base. Wartime production during the early 1940s helped keep the city afloat, but after the Second World War came to an end, factories closed, workers lost their jobs, and those who could afford to fled the city for the burgeoning suburbs. New Haven found itself in a downward spiral, complete with a flailing business district and blighted neighborhoods, so-called slums often inhabited by low-income and minority populations. Lee promised that, if elected, he would revitalize the city. With future “building czar” Edward Logue at the helm of the New Haven Redevelopment Authority (NHRA) and in close collaboration with leading Yale figures, including urban planning faculty and university administrators, Lee spearheaded a comprehensive plan to remake New Haven, starting with its built environment.5 Such an effort to refashion New Haven had occurred in 1910, when city officials commissioned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and architect Cass Gilbert, both well-known and respected professionals, to design a master plan based on the turn-of-the-century City Beautiful movement. Popularized by the White City, the neoclassical fairground of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition held in Chicago, and architect Daniel Burnham’s subsequent 1909 plan for the same town, City Beautiful principles emphasized the use of measures such as grand boulevards, monumental civic structures, and plentiful greenery, along with attention to transportation and sanitation improvements, to elevate the city’s aesthetic appeal and functionality. Due to shifting political forces and emergent ideas about urban design, in New Haven—with the exception of a few physical interventions, such as the elm-lined Edgewood Boulevard down which Scully walked his dogs during his youth—the Olmsted/Gilbert plan was shelved before most of its recommendations were executed. A very different master plan was developed in 1941 by city planner Maurice Rotival, who joined Yale in 1939 as professor of planning and was instrumental in coordinating the school’s new city planning faculty. In the decade before coming to Yale, the French-born Rotival had worked with Le Corbusier on plans for the North African city of Algiers, where Le Corbusier sought to enact urban principles he had been developing since the 1920s. Le Corbusier’s urbanism, like his architecture, rested on his conviction that the contemporary age deserved a new, organized setting to facilitate modern life. In his book Urbanisme of 1924, which in 1929 was translated into

104

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 8.1 Synthesis of the New Haven Civic Improvement Plan of 1910 and the Pope Plan of 1919. Drawing by Erik Vogt.

English as The City of Tomorrow, he offered a damning assessment of existing urban environments. “A town is a tool,” Le Corbusier declared. “Towns no longer fulfill this function. They are ineffectual; they use up our bodies, they thwart our souls. The lack of order to be found everywhere in them offends us; their degradation wounds our self-esteem and humiliates our sense of dignity. They are not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us.”6 The narrow, winding streets, unhygienic and unfit for the increasingly popular automobile; the low, dark buildings, heavy with the weight of tradition and a dearth of sunlight; the lack of open land to offer denizens respite within the city: these elements had to go. In his 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris, Le Corbusier proposed razing a large section of the city’s historic fabric and rebuilding in a manner that would provide wide boulevards for car travel and dense living quarters and office buildings surrounded by

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

105

manicured green space. Le Corbusier believed that this tower-in-the-park arrangement would offer the best of all worlds to inhabitants: fresh air and sunlight pouring into their modern indoor accommodations, and green space for outside enjoyment. Such environments would be clean, healthy, and easy to navigate, unlike the cramped, unsanitary, historic ramble that comprised large swaths of early-twentieth-century Paris as well as many other cities. Not surprisingly, Le Corbusier’s proposed Parisian interventions generated a significant backlash, and his plan was scrapped. He nevertheless held on to these urban concepts and built upon them, issuing his ideas for the Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) a few years later. The Ville Radieuse took the Plan Voisin a step further, envisioning an entire city separated into zones based on function (or use) that together would make a whole, much as the

106

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 8.2 Plan Voisin for Paris, 1925, model, by Le Corbusier. © F. L. C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.

human body is composed of different systems that collaborate to create a living organism. At the third meeting of CIAM, focused on rational land development and held in Brussels, Belgium, in 1930, Le Corbusier presented his Ville Radieuse, a linear city abstractly based on the human body, with a head (business center), heart (cultural center), arms (residential areas), legs (industrial areas), all connected by a central spine for transportation. Not only would this city provide, in Le Corbusier’s estimation, a rational organization appropriate for the modern age, it would also level the field socially, with everyone living in similar quarters regardless of income or social status. Le Corbusier experimented with his urban ideas in Algiers in the early 1930s, collaborating with Rotival, and then publishing La Ville Radieuse in 1935.7 Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse heavily influenced Rotival and other city planners of the era, even though to that point none of the architect’s largescale urban plans had been executed. Indeed, when Rotival arrived at his professorial post at Yale in the late 1930s and shortly thereafter devised a master plan for the faltering New Haven, he incorporated many of Le Corbusier’s principles into his modernist creation. He revised the plan periodically, issuing a version published in a 1944 pamphlet with the title Tomorrow is Here, a clear riff on Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow.

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

107

FIGURE 8.3 La Ville Radieuse, c. 1930, plan showing functional zoning, by Le Corbusier. © F. L. C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.

Thus in the mid-1950s, when Lee and Logue set out to remake New Haven, Rotival was waiting with the most recent plan, from 1953, in hand, more than ready to contribute.8 The resulting master plan for New Haven called for the demolition of slums, reconstruction in keeping with tower-in-thepark urbanism and functional zoning, and new highway construction to connect the to-be-revived downtown commercial district with the emerging suburbs, as well as with Boston to the north and New York City to the south. Under Lee and the NHRA, more than 30 percent of the city was slated for redevelopment at a cost totaling $500 million. Through the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, the federal government provided much of this funding to acquire “slum” areas, clear the land, and make it available for redevelopment as public housing or, more often, as commercial real estate held by private developers. Logue proved to be a genius at securing government funds, with

108

VINCENT SCULLY

New Haven receiving the highest per capita federal urban renewal expenditure in the country, taking in $458 per person. (In comparison, the far larger and more heavily populated New York City received only $31 per person.)9 Using Rotival’s plan, Lee and the NHRA instituted a multipronged approach to New Haven’s urban renewal that involved clearing dilapidated housing and flagging business areas, building new commercial attractions and neighborhoods, and constructing new highways. The first element of New Haven’s urban renewal program was launched in 1957 with the Oak Street neighborhood, one of the city’s most densely populated and financially bereft communities, composed largely of immigrants. Most of the families who lived there were Italian or Jewish, but Oak Street—which included not only the street itself, but also its extension, the commercial stretch known as Legion Avenue—was where new arrivals scrambling for a foothold usually wound up. Jews, Italians, African Americans, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Irish, Greeks, and others lived cheek by jowl in long rows of dark, timeworn tenements and cold-water flats with junk-strewn back lots.10 In keeping with modernist planning ideas, Lee and his administration envisioned a clean, new environment that necessitated the seizure and destruction of several city blocks of preexisting structures, housing and commercial properties that ranged from passable or in need of updating to highly unlivable, lacking indoor plumbing and other hygienic necessities. The intent was altruistic, at least to a point; proponents of this bulldozeand-rebuild urban renewal believed they were helping both the neighborhood inhabitants and New Haven itself by eradicating one of the city’s worst slums. In practice, however, the Oak Street project caused widespread social upheaval, displacing 3,000 people (881 households) and 350 small businesses.11 Most of these citizens and shop owners were relocated to other New Haven neighborhoods, but in their new environments, they sorely missed the social networks and community structures that had allowed their businesses to thrive and had made Oak Street their home. More than half a century later, surviving displaced residents continued to gather annually to reminisce about the old neighborhood, 42 acres of which were destroyed to make way for a roughly one-mile-long stretch of highway called the Oak Street Connector that linked Routes I-95 and I-91 with the planned downtown Church Street commercial district and its newly constructed hotel, two department stores, small shops, and concrete parking garage.12 As the Oak Street project progressed and the NHRA made strides with Church Street and other initiatives, New Haven achieved national notoriety.13 It was dubbed “the Model City” by politicians and the press for its grand and seemingly successful approach to urban renewal.14 While there were areas of success, the Model City narrative failed to acknowledge the many negative social and physical consequences that stemmed from New Haven’s

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

109

FIGURE 8.4 Oak Street Connector, aerial view looking west, May 1964. New Haven Museum.

urban redevelopment. Between 1956 and 1974, one-fifth of the city’s residents—primarily immigrant, Black, and financially disadvantaged individuals—suffered relocation; 140 acres of land were cleared; nearly 8,000 people lost their homes; 2,200 businesses were shuttered; and thousands of housing units were eliminated.15 Urban renewal charged forward, regardless of the very human cost. *

*

*

Even before the full damage of New Haven’s urban renewal could be understood, Scully had adopted a choice adjective to describe the campaign’s impact on the city and its inhabitants: “cataclysmic.”16 In the mid-1960s, Scully would become active in local protests against the proposed demolition of the New Haven Free Public Library and Post Office, fronting the Green, to create a windswept modernist plaza in front of a new City Hall complex. On the evening of October 19, 1966, under the auspices of the New Haven Preservation Trust, the New Haven Colony Historical Society, and the Connecticut Society of Architects, Scully gave a public lecture detailing what he called “The Threat and the Promise of Urban Redevelopment in New Haven.” Fifty posters advertising the event (“A local affair with national interest!”) were hung throughout New Haven, and an additional thirty around Yale’s campus, making for a tremendous turnout: seven hundred people—New Havenites, architects, planners, and students—filled the Yale Law School auditorium to hear Scully speak. Wielding his giant pointer as he roamed the stage, Scully explained that the “threat” of urban renewal was its grounding in principles that, while accepted fifteen years ago, were

110

VINCENT SCULLY

now outdated. Furthermore, these principles were themselves based on three fallacies, and he, too, had bought into them initially.17 The first, the “cataclysmic,” was repelled by “the complexity and splendid mess of towns,” preferring in its place to tear everything down and start with a clean slate. The second fallacy, the “automotive,” privileged the car at the expense of all else, substituting “vast overdesigned highways and connectors for preexisting neighborhoods.” And the third fallacy, the “suburban,” rejected the city in the first place; it “would just as soon destroy its density and strew it across the countryside,” turning downtown into a genteel shopping plaza devoid of the untidy contingencies of urban life. He also decried a planned circumference ring road, which would have plowed through existing, often lower-income neighborhoods, in essence acting as a moat to isolate (and, in the minds of some university leaders, insulate) Yale from the citizenry of New Haven. To counteract the threat these fallacies posed to New Haven and its people, Scully called on planners and officials—those of the city and the university—to devise thoughtful architectural and sociological principles to guide future redevelopment projects. This was the “promise” referred to in the title of Scully’s lecture.18 Scully’s involvement in these New Haven protest movements, often organized by Margaret (Peggy) Flint in opposition to urban renewal practices that threatened the city’s historic fabric, dovetailed with a growing grassroots interest in historic preservation that gained momentum with the 1963 demolition of New York’s Penn Station and was reflected federally in the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which established the National Register of Historic Places. In the earlier part of the 1960s, though, Scully’s attention was often elsewhere, trained less on his native New Haven or the destruction of Penn Station, and more so on his burgeoning career and increasingly fraught personal life. *

*

*

During the mid-1950s, Scully’s relationship with Nancy began to unravel. Details are few, yet by looking at Scully’s professional activity as the decade progressed, it is not a stretch to imagine that Nancy, the primary caretaker for three boys and wife to an increasingly busy professor, could have easily become disillusioned with their marriage. After returning from the 1951/52 academic year abroad in Italy, Scully began acquiring additional professional responsibilities—teaching classes on modern architecture and architectural history as well as Greek and Roman art and architecture; publishing a portion of his dissertation as a book co-authored with Antoinette Downing in 1952; composing the “What is Modern Architecture?” manuscript for MoMA; writing articles, lecturing, and presenting at conferences; all the while striving for tenure, which he received in 1956. He spent the summers of 1955 and 1956 doing research in Greece and southern Italy, respectively, mostly leaving his family behind. It seems that family responsibilities fell firmly along expected gender lines, with the husband/father pursuing his

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

111

professional aspirations and the wife/mother running the domestic show. It would be completely understandable if Nancy, who possessed a keen intellect of her own and whom Scully partially credited for turning his attention to art history all those years ago, felt unfulfilled. It was Scully, however, who ultimately ended their marriage. In 1956 or 1957, Scully encountered Marion LaFollette Wohl, wife of junior faculty member and Italian Renaissance scholar Hellmut Wohl, at a history of art department function. Scully and Marion soon developed a relationship, which would sound the death knell of their respective marriages. Early on in the affair, Scully attempted to solidify his faltering home life, and put distance between himself and Marion, by taking Nancy and their three children—Daniel (almost 14), Stephen (10), and John (9)—to Greece and Turkey for the 1957/58 academic year. It was during this time that Scully, associated with the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, undertook the bulk of the research and writing for what would become The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. The trip was successful for Scully in terms of academic growth, and in leaving formative impressions on his children— Dan, inspired in part by a visit to the Parthenon, would become an architect, and Steve would become a professor of classical studies. Yet the year away did little to halt Scully’s extramarital entanglement. Once back in New Haven, he and Marion continued their relationship. His marriage grew increasingly strained, and from the late 1950s on, Scully spent more and more time—often sleeping overnight—in his faculty office in Street Hall, ostensibly to avoid the difficult realities of his home life. By fall of 1961 (if not sooner), Scully had taken an apartment in 100 York Square, a recently completed 17-story residential tower adjacent to Yale’s campus, a mere five-minute walk from Kahn’s university Art Gallery to the north and the recently decimated Oak Street neighborhood to the east. He vacated the apartment on May 31, 1962, after the spring semester had ended, and prepared to return to Greece for the coming academic year where, supported in part by a continuation of his Bollingen Fellows grant, he undertook research on Greek architecture from the fifth century BCE for a planned but ultimately unexecuted sequel to the recently published The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods. Like the trip to Greece five years earlier, Scully opted to travel with family. But instead of Nancy and his sons, on September 19, he set sail for Europe with Marion and her young daughters, Ann and Maika Wohl. *

*

*

Meanwhile, as Scully’s marriage languished throughout the second half of the 1950s, his professional life thrived. In 1955, as Lee took mayoral office, Yale University Press published The Shingle Style to much acclaim, just as its author was cultivating the thoughts he would express in Frank Lloyd Wright (1960), Modern Architecture (1961), and Louis I. Kahn (1962). Scully was likewise embarking on a new avenue of inquiry, initiating research into ancient Greek architecture that would become The Earth, the Temple, and

112

VINCENT SCULLY

the Gods (1962). The kernel for his interest had been planted when, as a Fulbright Fellow in Italy, he encountered the Second Temple of Hera at Paestum a few years prior. Funded by a Billings Memorial Fellowship from Yale University, Scully “got to Greece at last in [summer] 1955 and traveled around the Peloponnesos and the usual places and some of the islands,” he recalled, “and nothing [was] the same since.”19 For Scully, this first trip to Greece marked a turning point. It signaled the next phase of his career, his shift in focus from the Shingle Style to sacred Greek architecture. It also cemented his growing awareness of how a society intentionally builds in relation to the natural landscape. And critically, it established an experience of Greece in 1955, an indelible impression of Athens that would be reinforced in 1957/58 and then serve as a baseline for Scully when he returned in 1962/63 to find the city physically scarred by urban development and the proliferation of the automobile. Decades later he would recall his initial visit to Athens. I will, of course, never forget the morning that I first stood on the Acropolis. It was during the summer of 1955 and I had traveled from Italy on the old steamer Georgios Potamanios . . . We got into Piraeus early in the morning and I took a taxi to Athens where I had reserved a room in a fleabag called the Lefkos Oikos (The White House) . . . I finally made it to the Acropolis and went boldly up to the Parthenon. You could do that then with temples everywhere in Greece. I sat and put my back into a column’s flute, the one on the northwest corner, and looked out . . . like a sentinel scanning the horizon from Athena’s rock . . . I had never stood on such an eminence, humanity’s citadel, or with such comparisons as those white columns ablaze with victory on the gleaming, polished rock under the fierce blue sky. Not yet was the rocky surface of the Acropolis smeared with concrete to accommodate the footsteps of tourists; not yet were the slopes of Hymettos so clotted with houses and gouged by quarries that its body seemed terminally violated. Not yet, most of all, had automobiles filled the precious bowl of Attica with their poisonous exhaust . . . In 1955 it all seemed pristine enough; we could still see it a bit as it had been for centuries.20 By the early 1960s Scully could see a change in the city, ecologically and architecturally. He addressed the latter in an article entitled “The Athens Hilton: A Study in Vandalism,” which appeared in July 1963 in Architectural Forum, solicited by managing editor Peter Blake.21 From a glance at the illustrations accompanying the text—including a view of the Parthenon’s central columns framing the majestic Hymettos—the reader could quickly identify the villain in question: the oversized, out-of-scale, “egg-crate facade” of the recently constructed Hilton Hotel, looming above the densely settled streets it interrupts. Scully found many faults with the building, including its shape (“bent”), point of entry (“on edge”), and detailing (“gauzy-columned

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

113

FIGURE 8.5 View from Parthenon toward Mount Hymettos, with Athens Hilton rising between the two. Vincent Scully, “The Athens Hilton: A Study in Vandalism,” Architectural Forum 119 (July 1963): 100. Photo by K. Theocharis-N. Tsikourias.

114

VINCENT SCULLY

and plastered with junk, spotlighted at night white and blue”). Yet he took most umbrage with the hotel’s size and siting. A Ministry of Public Works waiver allowed the hotel to rise 54 meters in height, more than double the neighborhood’s 24-meter limit, and permitted the building’s hulking rectangular mass to be situated at a 90-degree angle to the street. Thus, the Hilton sat smack between the Acropolis and its corresponding sacred mountain, Hymettos, parallel to them, creating (in Scully’s opinion) a visual scar that threatened the 2,500-year-old relationship between the ancient monument and the natural landscape. In Scully’s assessment, the towering behemoth belittled the temple and the mountain. “It casts some doubt upon the validity of the latter’s scale and the former’s shape. It depreciates, that is, the significance of what nature is and of what men do. And what else is there?” For Scully, the injuries inflicted by the Athens Hilton exemplified “what can happen when men build on the earth without intelligence, reverence, or love.”22 Beyond the hotel’s impact on the relationship between the built and natural environment, Scully underscored a related issue that was playing out across the globe. Instead of honoring or, at the very least, acknowledging its unique location, “the Hilton,” he noted, “takes a major step toward making Athens just like anywhere else. It is a perfect example of that anonymous mass scale which is now depreciating the particular scale of specific places everywhere.” Scully continued, “Such buildings tend, by their natures, to be arbitrary impositions on places, not integral growths out of them; they must therefore be strictly controlled by competent local authority.”23 Indeed, by the early 1960s, the detrimental consequences of unchecked or poorly regulated urban development—whether related to the Athens Hilton, modernist urban planning in New Haven, or growing numbers of contextually blind buildings throughout the world—were glaringly evident to Scully. In the decades to come, to preempt negative impacts of such construction campaigns, Scully would repeatedly advocate for “competent local authority,” including oversight spelled out in two- and three-dimensional building codes. Scully had harbored ideas about the necessity for local oversight to guard against deleterious urban interventions since at least 1961, two years prior to when he issued his scathing assessment of the Athens Hilton. That year he was invited to participate in a series of symposia entitled The Building Boom—Architecture in Decline, co-organized by MoMA and the Architectural League of New York and moderated by Architectural Forum’s Blake. Scully delivered a talk called “The Death of a Street,” updated and published in 1963 as “The Death of the Street.”24 While ostensibly about the impacts of recent high-rise construction on Park Avenue, New York’s grandest boulevard, this lecture encompassed far more, underscoring Scully’s growing attention to urban context, the inseparability of architecture and urbanism, and the failures of modernist planning approaches. Perhaps most noteworthy, though, is that “The Death of the Street” expressed the beginnings of the inclusivist both/and approach that would increasingly guide Scully’s life and work from this point forward.

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

115

FIGURE 8.6 Park Avenue, New York City, New York, looking south toward the Pan Am Building, 1963. Originally published in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 8 (1963): 96.

116

VINCENT SCULLY

Scully began his piece with a quick discussion of mid-twentieth-century Park Avenue, which had evolved from a “satanic” hole in the ground “filled with acres of railroad tracks and steam engines belching smoke,” to a unique urban space, a balanced three-dimensional composition with a defined axis along which people and vehicles coursed, contained by walls of buildings, much as a river bound by its banks. During the previous decade, however, modern skyscrapers such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Lever House (1952) and Mies van der Rohe and Johnson’s Seagram Building (1958) had punched “hole[s]in the wall that defined the Avenue”: the former by turning its tower perpendicular to street, and the latter by stepping back into its own plaza. These isolated buildings and the others that rapidly sprang up around them—all conceived as monuments to their architects’ genius—eroded the avenue’s defined shape. In defiance of the axiality, balance, and scale that characterized Park Avenue, these singular structures consequently “fight” each other and weaken the very urban fabric on which they depend for their impact. What’s more, they destroy the experience of “exterior urban space, the most important kind of space for the popular life of the city as a whole.” Indeed, Scully asserted, in the public urban realm, a building’s “exterior is [its] most democratic aspect, since it is the one that all people of the city use. It creates the architectural space common to them all; and on Park Avenue, in the area under discussion, space no longer exists.”25 For this established and noble street, the “fatal blow” came in the form of Gropius and friends’ Pan Am Building (1963), a “fat, wide [59-story] slab” looming above Grand Central Station. Here Scully expanded his discussion, contrasting Le Corbusier’s urban planning projections with the realities of city development. We should ask ourselves what, in their self-centered aggressiveness, these buildings now portend. The answer is easy to guess . . . these buildings portend what [Le Corbusier] called for: the death of the street, the destruction of the rue corridor. “The skyscrapers are too many,” Le Corbusier said when he visited New York in the thirties, “and they are too small.” And he stated as a general principle that if skyscrapers were to become the basic building-type for the city, and he thought they should be, they would have to be spaced far apart and the street would have to go. So, on Park Avenue, the street is going, but not quite as Le Corbusier imagined its passing, since the new skyscrapers are being placed close to each other according to the principle of who owns what lot, not of who should control the entire area, for whose good.26 The death of the street may have been happening, as predicted, but the street wasn’t being replaced by an open-air, egalitarian environment for the good of society as envisioned by Le Corbusier. Rather, the form of the street, with its messiness and density, remained, while the very qualities that made it special—its axiality, its scale, its democratic nature, its existence as a

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

117

unique place—perished. Space, Scully argued, must be bound by solids; the prevailing glass curtain wall, devoid of depth and character, and the empty areas that punctuated Park Avenue were not up to the task of shaping meaningful space, at least not as employed. Yet, this didn’t mean that glass facades, open plazas, or other modernist concepts were bad, or that they needed to be done away with entirely. Instead Scully looked for a new way forward, one that embraced what existed and could be done in the future. “There is nothing intrinsic to the way we build today which demands the present outcome,” he stated. Furthermore, There is no reason why the street must always be destroyed: there is nothing to prevent us from building solid street-facades of considerable height and defining the axial direction of an avenue. Open courts on a street are not always desirable; far from it. On the other hand . . . there is no reason why we cannot open up from such streets to frame . . . the reflecting prisms of glass towers by solidly defined squares. Nor, conversely, is there any reason why facades largely of glass, if properly designed in some shadowed depth, may not frame spaces in which more massive and actively sculptural buildings may deploy.27 In other words, a city can be made up of solids and voids, streets and squares, masonry and glass—no need for just one or the other. And what’s more, these seeming opposites can not only exist together but can even strengthen one another. Scully’s concluding point in “The Death of the Street” elevated his discussion to a higher plane, one that transcended centuries and civilizations, situating architecture and democracy at the height of human agency. He declared, There should be no reason, finally, why the decisions taken by elected authority cannot be larger ones, disciplining anarchy in order to make the city what it has always been, the ultimate work of human art: making possible the effective action not only of the group but of the individual citizen, so liberating what Sophocles called “the feelings that make the town.” The times do not make us, but we the times. To think in smaller or more cynically positivistic terms is neither practical nor realistic.28 *

*

*

As Scully’s announcement of Park Avenue’s “death” appeared in print in early 1963, preparations were underway for the destruction of another of New York’s noble features: Pennsylvania Station. Completed in 1910 to the designs of McKim, Mead & White, Penn Station served as a magnificent neoclassical gateway through which rail passengers entered and departed the city. With its oversized, travertine colonnades and soaring vaulted interiors—

118

VINCENT SCULLY

both stone and steel—illuminated by arched clerestory windows, Penn Station echoed the majesty of Rome, both the ancient Baths of Caracalla and the baroque St. Peter’s Square, imbuing early-twentieth-century rail travel and New York City itself with dignity, elegance, and meaning. But less than a half-century after its construction, what was once seen as a grand entranceway to the city would be viewed as a waste of valuable real estate and an extravagant reminder of a bygone era. As the station had aged, maintenance costs grew, rail travel declined, and tastes changed. The Pennsylvania Railroad sold the air rights above the station, a move which eventually led to the plans to demolish the station’s head house and train shed—basically everything visible above ground. The neoclassical masterpiece was deconstructed, and the 8-acre site was cleared to make way for Pennsylvania Plaza, a mixed-use complex to house offices, hotel accommodations, and a multipurpose arena. Penn Station’s train platforms and rail lines, renovated and updated, would remain operational underground. Plans for Pennsylvania Plaza became public in July 1961, and by the following summer, opposition to the demolition of Penn Station had coalesced. On August 2, 1962, the month before Scully prepared to set sail for Greece with Marion and her girls, United States Congressman and future New York City mayor John Lindsay penned Scully a letter, asking for his support in opposing the demolition. Scully, however, failed to respond. He was shortly leaving the country for ten months; he no doubt thought the building’s destruction was a shame, but he had other things on his mind. Scully’s inaction would come to haunt him, though, and he would carry deep remorse for his failure to defend the neoclassical icon alongside Congressman Lindsay and Philip Johnson. Later in life, Scully listed his inactivity on behalf of Penn Station as one of his greatest regrets. “Through it one entered the city like a god,” he bemoaned. “One scuttles in now like a rat.”29 It was likely a function of timing. By late summer 1962, Scully had yet to equate events such as the razing of Penn Station with the vandalism of the Athens Hilton he was about to encounter, the death of Park Avenue he had recently described, and the cataclysmic impacts of New Haven’s urban renewal. Within a few years, though, Scully would see these four individual events as part of a larger pattern that had been emerging for decades, an approach to the built environment that sought to erase the past in favor of an idealized, and ultimately faulty, vision of the future. The following summer, as Scully wrapped up his nearly year-long stay at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, he received a letter from Blake soliciting a piece for Architectural Forum. The writer and public commentator Norman Mailer, author of the bestselling Second World War novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), had used his monthly column “The Big Bite” in the August 1963 issue of Esquire magazine to skewer modern architecture as “totalitarian,” calling it “an incubus upon the American landscape” that “beheads individuality, variety, dissent, extreme possibility,

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

119

romantic faith . . . blinds vision, deadens instinct; [and] obliterates the past.”30 In Blake’s assessment, “Much of [Mailer’s attack] is perfectly valid if you equate modern architecture with the mess along Park Avenue and elsewhere. But, of course, Mailer has ignored all the things that have been done by architects with a more profound approach, and I thought we should print his piece and then follow it with a sort of rebuttal, possibly by you.”31 Scully found Blake’s idea agreeable, and after he returned to the United States, crafted a witty, pointed reply to Mailer’s indictment. In the April 1964 issue of Architectural Forum ran “Mailer vs. Scully,” a face-off containing excerpts of Mailer’s original Esquire column, Scully’s rebuttal, and Mailer’s “re-rebuttal.”32 The article’s layout, cleverly choreographed, echoed the playful yet adversarial nature of the debate; the page was divided in two, with each contender’s text printed under their respective images—Mailer looking directly at the reader, and Scully in profile, seemingly rolling his eyes and thumbing his nose in his opponent’s direction. Forum, it seems, had orchestrated a prize fight. The reader was to decide the winner. In his rebuttal, Scully painted Mailer as an astute yet uninformed and ultimately indifferent observer, able to grapple readily with words but overwhelmed by and thus unable to “cope with constructed reality.” The first of Mailer’s claims with which Scully took issue was that modern architecture is totalitarian. Scully declared, “To equate modern architecture, which was banned by all the most totalitarian of the totalitarian countries, with totalitarianism, is . . . the Big Lie at its most majestic.” Furthermore, “the work of Wright, Le Corbusier, and Aalto—not, surely, to mention that of Lou Kahn—flatly contradicts everything, absolutely everything, Mr. Mailer has to say.” “Just read it in reverse,” he quipped, “and you’ve got it, especially the bit about destroying the past.”33 As Scully had already discussed elsewhere, including in Modern Architecture, these architects relied heavily on history for inspiration, even if some of them (in particular, Wright and Kahn) expressly denied it. While Scully felt Mailer to be “uninformed” about the masters of modern architecture and their unique contributions, he conceded that Mailer was “more right than wrong in terms of what is generally to be seen around us.” With respect to “the bulk of American building at the moment,” Scully noted, one was likely to find something exactly like what [Mailer] describes: a dacron-suited building with a surface like “gelatin,” of “a vast deadness and a huge monotony”—something, most of all, whether on Park Avenue or in Athens, or now not so far from Freshman Commons at Yale, which has thoroughly destroyed a place that was there before, so creating another of what Mr. Mailer describes in an exact and terrible phrase as “the empty landscape of psychosis” . . . As we ream out the centers of our cities for redevelopment and more or less leave them as scaleless open

120

VINCENT SCULLY

space inhabited largely by parked automobiles, it may be that we are in fact imaging that “inner landscape of void and dread” to which Mr. Mailer refers. New York, Athens, New Haven . . . Scully had been experiencing the attempted erasure of the past first hand and cataloging the results. And perhaps more than Mailer, Scully recognized the dire and widespread consequences of this modern approach gone awry. “Indeed,” Scully continued, “I think that the architectural situation relative to humanity and the earth as a whole is a good deal more serious than even he seems to find it.”34 Despite his recognition that the architectural approaches inherited from early modernist practitioners warranted reevaluation, Scully was not willing to ignore the positive contributions of said practitioners. Mailer, however, felt strongly otherwise. In his re-rebuttal to Scully, published on its own page to “wind up the debate,” Mailer chastised Scully, who he believed “all but deliberately missed the point.” Mailer explained, “If the classic totalitarian regimes, Germany, Italy, Russia, were programmatically against modern architecture—no matter. It should be obvious that in 30 years an esthetic movement can shift from a force which opens possibilities to one which closes them.” In other words, Mailer’s use of totalitarian reached beyond political definitions to a social/psychological process that “deadens human possibilities.” With such an understanding of totalitarianism in mind, he continued, “it is not too great a jump to declare that the Guggenheim Museum may be a totalitarian work of art . . . That museum shatters the mood of the neighborhood . . . more completely, wantonly, barbarically than the Pan Am Building kills the sense of vista on Park Avenue.”35 By comparing the contextual impact of Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, which shunned Manhattan’s Upper East Side with its blank concrete exterior and dictated interior movement through its spiraling ramp, to that of Gropius’s hulking Pan Am Building, Mailer likely hit a nerve with Scully, who had himself in Modern Architecture, published just three years before, described Wright’s final work as a “wholly enclosed” environment in which “no individual act is possible.”36 Mailer thus repackaged the Guggenheim, seen by Scully as the culmination of the democratic urge for movement that plays out in modern architecture, as the physical manifestation of totalitarianism, precisely because the building refused to converse with its neighborhood and eliminated the possibilities for alternative action. Mailer scolded Scully for holding Wright and his ilk in such high esteem, and for extricating them from their followers. It is too cheap to separate Mafia architecture with their Mussolini Modern (concrete dormitories on junior college campuses) from serious modern architects. No, I think Le Corbusier and Wright, and all the particular giants of the Bauhaus are the true villains; the Mafia architects are their proper sons; modern architecture at its best is even more

THE DEATH OF THE STREET (LATE 1950s–1964)

121

anomalous than at its worst, for it tends to excite the Faustian and empty appetites of the architect’s ego rather than reveal an artist’s vision of our collective desire for shelter which is pleasurable, substantial, intricate, intimate, delicate, detailed, foiled, rich in gargoyle, guignol, false closet, secret stair, witch’s hearth, attic, grandeur, kitsch, a world of buildings as diverse as the need within the eye for stimulus and variation. For beware: the ultimate promise of modern architecture is collective sightlessness for the species. Blindness is the fruit of your design.”37 Far from redeemable, then, early modern masters and the architectural tendencies they birthed were the true problem. And with his support, by extension, Scully was complicit in the destruction modern architecture subsequently wreaked. Scully declined to issue a “re-re-rebuttal” as Blake suggested, and he refused to yet again two months later when the Village Voice published portions of the debate, saying instead, “I feel that I have had the last word already.”38 Perhaps Scully did feel that he had truly had the last word, or perhaps he felt that to continue the back-and-forth would be uncouth. Indeed, a few months before the confrontation appeared in Forum, Scully wrote Blake that he felt “uneasy” about his contribution—not for the content of his argument, but more because he feared his “attempts at humor” would appear awkward—and that the whole thing felt “very undignified . . . a little like a wrestling match in the mud.”39 It is quite possible, though, that Scully shied away from composing a re-re-rebuttal because, while he disagreed with Mailer’s assessment of the modern masters, much of Mailer’s rejoinder about present-day modern architecture “closing possibilities” rang true. In his written tirade, Mailer warned, “The landscape of America . . . may be stolen forever if we are not sufficiently courageous to . . . [contemplate] what we have already lost and what we have yet to lose.”40 Scully had been engaged in such anxious contemplation for some years, working toward a conclusion that, while not as drastic and unnuanced as Mailer’s cries of totalitarianism, echoed similar concepts.41 Yet, for Scully, unlike Mailer, modern architecture itself was not the problem; indeed, in terms of social intent and physical form, modern architecture still had valid contributions to share. Rather, it was the all-ornothing attitude often associated with modern architecture, the wipe-theslate clean approach, the one-and-only-way mentality that led to difficulties— in architecture and urbanism, and in his life. Scully would come to associate this either/or exclusionary approach with the hero architect. And by the mid1960s, Scully had begun to believe that society no longer had a need for the architect as hero; rather, the time had come for the architect as healer.

CHAPTER NINE

Complexity and Contradiction (1964–1967) The mid-1960s found Scully increasingly in demand. With his engaging and theatrical lecturing style, Scully had become a wildly popular professor, achieving almost mythic status. He prepared fastidiously yet used no notes while lecturing, avoiding the lectern as he roamed the stage, 10-foot wooden pointer in hand, opining about the twin images projected on the screen behind him. As he rapped on the screen with the pointer, or banged it on the floor to emphasize a particular point, Scully awed the audience. With his off-the-cuff delivery, and an effortless and often self-deprecating humor, he moved seamlessly from art and architecture to literature and contemporary culture. Students in all fields clamored to enroll in his courses, especially History of Art 53b: Modern Architecture, which covered “architecture from about 1876 to the present, with special emphasis on events of the two most recent decades”; and History of Art 12: Introduction to the History of Art.1 He conducted them in the 400-seat Yale Art Gallery lecture hall and 500seat Law School auditorium, respectively, which were often standing room only. Class sessions frequently ended with students on their feet, offering a standing ovation. Scully had reached a zenith of renown and recognition that would persist for the next three decades in terms of his impact on students and his professional activity at large. In addition to teaching a full course load during the academic year and engaging in university committees—including serving on the tenure committee and, for a time, acting as chair of the history of art department— Scully received numerous requests to lecture at other institutions, organizations, and companies. He accepted only a fraction of the invitations, which nevertheless amounted to at least a half-dozen speaking engagements a month, often between Boston and Washington, DC—frequently New York City and Philadelphia—but sometimes farther afield, such as Detroit, Toronto, London, and even Buenos Aires. During Scully’s short stretches in New Haven, he gave a number of public lectures to support protests against 122

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

123

urban renewal, especially in opposition to what he viewed as planning tactics that privileged the automobile at the expense of the community—for example, the plans for the circumference ring road and other highway connectors that had destroyed or continued to threaten established neighborhoods. Professional travel extended beyond isolated lectures and symposia. In March and April of 1965, Scully spent three weeks in Egypt, Greece, and Turkey starring in an ill-fated production orchestrated by the American documentarian Eliot Elisofon, who had difficulty translating his stillphotography skills into those needed for film. A month later, Scully traveled to Moscow and Leningrad for five weeks as a United States representative with Louis Kahn for the Architecture USA exhibition, an informational exchange program with the USSR sponsored by the American government. He returned to New Haven in mid-June, only to fly out the following month for Argentina, where he spent three weeks teaching an abbreviated course at the University of Buenos Aires.2 Likewise, Scully’s written contributions were highly sought after during these years. In addition to popular magazines like Life, Harper’s, and Esquire, well-known presses solicited manuscripts from him on an array of topics. Between 1964 and 1967, he undertook serious discussions with McGraw-Hill; Little, Brown & Co.; E. P. Dutton & Co.; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; George Braziller, Inc.; and Oxford University Press for books ranging from an introductory art history survey to a general architecture text to an anthology of essays concerning Le Corbusier to a “book on some subject other than either art or architecture,” in short, a book on any topic he selected.3 In the midst of this hectic schedule, Scully’s personal life shifted in a rather dramatic way. Having secured a divorce from Nancy, his wife for the past twenty-two years, Scully wed Marion on May 7, 1965. His family thus grew to encompass not only his three sons (now in their early twenties and late teens), but Marion’s two daughters (entering adolescence) and, the following winter, an infant daughter they named Katherine, likely in honor of Scully’s mother. Scully, Marion, Katie, and her half-sisters resided in a large home on St. Ronan Street about 1.5 miles north of New Haven Green.4 Ten years later, looking back on this particularly frenetic period, Scully would declare, “My life started over in the 1960s . . . I had to think through and out of the existential-confrontational view I’d developed in the 1950s. It turned me around.”5 This insightful statement signals a serious repositioning of Scully’s life, personal and professional. Coupled with his divorce and remarriage, Scully’s experiences with modernist urban renewal— what he characterized as its cataclysmic destruction of communities, the city fabric, and the collective past—prompted him to adopt a new outlook on life. It was no longer possible for him to abide by what he called the existential-confrontational view, which dictated that there is one right way

124

VINCENT SCULLY

forward, a single correct path, to the exclusion of all others. Rather, Scully began to think in terms of accommodation, a more open approach conditioned by the concept of inclusion. Modern architecture, for example, wasn’t all evil, as Mailer railed, but rather was both good and bad, situation and design depending. The “pioneers of modern design,” as Nikolaus Pevsner called them, had lessons to impart, about what to do and what not to do.6 The question for architecture by the 1960s was how to proceed. What was architecture’s next step? As he had more than a decade earlier, with the Shingle Style and with Kahn, Scully looked to the past and to the present, with an eye toward the future. *

*

*

After the publication of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods in 1962, Scully continued his research on Greek architecture, shifting focus from earlier eras to the fifth century BCE, the topic for which he was awarded a Bollingen Foundation Grant that helped support his time in Greece with Marion and her daughters during the 1962/63 academic year. Whether dissuaded by the harsh reviews classical archaeologists leveled at The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods or for another reason entirely, Scully ultimately decided to suspend the second book on Greece. For his next foray into the past, he turned instead to a new area of study—the Pueblo architecture of the American Southwest. He happened upon the topic by accident, he would later say, as he and his teenaged son Stephen made the car trip home in June of 1964 from Stephen’s boarding school in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “I found as I drove down the valley of the Rio Grande that the mountains began to look like Greece . . . horned and coned,” Scully later recalled. “And then I came to Taos, which is the first [great Pueblo settlement] coming down from the north, and there [Taos Pueblo] was, exactly picking up the shapes of the mountain—just exactly, locked into it.”7 The correspondence between the temples and the landscape that Scully had identified in Greece was now visible to him in New Mexico. In both locations, he saw the architecture as intentionally situated with respect to the mountains. In Greece, however, the stone temples’ crisp geometric forms stood out against the landscape, while in the American Southwest, the adobe pueblos, stepped and multitiered, seemed to echo it. Scully made trips to the Southwest every year from 1966 through 1971, including while on sabbatical during the spring of 1968, during which time he delved into the Indigenous architecture of Mesoamerica and North America.8 Scully began his journey in January with a flight to Mexico, where he stayed for a month visiting Pre-Columbian sites before working his way toward and through the American Southwest, concluding in early August.9 With his research into Greek sacred architecture, Scully had blurred the distinction between architectural history and classical archaeology; with his investigations of Pueblo architecture, he again ventured into multidisciplinary territory, incorporating significant anthropological, ethnological, and

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

125

FIGURE 9.1 South Building from the west with mountains rising behind, Taos, New Mexico, c. 1325. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

sociological components into his exploration of architecture and the landscape. Unlike the Greek temples, which were in varying states of ruin and no longer served their original purposes, some of the Pueblo sites Scully visited were still quite active. He quickly developed a fascination for sacred rites such as the Buffalo Dances, ritual reenactments of the hunts that offer thanks to the animal and the earth for the sustenance they provide. Scully visited and, where permitted, documented these ceremonial performances, and ultimately described them and their associated architecture in his 1975 Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance.10 In the introduction he characterized these dances as “the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent” and declared that “contemporary pueblos can be best seen and valued” through experiencing the dances they frame. Furthermore, he announced, “This book grew directly out of my previous work in Greece, whose landscape the American Southwest strongly recalls, not least in the forms of its sacred mountains and the reverence of its old inhabitants for them.” He continued, “Only in the pueblos, in that sense, could my Greek studies be completed, because their ancient rituals are still performed in them. The chorus of Dionysos still dances there.”11 Pueblo was a highly personal book for Scully—he noted in the preface that it was “written in love and admiration for the American Southwest and for its

126

VINCENT SCULLY

people.” In addition, contrary to in his earlier publications, he used the first person in the text, an act that would be referenced by some as an indication that Scully had crossed a professional boundary. At the very least Pueblo had crossed disciplinary boundaries, a fact that became abundantly clear when reviews appeared in journals from the realms of anthropology, landscape architecture, and even law. What’s more, reviewers weren’t sure what to make of the book. Was it art history? Anthropology? Ethnography? A “love story”?12 The criticisms of Pueblo typically stemmed from the anthropologists, who on the whole chastised Scully for failing to maintain emotional distance from his subject. For example, one anthropologist offered a biting review that ended with an equally harsh summation. “This is a fine book for one seeking esthetic and emotional perspectives on Southwest peoples . . . But for a systematic, detailed analysis of the interrelationships among architecture, environment, and ceremonialism, the reader should look elsewhere.”13 A second anthropologist was equally critical of Pueblo, especially that Scully allowed “himself to intrude” on the text “through personalized accounts of his travels and feelings.” This latter reviewer conceded, though, that the book’s 450 illustrations—nearly all of them photographs of people and buildings taken by Scully—made the volume a “useful and well produced reference work.”14 A third anthropologist offered a more positive appraisal of Pueblo. In addition to highlighting the book’s “outstandingly good” illustrations, he praised Scully for his ability to picture “the rich public structure of human thought represented in the architecture of Southwestern natural and Indianmade spaces and actions,” and noted that Scully’s “informed study [was] keyed skillfully to the ethnographic literature.”15 Meanwhile, a landscape architecture professor described Pueblo as “an extraordinary study,” while a law professor found in Scully’s portrayal of the Pueblo people a way of life that could perhaps offer a model for survival in an uncertain future.16 While Scully’s turn to the Indigenous architecture of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest may appear incongruous with his previous work on ancient Greek architecture, nineteenth-century American houses, and modern architecture, he felt the transition to be rather seamless; this latest focus was simply, for Scully, a continuation of his previous investigations. In addition, Scully had already developed a solid grounding in PreColumbian art when, as a graduate student, he had worked with George Kubler, who remained an active presence in Yale’s Department of the History of Art. Scully had also developed a friendship with the preeminent anthropologist Michael Coe, a Pre-Columbian scholar at Yale with a particular focus on the Maya culture. In fact, on one of his trips south Scully had accompanied Coe to El Chayal, Guatemala, where the anthropologist had discovered an old obsidian quarry near the Maya site of Kaminalijuyu.17 Thus, surrounded by Kubler and Coe, Scully had support and companionship in his Indigenous studies. Furthermore, Scully believed that his new avenue of exploration would lend credibility to his previous Greek work, which had

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

127

been so harshly received a few years earlier. Indeed, decades later he would write that the “accuracy” of his premise in The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods was “borne out by my related research in the American Southwest and Mesoamerica, where the fundamental connection between natural and manmade forms is now accepted by all scholars in the field.”18 Indeed, as Scully investigated the pueblos and other Indigenous architecture of the Americas, he formed a conceptual framework that, while admittedly “a rather too large generalization,” would condition how he thought about humanity, architecture, and the landscape.19 In short, the architecture of Greek civilizations most often contrasted with the forms of the landscape, while the architecture of pre-Greek or non-Greek civilizations typically echoed them. The former approach Scully termed heroic, seeming to confront, even challenge, its natural analog, while the latter was its opposite, anti-heroic, more open-minded and accommodating, opting to enhance what exists rather than dominate it. For Scully, already primed to see dogmatic allegiance to modern architecture as limiting, if not totalitarian (as suggested by Mailer), the Pueblos’ gentler and more reverent stance toward the landscape offered a promising way to think about architecture. *

*

*

While Scully turned his historian’s eye to the American Southwest, he focused his critic’s gaze on the present where, to his surprise, he found a burgeoning development inspired in part by his Shingle Style investigations. In 1955, while a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a young architect named Robert Venturi picked up Scully’s The Shingle Style and began to read. Away from his Philadelphia home and in the early stages of his career—Venturi had graduated from Princeton University five years earlier and worked for Oscar Stonorov, Eero Saarinen, and then Louis Kahn before, on his third try, being awarded this fellowship—Venturi was predisposed to rethink the aging, shingled houses of the American Northeast. In the preface to The Shingle Style, Scully noted that his historical investigation of the nineteenth century “deals with one generation’s search for expression and order in American architecture,” a problem that foreshadowed “the modern world’s search for itself.”20 Indeed, as Scully wrote this in 1954, he was himself engaged in such a quest, as was Venturi, a mere five years Scully’s junior. In Rome, Venturi found himself surrounded by the masterpieces of Michelangelo, a designer who had adapted the components of the classical vocabulary to create a novel architectural expression, mannerism, that many would later interpret as a reflection of the widespread instability following the Sack of Rome in 1527. Nearly fifty years after his long stay in Rome, Venturi recalled, “I will never forget reading [The Shingle Style] up in my studio on the Janiculum Hill, with Rome all before me . . . It involved a kind of revelation.” In the mid-twentieth century, before reading Scully’s book, he—and many others—“thought of these Richardsonian houses as dreary, old-fashioned, late Victorian buildings; a lot of them had

128

VINCENT SCULLY

been turned into funeral parlors.”21 But, embedded in the history of Rome, amid Michelangelo’s mannerism, Venturi made a startling connection: these dreary, old-fashioned buildings were neither dreary nor old fashioned. Rather, they were mannerist. As had Michelangelo, Richardson deployed an existing architectural language, primarily that of R. N. Shaw’s English country houses, to create an inventive new architecture, which Scully later named Shingle Style. Furthermore, the Shingle Style was as valid and appropriate for the late nineteenth century as mannerism was for the Renaissance. Energized by the idea of mannerism as a potent and historically relevant architectural strategy, Venturi designed one of his earliest works, the Beach House project of 1959, as a mannerist adaptation of McKim, Mead & White’s Low House of 1887, the very structure that had grabbed Scully’s attention as a graduate student. The Beach House featured its precedent’s broad sloped gable and wooden shingles, drawing a clear connection to the Shingle Style. Yet, in the Beach House, the smooth gable of the Low House

FIGURE 9.2 Beach House project, model, 1959, by Robert Venturi. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

129

was blown apart by a brazen brick chimney, exaggerated in scale, that exploded through the center of the roof. Reminiscent of the lofty Shingle Style chimneys yet amplified beyond expectation, this giant member drew ire from none other than Scully. “That big chimney!” he would later recall, with a laugh. “I thought, ‘Why is he shaking this thing in my face? How dare he do that!’ ”22 Even with this preliminary annoyance, Scully nevertheless saw something of interest in Venturi’s work, as the historian selected the young architect to be featured alongside five others in the “New Talent USA” issue of Art in America in 1961.23 Despite including Venturi in the Art in America publication, Scully initially overlooked the larger implications of Venturi’s Beach House project. Indeed, Scully appeared to put Venturi out of his mind entirely; this seems plausible, given the professional and personal activities that occupied the historian at the time alongside the fact that he spent the 1962/63 academic year in Greece. After his return, Scully was reintroduced to the work of Venturi through Robert A. M. Stern, a precocious graduate student at Yale. Stern appreciated Venturi’s architecture and attempted to persuade his skeptical professor of the merits of Venturi’s work. During the spring of 1963, Venturi himself had a physical presence at Yale as studio assistant to

FIGURE 9.3 Guild House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1966, by Venturi and Rauch. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

130

VINCENT SCULLY

Paul Rudolph, chair of the Department of Architecture. Perhaps it was getting to know Venturi in person, or maybe Stern’s persistence finally prevailed. Regardless, Scully ultimately decided to visit Venturi’s work. Thus in early 1965, Scully traveled from New Haven to Philadelphia to see a curious building rising amid the Spring Garden neighborhood’s characteristic brick row homes. Edgar Allen Poe’s abode, where the famous author lived in 1843, sat just behind this new edifice, occupying a front-row seat to the construction of the block’s latest addition—the Guild House.24 Standing before the Guild House, his characteristic wool overcoat pulled snug against the cold, Scully must have paused in amazement. This building looked so . . . ordinary. Brick, like its neighbors; square windows; chain-link fence: this new structure fit right into its working-class neighborhood! Sure, the Guild House announced itself as new in some ways, but it was not designed to stand out. This made it extraordinary. *

*

*

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, architecture wasn’t designed to fit in, at least not in obvious ways. More often, architects designed buildings to make a statement. In the American city, that statement was typically one of two kinds: the sleek glass box, or the powerful masonry mass. The Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and completed in 1958, perfectly exemplified the glass box. Preceded by a large, open plaza with twin reflecting pools, the Seagram Building rose thirty-nine stories above New York City’s Park Avenue. Atop slender piers, which comprised the building’s lower portion, the amber-glass and bronze-sheathed-steel skin drew the eye up the building’s mid-section to a crowning segment of densely spaced vertical elements, abstractly echoing a classical column with its three distinct parts—base, shaft, capital. Unlike its neighbors, the Seagram Building didn’t occupy its site up to the sidewalk’s edge, covering every square foot of buildable ground; instead, the glass box sat back 100 feet from the street, almost jewel-like, as if on display within its own plaza. Furthermore, the building concealed its use; it could have been the corporate headquarters of a Canadian beverage company (as it was), or an exclusive Park Avenue apartment building. The glass box could be anything, and it often was. In marked opposition to the Seagram glass box stood the other architectural statement of the age—the masonry mass, sometimes referred to as brutalist architecture. The Yale Art and Architecture Building, finished in 1963 as designed by Paul Rudolph, set an ideal example. Weighty corner piers—made of poured-in-place concrete and hammered by hand to create an all-over rough texture—anchored the building to the ground, contrasting with smooth concrete slabs and expanses of steel and glass. The building rose seven stories, a robust composition of shifting volumes that contained thirty-seven different interior levels, all distinguished by slight changes in ceiling and floor height. Yet from the street the building read as a single

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

131

object, and what that object contained was anyone’s guess. It could have been a design school or a city hall, or a parking garage for that matter. Rudolph’s building did speak somewhat of its context, echoing elements of Kahn’s nearby Yale Art Gallery of 1953 as well as the university’s neoGothic towers. But above all, the Yale Art and Architecture Building referenced its own form: a commanding figure on the university street it occupied, for better or worse, it demanded attention. In their separate ways, the Seagram Building and the Yale Art and Architecture Building both stood out. It could be said that the Seagram’s stance toward its neighbors was aloof, while Rudolph’s building was confrontational, even aggressive. Regardless of their specific messages, though, these two types of statement buildings—the glass box and the masonry mass—represented the dominant approaches to architecture at the time. It was against this background that Scully encountered the Guild House. *

*

*

Neither aloof nor aggressive, the Guild House was a congenial neighbor. While it’s tempting to link the building’s affable nature to its Quaker roots— it was commissioned by the Friends Neighborhood Guild as affordable housing for the elderly—the credit belongs to Robert Venturi, the young architect behind the project’s design. Venturi’s conscious design choices made the Guild House a unique building for its time, one that prefigured what would be called (to Scully’s chagrin) postmodern architecture in the decades that followed. With its use of humble red brick and double-hung windows, the Guild House echoed its 1960s residential context, mainly comprised of nineteenthcentury, three-story brick row houses. At six stories, the Guild House rose above many of its neighbors yet nonetheless maintained the area’s low-rise character. Its public face traced the line of the street, reinforcing its traditional urban environment. As the building’s form stepped back symmetrically, the chain-link fence continued the line of the street, creating a distinct yet transparent boundary between the property and the sidewalk.25 Despite its brick construction, the front facade read as a thin screen. The ground-level walls, painted white for emphasis, pitched inward toward the main entrance, which was tucked behind a centered, black-granite column. The column’s heft—indeed, its entire existence—seemed excessive considering that this massive, squat cylinder supported a virtual void: a series of balconies, all spanned by a giant hollow arch. Notches in the upper corners of the facade emphasized its shallowness, a fact further reinforced when viewing the building from the side. Taking all of this in, it became clear that the building’s front was a billboard—a slender placard that literally and symbolically announced its residential use, its reason for existence. In no uncertain terms, the bold “GUILD HOUSE” sign declared what the building was. Soaring above it an exaggerated (and nonfunctional)

132

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 9.4 Seagram Building, New York City, New York, 1958, by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection [reproduction number, e.g., LC-G612-T-45094].

gold-toned television antenna signaled, with an ironic wink, what the elderly inhabitants were likely doing inside. Within this ordinary building Venturi ensconced a range of references, calling on more than just its immediate context. Drawing on the past and the present, the Guild House played with sources that ranged from historical traditions to conventional expectations, from masters Michelangelo and Le Corbusier to Philadelphia architects Frank Furness and Louis Kahn, from the traditional street to Pop Art. It flew in the face of accepted architectural

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

133

FIGURE 9.5 Yale Art and Architecture Building, New Haven, Connecticut, 1963, by Paul Rudolph. Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0.

practice at that time, which mandated, as Scully would write a decade later, either “doctrinaire purism” (the glass box) or “titanic structural agonies” (the masonry mass).26 For some years, Scully had been on the lookout for architecture’s next step. He hadn’t been sure what that next step would be, but now, with absolute certainty, as he beheld the Guild House, he knew. Forty years later Scully would recall that “it was then, with Venturi, that I really began to question modern architecture.”27 Even under construction, the Guild House was an eye opener for Scully, who identified multiple layers of meaning that drew widely and freely on the past and the present, from the Renaissance through the mid-twentieth century, from the high end of artistic culture to the low brow. What’s more, this building—housing for the elderly—worked within its milieu to accommodate its neighbors as opposed to the Seagram Building or Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building, which dominated their contexts. In many ways, the Guild House served as a built manifestation of principles that Scully had been processing for the past few years—namely that modern architecture was a way, not the way, of designing. The narrative of exclusion associated with modern architecture had to go. Architecture and urbanism

134

VINCENT SCULLY

needed to move past the fussy, exclusionary tendencies of postwar modernism to embrace the messiness and vitality of contemporary life. Impressed by both the Guild House and the Vanna Venturi House, a home for Venturi’s mother that was completed in 1963, Scully returned to the Beach House project of 1959 with new appreciation. Now the towering chimney, once obnoxious, was bold and interpretive, honoring those of its Shingle Style precursors as well as Lutyens’s English country estates. Furthermore, in the Beach House, the combination of the gable roof and the chimney symbolized shelter and hearth, a riff on Wright’s anchoring fireplace that served to announce the house as a home. Yet, this home was not as stable as those of the past; rather, the taunt form of the Beach House, smaller in scale and less opulent than the Low House, was raised off the ground on piloti, alluding to both its modernist heritage (recall the Villa Savoye) and the very real threat of high tide. What’s more, the Beach House’s facades differed, responding to their immediate contexts: the sea-facing side was primarily open with a large balcony overlooking the ocean, while the landfacing side was more closed, wood shingled with irregularly spaced rectangular windows. Scully would later declare, “Venturi did what hadn’t occurred to me could be done. He directly adapted the Low House.”28 This was, in fact, the beginning of a Shingle Style revival, as the following years would reveal. Yet, the Beach House’s greatest contribution was that, as an amalgam of the Shingle Style and modern architecture and with its attention to context, it proposed a way to move beyond the architectural impasse embodied in the purist glass box and the brutalist masonry mass.

FIGURE 9.6 Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, 1963, by Robert Venturi. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith / Buyenlarge / Getty.

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

*

*

135

*

In fall 1964, after Rudolph had announced his pending resignation as chair of the Department of Architecture, Venturi emerged as a leading candidate for the position, with Scully’s backing.29 Venturi’s bid for chair was unsuccessful; Charles W. Moore, an architect and educator then teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, would serve as department chair from 1965 through 1970.30 Venturi nonetheless continued to teach at Yale, in spring 1965 offering a version of the architectural theory class he had taught since the late 1950s at the University of Pennsylvania. Venturi had fashioned the content of the course into a book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, slated for publication by MoMA as the first in a series of short texts concerned with theories of contemporary architecture.31 From January through June 1965, while teaching in New Haven, Venturi worked closely with Marion Wohl, who would marry Scully in May of that year and had been hired by Arthur Drexler, director of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, to edit and refine Venturi’s manuscript.32 In June 1965, Venturi asked Scully to write the introduction, and the well-known historian—a full professor since 1961, soon to be awarded Yale’s Colonel John Trumbull Professorship in Art History—readily agreed.33 At the time of the book’s publication, Venturi was barely 40 years old— mere infancy in terms of an architect’s career. He had only a handful of projects to his name, one of them for his mother. Nevertheless, with Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a slim volume populated by 350 almost thumbnail-sized images, Venturi cast doubt on four decades of accepted modern architectural practices. The first chapter opened with an assertion of what Venturi disliked in architecture. He disapproved of “the incoherence or arbitrariness of incompetent architecture” (the lackluster glass box) and “the precious intricacies of picturesqueness or expressionism” (the masonry mass). “Instead,” he embraced “complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art,” which had been acknowledged everywhere except in architecture, according to the author. With this preamble, Venturi launched into what he termed his “gentle manifesto.” Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanical moral language of orthodox Modern architecture. I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer “both-and” to

136

VINCENT SCULLY

“either-or,” black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once. But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implication of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.34 Thus ended the first chapter, with the remaining nine chapters offering support for Venturi’s position with discussions about simplification/ picturesqueness, ambiguity, the both-and, double-functioning elements, accommodation, adaptation, juxtaposition, the inside and the outside, and obligation toward the difficult whole. Overall, Venturi asserted that orthodox modern architecture was not the only true architecture. Pop Art, the vernacular landscape, and kitsch were all valid sources of inspiration, as was the architecture of the past, which International Style proponents had largely discounted. Regarding the commercial and honky-tonk reality of the American built environment, which soon-to-be Architectural Forum editorin-chief Peter Blake had skewered in his book God’s Own Junkyard, Venturi asked, “Is not Main Street almost all right?”35 And International Style works were all right, too. Reframing Mies van der Rohe’s famous mantra “less is more,” Venturi countered, “less is a bore.” For Venturi, every source of inspiration was fair game; multiplicity of meaning reigned supreme. Venturi’s argument in Complexity and Contradiction shocked some. In the book’s foreword, Drexler noted as much, stating that Venturi’s book opposes what many would consider Establishment, or at least established, opinions. He speaks with uncommon candor, addressing himself to actual conditions: the ambiguous and sometimes unattractive “facts” in which architects find themselves enmeshed at the moment, and whose confusing nature Venturi would seek to make the basis of architectural design. It is an alternative point of view vigorously championed by Vincent Scully of Yale University, whose introduction contrasts the frustrations of abstractly preconceived architectural order with Venturi’s delight in reality—especially in those recalcitrant aspects most architects would seek to suppress or disguise.36 Scully had been working through a version of Venturi’s argument for years. Perhaps this was the reason why, when Venturi asked Scully to write the introduction for the book in 1965, Scully readily agreed and proceeded to craft a piece that would prove more shocking to the “Establishment” than the book it introduced. With unabashed confidence, Scully declared that Complexity and Contradiction “is probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture of

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

137

1923.”37 A disclaimer followed this startling assertion; “This is not to say,” Scully continued, “that Venturi is Le Corbusier’s equal in persuasiveness or achievement—or will necessarily ever be.” Yet this acknowledgment was quickly overshadowed by Scully’s wholehearted support of the neophyte Venturi, which reverberated with increasing strength as the historian compared the young architect, point by point, to Le Corbusier, whom Scully considered to be the premiere architect of the twentieth century. The historian concluded, “I believe that the future will value [this book] among the few basic texts of our time—one which . . . picks up a fundamental dialogue begun in the twenties, and so connects us with the heroic generation of modern architecture once more.”38 Upon its publication, Complexity and Contradiction garnered reviews ranging from denunciation to praise. For example, Princeton University professor Alan Colquhoun panned Venturi’s text, citing inconsistencies in its views and supporting examples.39 A review in the AIA Journal offered a neutral assessment of the book, noting that Venturi’s “argument is logical and progressive.”40 In an evenhanded albeit ironic appraisal published in the New York Times Book Review, Colin Rowe, professor of architecture at Cornell University, compared Venturi’s book to Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? Rowe asserted that these overtly dissimilar books were actually two sides of the same coin in that they laid bare the authors’ dissatisfaction with modern architecture—Banham’s disappointment that technology failed to save the day, and Venturi’s confidence that a both/and approach to design freed architecture of its moralizing superiority. Rowe concluded that “the two attitudes disclosed [in Venturi’s and Banham’s books] represent the polar extremes between which architecture now oscillates.”41 Peter Blake, with whom Scully had shared a friendly relationship for years—as evidenced by their frequent exchanges when Blake commissioned the historian to write articles for Forum—offered an appraisal of Complexity and Contradiction that is itself complex and contradictory, both critical and quasi-appreciative. In terms of the former, Blake questioned the originality of the book’s argument, underscored its perceived “inaccuracies,” and concluded that Venturi’s theory of architecture and his actual design work, which occupies the last twenty-five pages of the book, were incongruous. In terms of the latter, Blake conceded that “the bulk of Mr. Venturi’s book—a sensitive and intelligent essay on architectural theory—seems perfectly valid and intriguing.”42 Blake’s favorable sentiment is all the more noteworthy considering that Venturi had, in fact, used Blake’s God’s Own Junkyard as a foil for his argument, saying that “the pictures in [Blake’s] book that are supposed to be bad are often good . . . express[ing] an intriguing kind of vitality and validity” and “an unexpected approach to unity as well.”43 While one might have expected Blake to bristle from such refutation, he did the opposite, noting in good humor that “Since Mr. Venturi’s book occasionally, and gently, chides my own vintage-1962 views . . . I should like

138

VINCENT SCULLY

to make it clear that I have changed my mind on several points made in that book and that I agree with his criticism of them to a considerable extent.”44 It was for Scully that Blake saved his most cutting commentary: “Vincent Scully’s introductory statement that the book ‘is probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, of 1923,’ is—well, we think very highly of Vincent Scully, most of the time.”45 Likewise, when Rowe was asked to critique Venturi’s winning design for the Yale Mathematics Building Competition in 1970, he would revisit his assessment of Scully’s introduction, which he described as a “specimen of Pro-Venturi literature.” As Rowe sardonically noted, Apparently a niche has already been prepared in the architectural hall of fame; and, since the image has arrived, it now only awaits installation. Venturi has, after all, not only the most elaborate recent pedigree— Sullivan, Wright, Le Corbusier, et al.—but we know that we only have to search a bit and we shall find both Aalto and Lutyens acting as sponsors . . . This is to exaggerate an only too prevalent critical tone which, by claiming too much, can only incite disbelief. Simply we feel that the credentials are being forced; and even when the stereotypes of aggressive art history become qualified by “gentle” information as to Venturi’s ironical insights, his modest feeling for compromise and “accommodation,” his “inclusiveness,” and that unerring common sense such as few others possess, still our skepticism is not allayed.46 Aside from Blake’s and Rowe’s jeering critiques, Scully experienced the fallout from his championing of Venturi in another way. Looking back from the early twenty-first century, Scully pointed to his support of Venturi as the impetus behind difficulties in two close friendships: the first with Louis Kahn, the second with Jim Stirling. Recall that Scully initially met Kahn in 1947 at Yale; the former was a graduate student and fledgling instructor, while the latter was a newly appointed design critic. The two men developed a close relationship— bonding over architecture, their respective time spent in Italy and friendships with Frank Brown, and their continued relationship with Yale. Scully wrote the first book on Kahn’s work, which was published in 1962, and Scully’s son Dan worked in Kahn’s Philadelphia office for four summers beginning that same year. Following the publication of Complexity and Contradiction, however, Scully came to sense that Kahn felt hurt by Scully’s backing for Venturi. Kahn had been a mentor for Venturi, at least at first, providing Venturi with opportunities and experience. Venturi had learned from Kahn, and in turn, Kahn had learned from Venturi; in particular, the younger architect’s interest in ruins and layering influenced Kahn and emerged in his work.47 Yet, as was the way with many modernists, Kahn refused to acknowledge this debt to Venturi and was perhaps even resentful of his

COMPLEXITY AND CONTRADICTION (1964–1967)

139

success. Thus, while Scully insisted that he and Kahn remained friends until the latter’s death, Scully nevertheless felt an element of strain in their relationship surrounding his open support for Venturi.48 The other of Scully’s relationships to be damaged by his encouragement of Venturi was with the British architect Jim Stirling. In 1959, Rudolph as chair of the Department of Architecture invited Stirling for the first of many stints as a visiting critic at Yale. At that point Stirling had little built work to his name but was understood to be a rising international talent, and he would continue teaching at Yale for nearly two decades in various capacities. Stirling had a penchant for heavy drinking and developed a reputation as a lively party-goer; he and Scully, who was known as a gregarious socializer, developed a rapport. Scully would later note that he and Stirling “were actually very good friends. He came to Yale for many years and wore one torn black sweater and kept getting arrested for misdemeanors characteristic of the angry young Englishman of that period. I liked him very much and his work and wrote about it.”49 It seems that Scully and Stirling’s friendship weathered the publication of Complexity and Contradiction well enough, yet within a few years, tension set in when Scully began writing with increasing frequency about Venturi. Perhaps it was the publication of American Architecture and Urbanism in 1969 that registered as an unforgivable slight to Stirling; for while Scully did briefly reference Stirling in the text, he failed to include images of his work. Meanwhile, Venturi’s work accounted for nearly twenty figures and even appeared on the book’s cover. One could argue that with a topic of American architecture and urbanism, it made sense for Scully to only cursorily mention Stirling, as he had no built work in America. Such a rationale doesn’t fully apply, though, as Kahn’s National Assembly in Dacca, East Pakistan, was pictured in the book, as was Le Corbusier’s Capitol Complex in Chandigarh, India, and even the young Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 in Montreal. Regardless, whether it was due to this or a slightly later publication by Scully, Stirling’s resentment built to the point where he cut off interactions with the historian. Later, when asked by his biographer Mark Girouard why he was no longer close with Scully, Stirling reportedly snapped, “if Scully wants to write about Venturi, then he can be friends with Venturi!”50 Despite the blowback he received in print and the strain to select relationships, Scully refused to change his assessment of Complexity and Contradiction, or to temper his support for Venturi. When Complexity and Contradiction was published as a second edition in 1977, Scully added an update to his introduction. He wrote, “Time has shown that this outrageous statement”—his assertion that Venturi’s book “was the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, of 1923”—“was nothing more than the unvarnished truth, and the critics who found it most amusing or infuriating at the moment now seem to spend a remarkable amount of energy quoting Venturi without acknowledgement, or chiding him for not going far enough, or showing that

140

VINCENT SCULLY

they themselves had really said it all long before.”51 Twenty years later, when asked about the bold assertion in the introduction, he laughed. “Everyone made fun of me for that, but I’m glad I wrote it and I’m glad I said it. It turned out to be true.”52 Indeed, Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction did become the manifesto for a generation of architects, much as—as Scully had predicted—Vers une architecture had for those in preceding decades. As a testament to the book’s success, in 2016 MoMA and the University of Pennsylvania co-sponsored a conference to “celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Complexity and Contradiction.”53 To commemorate the event, MoMA thereafter issued a sleek boxed set entitled Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty, which included a facsimile of the book’s first edition as volume one, and a collection of contextualizing and interpretive analytical essays as volume two. MoMA’s publication was as much a celebration of the book’s power as it was a nod to its own; the museum had had the foresight to support Venturi’s book, which then had a tremendous influence on the subsequent fifty years of architectural thought and design. In the introduction to volume two, editors Martino Stierli and David B. Brownlee noted, Complexity and Contradiction was famously characterized by Vincent Scully, in his introduction to the book, as “probably the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture of 1923.” While described by Venturi himself as a “gentle manifesto,” it is generally agreed that Complexity and Contradiction has lived up to the loftier assessment made by Scully.54 In addition to identifying in Venturi’s thought a path forward for architecture, Scully likewise embraced a principle of accommodation that applied not only to design but to life in general. The “existentialconfrontational view,” the either/or, no longer held for him. By the mid1960s, Scully keenly felt the need, in architecture and life—political, social, and personal—for tolerance and accommodation, the both/and.

CHAPTER TEN

Activism and Accommodation (1967–early 1970s) Scully was not alone in his shift away from an existential-confrontational view during the 1960s.1 Yale’s architecture program, since 1958 existing as part of the renamed School of Art and Architecture (A&A), underwent an equally dramatic transformation as it progressed from the exacting precision that characterized the Department of Architecture under Paul Rudolph to the experimentation and freedom of the Charles Moore years. While officially history of art faculty, Scully nevertheless played an active role in the goings-on in the architecture department. Rudolph began his tenure as architecture chair in January 1958. He had studied at the Harvard GSD, completing his master’s degree in 1947 following a four-year stint stationed at the New York Naval Shipyard during the Korean War. In 1948 as the beneficiary of a Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, Rudolph toured Europe, after which he settled in Florida where he developed a national reputation for designing small, modern houses. He also garnered attention as an inspiring educator, taking on short-term teaching assignments at universities such as Yale, where he spent the fall 1955 term as a visiting critic. Three years later, when he was still shy of 40 years old, Rudolph was appointed as chair of Yale’s architecture department, where he embarked on an ambitious plan to elevate the program’s strength and esteem. Throughout the next five years, Rudolph attracted wellrespected and talented practitioners to the school as visiting critics and/or jury members. This illustrious list includes architects Jim Stirling, Colin St. John Wilson, Peter and Alison Smithson, Frei Otto, Bernard Rudolfsky, Oscar Stonorov, and a number of men with whom Rudolph had studied at Harvard, such as John Johansen, Ulrich Franzen, Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Henry Cobb. This rotating door of visitors, along with Scully’s frequent presence and the full-time Yale appointment of former GSD professor Serge Cheramayoff, underscored Rudolph’s willingness to foster different ideologies and pedagogical styles.2 141

142

VINCENT SCULLY

Yale’s Department of Architecture under Rudolph became known not only for this panoply of perspectives, but also for its rigor and intensity. Stuart Wrede, who studied architecture at Yale during the mid- to late 1960s, joined the program in fall 1964, Rudolph’s final year as chair. Rudolph, Wrede noted, “ran a tight ship. Everybody had to really produce drawings and designs, and the juries were tough and scathing.” Wrede spent the 1965/66 year abroad and encountered a drastically changed academic environment under the guidance of Moore upon returning to Yale.3 Moore’s hands-off leadership was far more relaxed than that of his predecessor. In a few short years the emphasis of the program would shift quite dramatically from a pragmatic formalism under Rudolph to a humanist contextualism under Moore. Formerly the chair of the architecture department at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and an architect of growing renown, Moore took the open-mindedness for which Yale was known to a new level. After an initial year of settling in, Moore began to institute curricular changes that included restructuring the master’s program and adding a two-year post-professional degree, the master of environmental design program, to focus on advanced research specific to contemporary urban problems. He likewise encouraged students to connect with life beyond the drafting board, whether it be in New Haven neighborhoods, which were then working through the social and physical challenges associated with Mayor Lee’s ongoing urban renewal efforts, or in rural Appalachia, where in 1967 thirty first-year graduate architecture students spent eight weeks designing and constructing a community center for the disadvantaged residents of New Zion, Kentucky.4 Known as the Building Project, this on-site, design-build approach gave students hands-on experience with facets of the architectural process—including interacting with clients, local municipalities, and construction materials—not encountered in the more traditional studios then typical of design schools. The Building Project tapped into the students’ growing rejection of a system that privileged those with wealth and power, while aligning with their desire for social engagement and the enrichment of all.5 Indeed, in the mid-1960s, architecture programs across the globe faced student tumult in various forms, and Yale was no different. In the United States, the escalating war in Vietnam; the civil, women’s, and gay rights movements; and a perceived conservatism of university administrations converged to create an environment that demanded activism. Idealistic students eagerly obliged. At Yale, this activist energy was compounded by a feeling among the students who had entered the architecture department under Rudolph’s firm rule that the program was adrift under Moore, who “ran a laissez-faire operation, especially in the more advanced years, allowing students to more or less choose whatever project they wanted to work on . . . Students were up in arms over the quality and relevance of [their] education, and in certain cases, the quality of the faculty.”6 The most extreme example

ACTIVISM AND ACCOMMODATION (1967–EARLY 1970s)

143

played out in the city planning department, where struggles over leadership, oversight, and vision ultimately drove the university administration to dismantle the program in its entirety. Additionally, students in the professional arts programs—namely art, architecture, music, and drama—began to demand equity with their counterparts in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who were eligible for and received significantly more financial assistance from Yale. And finally, campus planning issues—including the university master plan by Ed Barnes and the design for the Mellon Center by Kahn—rose to the fore, coming “under close scrutiny by students who wanted a more inclusive approach and a greater concern for the street life of the city.”7 The larger atmosphere of activism, discomfort with Moore’s leadership, and a general disillusionment with Yale’s conservative environment and administration gave rise to a series of creative peaceful protests by the architecture students. The most noteworthy involved commissioning a twostory-tall monument and satirically gifting it to the university. The idea was unwittingly inspired by the philosopher/New Left political theorist Herbert Marcuse who, in an interview with Wrede, suggested that sculptor Claes Oldenburg’s unbuilt large-scale monuments could be a revolutionary, society-altering force. Marcuse mused, If you could ever imagine a situation where at the end of Park Avenue there would be a huge Good Humor ice cream bar and in the middle of Times Square a huge banana [as Oldenburg had proposed], I would say—and I think safely say—this society had come to an end. Because then people cannot take anything seriously: neither their President, nor the Cabinet, nor the corporation executives. There is a way in which this kind of satire, of humor, can indeed kill. I think it would be one of the most bloodless means to achieve radical change. But the trouble is, you must already have the radical change in order to get it built and I don’t see any evidence of that. And the mere drawing wouldn’t hurt and that makes it harmless. But just imagine that overnight it would suddenly be there.8 As a cultural protest against a conservative society and the traditional milieu of the university, Wrede landed on the perfect means and setting to attempt such a “bloodless” coup: a large work of art installed in Yale’s centrally located Beinecke Plaza. Officially known as Hewitt Quadrangle, Beinecke Plaza sits adjacent to Woodbridge Hall, Yale’s main administrative building. Placed in such a heavily trafficked campus space, the newly gifted monument would be highly visible to those affiliated with the university as well as visitors. And in addition to testing Marcuse’s theory that art could inspire radical change, the monument-as-gift scenario would slyly echo the standard practice of alumni donations, a primary means with which universities fund their operations. As Wrede remembered, “it occurred to me that Yale was the perfect victim because it relied on students and alumni for

144

VINCENT SCULLY

gifts.”9 What’s more, this gift—to be commissioned from Oldenburg (class of 1950)—would be fabricated and donated by an actual alumnus as well as students and faculty. Finally, the monument as conceived would symbolically underscore the university’s conservatism and serve as an antiwar statement. Due to its design and location—Beinecke Plaza contained a memorial to Yale men claimed by the First World War—the work was inherently political, an absurdist yet serious indictment of the Vietnam War. Thus Wrede along with fellow students Sam Callaway and Gordon Thorne set out to transform the plan for a subversive work of art into a built reality.10 First they approached Oldenburg, who offered his expertise free of charge and secured Lippencott, a fine arts foundry in North Haven, Connecticut, to fabricate his design for only the cost of materials.11 Wrede, Callaway, and Thorne had begun collecting small donations from students and sympathetic faculty members (including Scully, Moore, and Stirling), but they needed more money to cover the materials. So they traveled to New York to see Philip Johnson, who had a history of funding student projects. Johnson expressed interest but wanted assurances that Oldenburg was indeed on board, so Wrede and friends arranged a meeting with Johnson and the artist. After reviewing the proposal’s salient points, “Philip said ‘that sounds great. How much is it going to cost?’ ” “We had no idea what it was really going to cost,” recalled Wrede, “so we put a figure out there: $20,000. And Johnson said, ‘Oh, good. I’ll give $5,000.’ ” Thus, with a flourish of his pen, Johnson funded the bulk of the monument, which in all totaled $8,000.12 Aside from “bankroll[ing] the revolution,” Johnson’s financial support prompted the creation of the Colossal Keepsake Corporation of Connecticut (CKC), a nonprofit entity established in response to Johnson’s request that he receive a tax deduction for his contribution.13 Legally registered, the CKC consisted of ten individuals, mostly art and architecture students along with Wrede as president, Oldenburg as vice president, and two Yale faculty members, the architect Charles Brewer and Scully. A further advantage of forming the CKC, as Thorne later noted, was that its nature as a corporation legally made the gifting of the monument “as binding, legitimate, and airtight as possible.” In addition, the existence of the CKC highlighted the standard practice of universities benefiting from alumni donations and put an ironic twist on this particular situation, that of one corporation (the CKC) bestowing an unsolicited gift on another corporation (Yale). As Thorne recalled, “There was definitely the magic of giving a gift the University didn’t want.”14 Make no mistake—the monument the students commissioned and Oldenburg designed was a most unwanted gift. On the day of its arrival, a few thousand people crowded into Beinecke Plaza to witness this mysterious event, for which Scully had been building intrigue in the preceding weeks by ending his standing-room-only lectures in the Law School auditorium with a conspiratorial announcement: “Beinecke Plaza, twelve noon, 15 May.”15 Scully had adopted the role of hype man for the spectacle, and he was further

ACTIVISM AND ACCOMMODATION (1967–EARLY 1970s)

145

tasked to ensure that a university official would be present to receive the gift and its accompanying deed. He and the students anticipated that Yale president Kingman Brewster would make himself scarce for the spectacle, despite the fact that it would all occur just outside his office window. (Brewster, just back from lunch, did show up, but quickly retreated to his office.16) So Scully recruited Ben Holden, his former college classmate and now secretary of the university, to attend the ceremony. Holden was understandably suspicious of the pending enigmatic event, given that the spring had been marked by a series of student protests, with the most recent staged the previous week. As would be the ceremonial bestowal of Oldenburg’s monument, the earlier protests were peaceful and creative, voicing serious concerns in a clear yet often humorous manner. On May 7, for example, one hundred students from the A&A marched through campus to protest the dearth of available financial aid. The following day, a large hearse-led funeral procession progressed down Chapel and then High Street, bemoaning the death of the “Unknown A&A Student.” After journeying from Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building to Beinecke Plaza, the tailgate of the hearse swung open to disgorge a casket, which the students promptly lowered, as if into a grave, into the Sunken Garden, a recessed sculpture court designed by landscape architect Isamu Noguchi. A heart-felt eulogy followed. Students then took their protest to the Yale Art Gallery where they held a mock auction, pretending to sell off famous works for Brewster Bogus Bucks, underscoring their feeling that the university spent money to maintain its art yet turned its back on its student artists. This day of protest culminated at the Yale Repertory Theater where students begged for alms and sold pencils to the audience, actions designed to embarrass the university by highlighting the poverty of its charges.17 Thus, on the morning of May 15, when Scully phoned Holden to request his noon-time presence at Beinecke Plaza and assure him that the event would be “very nice . . . and entirely sympathetic to everyone,” the secretary was justifiably skeptical. No doubt this feeling increased when a pick-up truck overflowing with the sculpture’s components, architecture students, and “Oldenburg hanging off the running board like a character in an old agitprop movie” made its way through the crowd into the middle of the plaza.18 The artist and the students then disembarked and assembled the monument, Lipstick (Ascending) On Caterpillar Tracks. Intended to rise 24 feet above the stark concrete surface of Beinecke Plaza, Oldenburg’s design—the first of his many large-scale installations to be executed—contained two seemingly incongruous elements: a large brightred lipstick atop the base of a sizable tank. That the lipstick was an inflatable shaft of vinyl and the tank treads were of wood did nothing to lessen the beguiling effect, and arguably made an even stronger impression as a small leak kept the lipstick from maintaining full rigidity. (As planned, Oldenburg soon replaced the soft tip with a hard fiberglass one.19) Lipstick thus initially conjured the image of a semi-flaccid phallus, lolling above the throngs of

146

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 10.1 Claes Oldenburg directs the installation of his large-scale sculpture, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, at Yale University, May 15, 1969. David Gahr / Getty. students who had gathered to witness this very-1960s happening—the arrival, assembly, and bestowal of Yale’s newest alumni donation. Once Lipstick had been erected, Oldenburg and Wrede, with Callaway and Thorne standing by, formally presented Holden with the gigantic sculpture’s deed. The secretary’s expression likely conveyed some manner of dismay, reportedly prompting Oldenburg to lean toward him and quietly intone, with a tight smile, “It’s a gift, you must be gracious.”20 Holden took the deed, mumbled some words of thanks, and the transfer was complete. The university’s displeasure with the gift was evident in that they never formally acknowledged receipt of Lipstick, and then let the monument languish in Beinecke Plaza, falling victim to scribbled graffiti and the incremental theft of the wooden tracks. The monument’s base acted as an impromptu speaker’s platform for a time, as it was indeed intended to do, all the while progressively disintegrating in New Haven’s humid summer and snow-laden winter. Yale’s failure to maintain Lipstick, let alone acknowledge its existence, led Oldenburg and the CKC to reclaim the monument in March 1970, as the university had failed to live up to the stipulations of the deed that they take care of the work. By the following year, Lipstick had become internationally famous, and pressure from the Yale Art Gallery and the history of art faculty—Scully, in particular—prompted Yale to ask for the monument’s return. They promised to restore and maintain it but refused to place it in the original Beinecke

ACTIVISM AND ACCOMMODATION (1967–EARLY 1970s)

147

Plaza location. Thus Lipstick was rebuilt and found its way back to Yale’s campus in 1974, sited in the courtyard of the Morse residential college, where Scully was college master.21 *

*

*

The student unrest of the late 1960s infiltrated all avenues of campus life, including leadership of the school’s residential colleges. More than thirty years before, Yale had implemented the residential college system, placing undergraduates for their years of matriculation in smaller groups that contained living, eating, and socializing quarters, all overseen by designated faculty members who lived on site. Residential colleges, as they persist to this day at Yale and other universities, reflect a system used by the preeminent British universities in Oxford and Cambridge; in theory they provide a microcosm of the larger university, shaping a more intimate environment for student community development. In early 1969, Yale administrators set out to appoint a new master of Morse College, one of Yale’s two newest residential colleges, designed along with Stiles College by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1962 on the former site of Hillhouse High School, which was demolished to make way for Yale’s expansion. Students in Morse, keen to voice their opinions on who their next master would be—and clearly desiring someone with liberal sympathies in keeping with antiwar and pro-civil rights sentiments—circulated a petition, drafted by sophomore Wilbur (Bil) Johnson, asking that a luminary such as Norman Mailer (an outspoken political critic) or the Reverend William Coffin (Yale University chaplain and prominent activist) be chosen.22 President Brewster quickly assured those behind the petition that he did have someone in mind, and they would be quite pleased with the outcome. Indeed they were, and Scully assumed the mastership of Morse College in fall 1969. Scully—then just shy of 50—along with Marion, Ann (in high school), Maika (a young teen), Katie (3 years old), and their Irish setter, moved into the master’s house located at the center of Morse College’s quadrangle. Scully noted that, ironically, his bedroom in the new quarters was located precisely where his homeroom at Hillhouse High School had been more than thirty years before.23 When Scully took over as master of Morse, he inherited a student staff of a dozen or so to assist with clerical and other tasks around the residential college. Johnson, in his junior year at Yale, was among this staff and would rise to be Scully’s chief aide, and friend, the following year. Johnson and his classmates felt that Scully was the perfect person to head their college during that politically and socially tumultuous era. “A bleeding-heart liberal,” in Johnson’s words, Scully was extremely supportive of antiwar and civil rights activism. Fall 1969 marked the first year that women were allowed to matriculate as undergraduates at Yale, and Scully was all in favor of this shift toward coeducation and a more diverse student population. Above all, he maintained a strong presence within the college—he’d socialize with

148

VINCENT SCULLY

students in the courtyard, host lectures and dinners in the master’s residence, and—as he had since he was a child—attend every possible football game. The students welcomed Scully’s presence, and he seemed to truly enjoy the students, drawing energy from those around him.24 Just as Vincent Sr. had taken his alderman duties quite seriously, so Scully threw himself into his role as Morse master, adopting true concern for the lives of his charges. For example, when a Morse College student was arrested in New Haven during a civil rights protest in the spring of 1970, Scully went down to the jail and bailed out the young man. He received a letter from the student’s father a few days later, which read, “My son’s predicament came as a surprise to me and I was very worried. I am very grateful for your assistance in effecting his release.”25 In a different instance, a student was hospitalized for unexpected surgery; Scully went to visit the boy every day for weeks until his discharge.26 As master of Morse College, Scully was at once a friend to students and a father figure of sorts, a post he would occupy through the spring of 1975.27 *

*

*

Scully’s participation in the Lipstick endeavor and the student protests of 1969 appear rather remarkable in that he managed, with consummate skill, to simultaneously align himself with both sides—the students and the administration. In word and deed he sympathized with the students, serving as a director of the CKC and procuring Secretary Holden to accept Lipstick on the university’s behalf. He had also attended the mock funeral, which he commended as “a beautiful performance, done with great style . . . like the Living Theatre,” and the subsequent fake auction.28 At the same time, Scully remained a loyal son of the university, imbued with respect for—and the deep need to uphold—Yale’s institutional honor.29 Thus when the Yale Art Gallery security guards asked the student activists to leave after closing time, Scully urged them to be respectful. “You’ve made your point, and it’s a good point,” he said. “I advise you to leave now.”30 And while Holden stood dumbfounded as Lipstick rose, Scully likewise acted as a voice of reason, “slapping [Holden] on the back and telling him what a great thing it was,”—it being the sculpture, a now Yale-owned and soon-to-be worldrenowned work of art, and the event as a whole. Indeed, “That was the year when students at other universities, such as Harvard and Cornell, were locking deans up in their own offices and marching out of the gym with guns in their hands and generally trashing their universities. Not at Yale, where the administration got this little gift instead, presented at a delightful meeting of the community.”31 As revolutionary activity had ramped up in the fall of 1968, Scully embraced both the students’ and the administration’s positions. He addressed the student discontents sympathetically while “urging [them] to keep their ‘revolt professional’ ” and recognize that disciplinary professionalism and the university are not the enemy, but rather the students’ weapon for change.32

ACTIVISM AND ACCOMMODATION (1967–EARLY 1970s)

149

(“Any reactionary will tell you,” Scully intoned, “that the university is in fact the shield and spear of human freedom always.”33) That students took Scully’s message to heart is suggested by the fact that Wrede and his fellow activists included Scully’s remarks in Novum Organum (NO, for short), their student-published broadsheet focused on pressing issues of the day.34 Perhaps it was a similar impulse to support—or protect—both students and the university that compelled Scully to insist Wrede omit mention of Marcuse in a special issue of NO about Lipstick, distributed on Ascension Day.35 It is curious to note Scully’s attempt to cleanse the story of Marcuse, a philosopher who was intimately connected with the social activism of 1960s, especially since Wrede openly credited his idea for the monument-asgift to his discussion with Marcuse. Likely Scully recognized that an overt link to Marcuse, oft cited as an inspiration for the at-times violent antiuniversity and anti-government revolts in Europe during the spring of 1968, could immediately sour the Yale officials on Lipstick, adding another layer of tension to what was already destined to be a trying situation.36 In its conception, creation, bestowal, and continued existence, the monument embodied student dissent first and foremost against university policies. Additional interpretations—sexual, martial, cultural, gendered, and otherwise—the students and Oldenburg insisted, came later. Thorne, a student board member of CKC, would explain, The real content of the Lipstick was in its initial act—in its being a “happening,” a collaborative effort at a specific historical time and place. The bullet phallus, tank/war machine associations may be there, but no single interpretation . . . is correct. The action that gave the monument meaning and life is none of these connotations; what happened to Beinecke Plaza and to the crowd there on May 15, 1969, was as important as the physical object itself. Before the eyes of onlookers and in a spirit of excitement and good feelings, the Lipstick became whole. Yale at that time was generally terrified by groups of students congregating on campus; but this gathering was different, for the activity was a nonterrorizing act. The military procession with tank treads was almost a dramatic parody, yet significantly it was all done because it had to do with sculpture and art—a non-political, non-violent object. A spirit of celebration and creativity—not of destructiveness—reigned; the Lipstick grew out of the communal nature of the project and of the day itself. Whatever political overtones the monument had, it acquired afterwards; the original intentions were not meant to be propagandistic, anti-war, or insulting to the War Memorial. The beauty of the Lipstick was that it allowed anyone to read anything into it that they wanted.37 Thorne’s interpretation differs from that recounted by Wrede, who saw the monument and the event surrounding it as a protest against a conservative society, university, and physical environment.38 Considering this potential

150

VINCENT SCULLY

for multiple and open-ended interpretations, one thing Scully likely did not want associated with Lipstick was violent student action via reference to Marcuse. Scully’s insistence that Wrede erase Marcuse from the narrative, at least at the time of its bestowal, reflects on the professor’s desire for a nonviolent, successful happening for the students and the administration, not reluctance on Scully’s part to engage in politically charged events. *

*

*

Indeed, Scully—not one to shy away from confrontation—had earned a reputation as someone who boisterously voiced his beliefs. Recall that he, as a 27-year-old graduate student, took Gropius and Breuer to task in front of a MoMA audience for not paying Wright the respect Scully felt the older architect deserved. Likewise, consider Scully’s steadfast opposition to both the city’s and the federal government’s redevelopment plans that would have laid waste to the New Haven Free Public Library and Post Office.39 Not surprisingly, Scully’s outspokenness extended to politics, and the 1960s provided ample opportunity for him to express his pro-peace position. For example, as American involvement in Vietnam escalated, Scully and six other Yale faculty members organized a peace demonstration that began in the university’s Battell Chapel on May 23, 1967, the 2,030th anniversary of the Buddha’s birth and an agreed-upon day of truce in the Vietnam War.40 A flyer addressed to the teachers and students of New Haven educational institutions, public and private, was circulated throughout the city, inviting all to gather “in order to demonstrate their wish that the truce be extended into a true armistice and, finally, the end of the war.” The gathering and subsequent march were intended to “reflect [the organizers’] hope that Ho Chi Minh will show a true willingness to negotiate, and that Lyndon Baines Johnson will exercise the massive political courage necessary to terminate the bombing of North Vietnam and to negotiate with the Viet Cong.” Further purposes of the protest, the flyer said, were to save American and Vietnamese lives, support American politicians who urged moderation in the conflict, prevent an escalation toward nuclear war with Russian and China, “and to help rescue both the life and the soul of our beloved country, so long the hope of the world.”41 On the appointed day, university chaplain William Coffin opened the meeting with a song and readings from the Buddha; four prominent faculty members offered thoughts after him, and then Scully provided closing remarks. To the six hundred people in attendance, Scully observed, We feel today a deep sadness for mankind: it wants so much good and does so much evil, its eyes full of stars, and blind. We are choked with grief for the promise and the folly of man: loving his children, holding them in his arms, watching their steps, and somehow unable to see in them their brothers screaming . . . or lying in their sisters’ arms, mutilated, dying.

ACTIVISM AND ACCOMMODATION (1967–EARLY 1970s)

151

Dead by design? No. By accident, because they got in the way. In the way of what? In the way of an abstraction called “policy”; in the way of an old, widely accepted, wholly outworn model of confronted worlds which is now in fact a generation out of date; in a way, most of all, of a simple mistake, made by a few stubborn men in a closed, administrative decision: the mistake was their decision to bomb. To bomb, and to smash a fragile agricultural economy by massive technological force. To bomb, to smash, to uproot, and to risk—even to court—a third world war.42 In addition to killing innocents, the bombing campaigns, Scully continued, played right into the hands of the United States’ communist adversaries, who benefited as the United States drew global condemnation from other countries. With these facts in mind, Scully declared that it was time for Americans to announce, “ ‘We have no stomach for this mindless, murderous pounding. We are too strong and hopeful for it. We stop it now.’ They said that if we would do so they would negotiate. Therefore, let us stop, and let them negotiate now.” He concluded, In a moment, those of us who wish to do so will walk around the Green while these [chapel] bells toll. And I hope that all the rest of you will fall in behind us. We won’t shout slogans or do anything but walk . . . We will carry one sign, reading, “Let the Truce become Peace.” We will also carry the flag, because I believe that we walk in the spirit of the American constitution, now violated . . . It was our shield, now broken. I therefore suggest that we walk in terror of God’s justice, and for all the children in the world.43 With these words, Scully stepped down from the lectern, took the hands of his stepchildren, who were in attendance, and led a peaceful, silent march around the New Haven Green.44 In October 1967, Scully and law professor Charles Reich circulated a petition to Yale’s faculty that condemned the war in Vietnam and President Johnson’s Asian policies more generally.45 Scully positioned the faculty petition as a statement in support of the students’ “We Won’t Go” movement, a draft-resistance pledge adopted by university students across the country who planned to refuse military service in Vietnam, even if drafted. Discussing his support for the student resistance and the faculty petition, Scully declared, “I love the law. I respect the law . . . I live by the law. But I feel that this nation has now left the law. It is time to take action.”46 The following month, Scully joined students to form a chapter of the Conference for Concerned Democrats, a nationwide movement that, on the basis of Johnson’s Vietnam policies, opposed his expected nomination as the 1968 Democratic presidential candidate, lobbying instead for someone “who will come out for peace.”47 Two years later, in fall 1969, Scully took

152

VINCENT SCULLY

part in the New Haven Fast for Peace during which he gave a speech urging Americans to “remember who we are.”48 The next spring, during the May Day 1970 weekend in which students, civil rights activists, and New Haven community members converged on the Green to protest the trial of Bobby Seale and fellow Black Panthers who were accused of murdering another member they believed to be an FBI informant, it was a similar aversion to violence that led Scully to leave campus. A recent large-scale gathering at Harvard University had erupted in physical altercations between the protesters and the police as people breeched Harvard’s gates and destroyed campus property. Anticipating the arrival in New Haven of thousands of activists from all over the country, Yale suspended classes and ceased much of the school’s operations as the government deployed the National Guard to suppress possible riots. While supportive of the May Day gathering on the Green, Scully recognized the real potential for violence, both against people and Yale itself.49 Not wanting to witness injury enacted upon his students or the campus, he and his family left their Morse College quarters for Branford, Connecticut.50 That Scully’s tendency to eschew violence was life-long is suggested by childhood stories he recalled while in his 60s. At age 8, Scully and his mother spent the summer at Morgan’s Point, a working-class coastal area east of New Haven. He earned money for the movies by harvesting fiddler crabs from the marsh, which he sold as bait to fisherman for a half-cent each. Reflecting on the time, Scully wondered if he “ever felt badly for the fate of the fiddlers.” “Probably I did,” he concluded. “I have never hunted since then and fished only a few times. I caught a big blue on one of those occasions and couldn’t stand his dead gaze. They gasp once, it seems, and die, and their round black eyes instantly turn to stone, unreachable and unforgiving.”51 An even more telling remembrance involved, that same summer, Scully’s refusal to punch another boy who had pushed Scully’s dog, a short-haired fox terrier named Pal, into the bay. Pal swam ashore uninjured, and Scully grabbed the offending party, ready to defend his dog’s honor. Yet, as Scully raised his hand to “pound [the boy] to jelly,” he found that he couldn’t hit him. “It was a duty,” Scully wrote. “Better than that, it was an opportunity. He was in the wrong . . . and I never struck him with the satisfying, manmaking chunk of the balled fist on bone.”52 Scully’s refusal to strike the other child stuck with him and, more than a half-century later, Scully seemed to remember this event not as evidence of a preference for peace or an aversion to violence, but rather as an indictment surrounding his failure to act. “Why couldn’t I hit that dumb, round head?” he asked. “What good is it, I thought . . . if you can’t strike like a man, blinded and unreasoning, for your own?”53 In other words, as a child Scully felt he had failed for not doing his “duty” and defending his dog with his fists. Reading his recollection of the story, it seems that adult Scully, all those decades later, still felt the sting. It was a similar pacifist sentiment that Scully channeled as he spoke to a graduating college class in 1969. Over the course of his career, Scully would

ACTIVISM AND ACCOMMODATION (1967–EARLY 1970s)

153

give dozens of such graduation speeches, but perhaps none was delivered in such a socially, culturally, and politically tumultuous time as the end of the 1960s. In addressing the topic of student unrest, Scully offered a summary of the age that laid bare his deep disillusionment with global events and the failure of human decency. Four years and more of brutal war have shown us a face of ourselves which we thought we had outgrown forever, or had forgotten we ever possessed. It is the face we wore when we packed the West Africans between the decks of our slave ships, and when we massacred the women and children of the Cheyenne on the banks of the Washita, and cut down the fruit trees of the Navaho in the Canyon de Chelly, and piled up the Filipino patriots before the muzzles of our Krags. They were called “subhuman” . . . The list is long, but long cold, long past, we thought. Alas, we have worn that face again among the burning villages of Vietnam; and our dear sons and brothers have been forced to kill and die in a repressive fight unworthy of them and of ourselves—unworthy alike of their courage and of the humane principles which we at least profess. Worst of all, we have done and suffered these things while enjoying the most lavish material culture the world has ever known: the biggest cars, the fattest food, the silliest clothes. We, the grownups, have played like children while children were burned in our name. Can it be any wonder that our children look at us now with astounded and horrified eyes? They recognize our madness and reject it.54 Scully, too, had come to reject this madness. And furthermore, he recognized a kinship between the attitudes underlying American foreign policies and orthodox modern architecture. In Scully’s view, the bomb-intosubmission mentality that had governed American strategy in the Second World War—the all-powerful, unyielding mindset that led the United States to deploy atomic weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima—continued in the 1960s to rule American policies in Asia. Under Johnson, the country worked to overwhelm Vietnam with a show of might, to blast and burn the enemy into submission. Yet, the game had changed and the old tactics, seemingly appropriate before, were no longer relevant for the current day, marked by guerrilla warfare in the jungles of Southeast Asia.55 Similarly, Scully had come to see modern architecture, as established in the earlier part of the century, as a response to its particular time and context. More than a generation later, though, modern architecture as conceived in the early part of the century was no longer appropriate; rather, it was an anachronism. For Scully, architecture and war—each products of their era—lived and died by the same logic. In the New York Times in early 1971, Scully succinctly explained his understanding—which he had formulated partway through the preceding

154

VINCENT SCULLY

decade—of the relationship between mid-century approaches to American foreign policy and modernist-driven urban renewal. He wrote, Redevelopment and Vietnam were intimately connected and were indeed the two massive failures of American liberalism—by which, in the end, it blew everything it had gained before. The two phenomena were alike in many ways. They were both 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. Furthermore, their effects have been similar. They have played complementary roles in the polarization the country and in the shift of power away from the liberal Center toward more extremist positions.56 Two years prior, Scully had ended his American Architecture and Urbanism of 1969 on a similar note, with his by-now characteristic literary flourish (which would please some reviewers and aggravate others).57 New Haven mayor Dick Lee and his urban redevelopment advisors were really operating under an old model of reality now about fifteen years out of date, a model at its worst simplistic and arrogant, at its best demanding uncompromising confrontation rather than civilized accommodation, a model which needed to be everywhere revised in terms of common humanity if catastrophe was to be avoided . . . The model had nothing intrinsic to do with reality . . . The packaged solutions of the last generation are no longer of much use in the social and architectural problems of the late 1960s. They must all be thought through again, in terms of the lives of all of us . . . Happy the moment when professional questions are finally perceived in relation to everything else, as they demand to be these days. They help us to see that the brutal forcing of the present reality into old models is always Procrustean folly. It is, of course, the way in which most states and individuals have encompassed their own collapse before now. The brain hates to think things through afresh; sometime it chooses death instead. It resists most of all the abandonment of childish dreams and illusions, worn-out myths, and violent evasions. Life is calling the United States to face its realities now.58 In terms of architecture and urbanism, Scully keenly felt the need for an attitude that was relevant to, and an outgrowth of, the present day. Venturi, seeming to Scully to avoid the extremist either/or position, filled this void; he offered a methodology that recognized modern architecture as a source, not the source, of departure. In politics, society, and architecture, the time had come for a new approach grounded in realism, a new diplomacy based on accommodation and inclusion.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Great Shift Toward Realism (late 1960s–early 1970s) By the late 1960s, disillusionment with American brutality—as expressed in Vietnam, the long-term persecution of marginalized communities, the destruction of neighborhoods and city fabric by urban renewal, and a carcrazed culture—weighed heavily on Scully’s mind. From American Architecture and Urbanism, written in 1966/67 and published in 1969, to the updated edition of Modern Architecture, which appeared in 1974, these issues figured prominently in his writings. Perhaps the full heft of this disillusionment—and Scully’s proposed antidote to it—is conveyed most succinctly in Scully’s lecture on the occasion of his invitation to present the Royal British Institute of Architects (RIBA) Annual Discourse. Since its origination in the late 1950s, the RIBA Annual Discourse—a prestigious honor—had been awarded to design professionals such as Alvar Aalto (1957), Buckminster Fuller (1958), and Louis Kahn (1962). Scully was the first architectural historian to be tapped. His lecture, published as “RIBA Discourse 1969: A Search for Principle Between Two Wars” in the RIBA Journal, struck a different note from those that came before it, Neil Levine noted, “in the way that it interweaves issues of history, criticism, and autobiography around a core of profound moral and ethical significance.”1 Pueblo architecture, urban renewal, Venturi, Pop Art—these elements all appeared, almost as if a greatest hits list of his past five years’ preoccupations. For Scully, these foci represented his larger attitudinal shift, from confrontation and domination to accommodation and compassion, which he hoped to see mirrored in society in the years to come. In his RIBA lecture, which in many ways rehearsed his arguments in American Architecture and Urbanism, Scully restated his long-standing conviction that “all of the constructed environment is architecture,” from “the concentrated science-fiction dreams of the Archigrammists” to “the American strip, where the city is strewn out along the road like the contents of an affluent wastebasket. It is all architecture. It always grows out of us, forms us, and shows us what we are.”2 The question then became, where did American 155

156

VINCENT SCULLY

architecture find itself—and thus where did Americans find themselves—at this point? For Scully, the answer was obvious: caught between the growing rejection of American artists and intellectuals, and most of all by the young, of several central aspects of the Hellenic tradition, among them especially the heroic, or confrontational, view of human life—or what those who make that rejection would call the “uptight” attitude toward experience. (The Temple of Athena at Paestum is as “uptight” as it can be.) That rejection seeks instead what those who make it would call the “with it” attitude, like the more relaxed Indian stance, wherein the building at Taos pueblo dances its sacred mountain in its forms.3 Scully’s own research of the last half decade, he asserted, “has followed this course from Europe to America, from Greek to Pueblo, perhaps from more individualistic to more communal, and to a concern for the future of all non-European Americans, whose total liberation is a fundamental part of the ‘with it’ movement as a whole.” Indeed, as Scully explained, “the dream world which (colonial) American society had persistently tried to create has never in the past had other than a servile place for non-white peoples in it.” In light of the social turmoil experienced during the end of the 1960s, Scully’s explicit reference to American civil rights struggles may have seemed extraneous to his predominantly Anglo and male audience. More likely, though, it was an unexpected departure in the typically staid forum of the RIBA. Nevertheless, it is worth noting the enormity of this fact: during a lecture on the current state of architecture, Scully—a middle-aged white professor of working-class origins—foregrounded as key components the issues of civil rights and persistent racism. This implies that, for Scully, architecture was inextricably bound up with our human beliefs and actions. Indeed, “It is all architecture.” Society needed to shift its outlook from heroic, confrontational, “uptight” to realistic, accommodating, “with it.” Aside from—or in addition to—the “relaxed” adobe pueblos that echo the natural landscape, what did “with it” look like in terms of architecture? Scully taught by comparison, highlighting what he saw to be a fundamental difference between the work of Kahn and Venturi. “Kahn’s work professes to be special and heroic,” Scully noted. “There is nothing ironic about it; it is Rome in concrete, Olympian in intention.” Venturi, too, had learned from Rome as well as other places, but he dwelled in the present. His Guild House incorporated an array of past precedents and one in particular of his time, “a television aerial in gold which culminates his building just as it does the lives of the old people in the common room below.” Here Scully drove home the difference between Kahn and Venturi. “That television aerial obsessively infuriates Kahn. He is of the older, ‘uptight’ generation, its most heroic figure; Venturi is the most intelligent spokesman and best of the new ‘with it’ world.”4 Thus Venturi had emerged as the foremost representative of the new generation—Scully’s generation. And once again—as did Kahn in his

A GREAT SHIFT TOWARD REALISM (LATE 1960s–EARLY 1970s)

157

time, Wright in his, and others before them—Venturi continued the generation’s search for an order particular to, and appropriate for, its time. While the new generation searched for its architectural order, all was neither smooth nor rosy, for Venturi and his compatriots were forced to grapple with the “uptight” fallout at its apogee. The “active sculptural force” enacted by Le Corbusier’s High Court Building in Chandigarh in the 1950s, the upright nobility that Scully felt to be “the essential fact of human life in action”—in short, the urge for monumentality that reigned throughout the 1950s—had, by the mid-1960s, mutated into something threatening and inhuman, giving way to what Norman Mailer famously termed the “empty landscapes of psychosis.”5 By 1965, Scully had come to see things Mailer’s

FIGURE 11.1 Knights of Columbus Building, New Haven, Connecticut, 1967, by Roche and Dinkeloo. Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0.

158

VINCENT SCULLY

way, at least in part. He lamented, “The heroic pretensions of the last decade have turned to tragic war, and the old confrontational models of action, in politics as in urbanism, have shown themselves to be unrealistic and out of date, brutalized by time.”6 Much notable architecture of the 1960s had come to be viewed by Scully and “American students as an all too obvious symbol of the larger horrors of our time.”7 In American Architecture and Urbanism, published the same year as his RIBA lecture, Scully had expanded upon this argument, offering a genealogy of architectural examples to support his assertion. There he had detailed that, as “popular packages of their time and a revealing image of it,” Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal (1962) at Kennedy International Airport in Long Island, New York, and Dulles International Airport (1962) near Washington, DC, shared the client-pleasing formula of “(a) one whammo shape, justified by (b) one whammo functional innovation . . . and by (c) one whammo structural exhibition which is always threatening, visually at least, to come apart at the seams.”8 Saarinen’s later projects, and those created by his head designer Kevin Roche after joining John Dinkeloo in practice, appeared even more menacing to Scully, developing “a quality at once cruelly inhuman and trivial, as if they had been designed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” Thus the towering mass of Roche and Dinkeloo’s Knights of Columbus Building (1967) in New Haven displayed “a kind of paramilitary dandyism which seems disturbing at the present moment in American history.” And the firm’s Ford Foundation Building in New York City of the same year was “no less ominous: military scale on the street, sultanic inner garden.” It felt to Scully as if the firm of Roche and Dinkeloo “sens[ed] and embod[ied] the most deeply seated, perhaps unconscious, aspirations of its political and corporate clients.”9 For Scully, these buildings served as concrete expressions of the era’s prevailing attitude. While Scully was deeply disillusioned, it is important to note that, for him, all was not lost. In the accommodation and realism of Venturi’s and other “with-it” architects’ work, he saw a way forward. Grounded by his belief that architecture “forms us, and shows us what we are,” Scully believed that a more humane, gentle architecture was needed to point the way.10 *

*

*

When Complexity and Contradiction was published in 1966, Venturi—in partnership with John Rauch since 1964—had scant built work under his belt, aside from the Guild House, his mother’s house, and a few other smallscale projects, including a dormitory for the Hun School in Princeton, New Jersey. That Venturi’s design theory of accommodation resonated deeply with Scully became quite clear when the historian wrote the introduction to Venturi’s book, lauding him as the new generation’s foremost architectural representative. Scully continued this discussion in American Architecture and Urbanism. Naturally, he was eager to see more physical manifestations

A GREAT SHIFT TOWARD REALISM (LATE 1960s–EARLY 1970s)

159

of Venturi’s concepts. Thus, when Yale announced in late 1966 that wealthy alumnus Paul Mellon had gifted the university both his extensive collection of British art and books as well as the money to build a museum in which to display them, Scully chimed in with his choice of architects. Venturi topped his wish list, followed by Kahn and then Philip Johnson.11 The process of selecting an architect dragged on for nearly three years, with Kahn steadily occupying the preferred spot in the eyes of the selection officials. Scully, however, continued to advocate for Venturi. On May 7, 1969—one week before Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks would rise in Beinecke Plaza, Scully pleaded his case in a letter to President Brewster noting that Ten years ago, it would have been a heroic act to employ Kahn [as architect for the Mellon Center]. Today it would have no particular significance, or would even constitute a certain backward step. A great shift toward what I think we must call “realism” has taken place in American architecture during the past few years, and it has been initiated and led by Venturi. Now, today, he is the best designer in America, the quickest, simplest, most intelligent, most generous, most economical.12 Despite Scully’s endorsement, Venturi was passed over for the Mellon Center commission in favor of Kahn, who was hired that summer. Scully, however, was able to help Venturi secure a smaller commission. Two families, those of brothers-in-law David Trubek (a Yale law professor) and George Wislocki (an environmentalist), were looking to build adjacent houses on a limited budget on Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. Scully, who had spent time on Nantucket with Marion at her family’s home, suggested to Trubek that he consider Venturi and Rauch to design the project.13 The houses were completed to the firm’s design in 1972. Located on an undeveloped stretch of Nantucket’s coast, the two homes differed greatly from the lavish, glass-heavy neo-modernist villas typical of the elite locale.14 Rather, Venturi modeled his design on humble fisherman’s cottages native to the island. The two wood-shingled houses likewise echoed, at a far smaller scale, their nineteenth-century Shingle Style predecessors as they faced the sea, canted toward each other slightly, clearly part of the same grouping. The “studied misalignment” of their siting Venturi likened to the Greek temples at Selinunte in Sicily.15 Scully found the whole combination quite moving, and he injected additional layers of meaning into the composition. The two houses stand side by side on a bluff above the bay . . . with every variety of old and new shingled house, from 1973 to 1686, to be found not far away. But these two stand very much alone, and their tall vertical stance gives each of them a special quality as a person; we can empathize with them as the embodiment of sentient beings like ourselves . . . [Indeed,

160

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 11.2 Trubek and Wislocki Houses, Nantucket, Massachusetts, 1972, by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

the houses] turn like two bodies slightly toward each other as if in conversation . . . not now gods, like the being embodied, for example, in the high, taut Temple of Athena at Paestum. But common creatures dwindled to modest human scale . . . The windows of each house are in tension with those of the other, a family in response and withdrawal. The conversation is difficult; the gables are lance points in an electric sky; the smaller more slender house withdraws from the broader one. How lonely each seems, as Americans have somehow always felt themselves to be. How stiff their backs . . . Now [in comparison] Wright’s old house in Oak Park really does look like what it was: unquestioningly suburban, wellprotected on a leafy inland street in a peaceful nineteenth-century suburban town. 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.16 Lest there be any confusion about the high esteem with which Scully held the Trubek and Wislocki Houses, he concluded that, with them, “we are in the presence of what modern architects have always said they most wanted:

A GREAT SHIFT TOWARD REALISM (LATE 1960s–EARLY 1970s)

161

a true vernacular architecture—common, buildable, traditional in the deepest sense, and of piercing symbolic power. It is the bread and wine united to the sublime as sustenance no less than symbol.”17 For Scully, the Trubek and Wislocki Houses would occupy the place of honor in Venturi’s oeuvre. As Venturi’s work became aligned with that of his partner and wife architect/planner Denise Scott Brown, with whom he and Steven Izenour published Learning from Las Vegas (“a gaudy but enormously intelligent companion to Venturi’s somber Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture”18), and the firm went on to tackle projects of increasing size and scale, the diminutive Trubek and Wislocki Houses would remain dear to Scully’s heart. Perhaps it was that they offered, in their small stature and serene setting, an alternative to the harsh social, physical, and political realities of American urban renewal and the preceding decades’ militarism. Or maybe Scully’s affection for the Nantucket duo was seated in his identification of them as the culmination of modern architects’ aspirations as well as a suitable apogee, just as had been the Low House a century before, of the renewed Shingle Style. Irrespective of the reasons, though, Scully’s undying allegiance to these houses would only become obvious in the following decade. In the 1970s, Scully had every in reason to expect that Venturi’s work would continue to delight him for years to come. Indeed, around the time that Scully pointed Trubek toward Venturi, another Yale building project appeared on the horizon. This one was for an addition to Leet Oliver Memorial Hall, an early-twentieth-century Gothic structure that housed the mathematics department. To find a suitable design, Yale initiated an open competition, the first in the university’s history.19 The excitement generated by the announcement was vast; anyone who met the minimum requirements could participate. For an unknown or fledgling designer, winning this competition could be the spring point of a successful career. Sixteen hundred architects registered to compete (albeit less than a third would ultimately submit entries). In a brief distributed to all participants, Charles Moore, who acted as a professional consultant for the competition, outlined the aspirations for the addition, which was to be a “workable, economical, generally nonmonumental space for the conduct of [the math department’s] teaching and research” and be “sensitive to the complex conditions around it.”20 In other words, Yale wasn’t interested in erecting another object à la Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink (1958), Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building (1963), or Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library (1963). Rather, the university sought a building that would complement and contribute to the cohesiveness of its campus, creating a building-as-bridge between the past and the present. In February 1970, a jury comprised of the math department’s chair, Charles E. Rickart; Yale’s director of Buildings and Grounds Planning, Edward Dunn; four architects—John Christiansen, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Kevin Roche, and Romaldo Giurgola—and Vincent Scully blindly reviewed the 468 competition submissions, narrowing the field to five. The final five received $10,000 each and three months’ time to complete their

162

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 11.3 Yale Mathematics Building, winning entry, 1970, by Venturi and Rauch. The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania by the gift of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. architectural drawings, which remained anonymous through the second round of review.21 (The jurors knew the names of the five firms selected as semi-finalists, but the final schemes they submitted remained nameless during the judging.) In June, the jury declared a winner: Venturi and Rauch.22 That the seven-member jury unanimously selected the winning project made little difference to detractors of Venturi’s design. When Architectural Forum published the winning submission alongside the four semi-finalists’ designs in the July/August 1970 issue, the journal received a flood of damning letters from the architectural community. Criticisms ran the gamut from charges of functional inadequacy—the building would not serve the needs of its users—to accusations of failing to meet the brief’s programmatic requirements. The loudest objections involved the aesthetics of Venturi’s design. One architect characterized the building as “reveling in mediocrity” before griping, “if this design represents a new architectural millennium, then what’s the use of continuing to practice architecture?” In short, the building was so nondescript, in his estimation, it required no architect to shape its character, only someone to build it. Offering an even less nuanced assessment, and slamming Architectural Forum to boot, another architect

A GREAT SHIFT TOWARD REALISM (LATE 1960s–EARLY 1970s)

163

declared, “No matter how long the article or clever the words, the winner is still a piece of junk.”23 More problematic than the outcry against the winning design were charges of impropriety concerning the competition itself—that it had been rigged all along for Venturi to win and that he was not eligible to participate in the first place. True, the original competition announcement forbade “associates and employees of Jury members and of the Professional Advisor [Moore] and employees or relatives of the Trustees of Yale University” from entering submissions. Shortly after the brief was issued, however, Moore amended this prohibition by declaring that, for purposes of the competition, faculty members would not be considered as employees of the Yale trustees. This allowed those teaching at the School of Architecture— including Venturi, who with Scott Brown had the previous semester led Yale’s Learning from Las Vegas studio—to take part in the competition. Even if one did accept this “faculty-can-play” rule change, critics argued, Venturi still shouldn’t have been able to participate because he was close with Scully (the historian had written that glowingly positive introduction for Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction a few years prior) and thus associated with a jury member. To top it off, there was suspicion that anonymity had been breached, specifically that Scully knew which entry was Venturi’s and intentionally voted for it.24 One aspiring—and perhaps foolhardy—student journalist raised the issue of impropriety with Scully, who reportedly exploded in anger, berated the young man for questioning his integrity and intelligence, and threw him out of his office. Scully apologized the next day. Nevertheless, Scully’s outburst, covered in the Yale Daily News under the headline “Scully Blasts Math Building Critics as ‘Despicable Scum,’ ” created more fodder for the critics of the design and the competition that had produced it.25 In the end, the legacy of the Math Building competition was not an addition to Leet Oliver Memorial Hall; when a fund-raising push failed to bring in the requisite $3 million for construction, Yale shelved the project.26 Less tangible than a constructed building, although perhaps just as concrete, the competition’s legacy was that it underscored the divide between two generations of architects, the late modern architects such as Kahn and Rudolph, who had grappled with concepts of monumentality; and the new generation of architects, including Venturi, Moore, and others, for whom different issues (realism, contextualism, relationship to the past) took precedence. Scully, it turns out, suffered his own lasting impact in the aftermath of the competition. Even early into the next century, more than thirty years later, he described the whole affair with a palpable sense of disappointment, injustice, and injury. He summarized the controversy, noting that “after Venturi was unanimously declared the winner, a storm of protest . . . broke over the university, which was accused of setting the whole thing up so that Venturi would win.” He continued,

164

VINCENT SCULLY

Venturi had just published his great Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, of 1966, wherein he deflated the heroic pretensions of late modern architects, and I had written an introduction to it, calling it, correctly as it turned out, “the most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture, of 1923.” Anyway, a good many architects felt themselves diminished by it, and they were annoyed at both of us, and, led by a few fanatics and opportunists, they slandered everybody involved, especially Venturi and me, as outrageously as they could . . . It all eventually died down, but it was a hurtful experience from which I personally, and perhaps other members of the jury, have never quite recovered.27 In this recollection, Scully—then more than 80 years old—recalled a few of the details inaccurately (the jury contained seven, not twelve, members; and they selected five finalists, not four), yet his words nonetheless conveyed the raw, lingering emotion from this “hurtful experience,” despite the passage of time. That this memory remained painful years later offers a glimpse into how upsetting the event was for Scully. It also offers insight into Scully’s future actions—namely his steadfast allegiance to Venturi (even after the architect’s new work began to resonate less with the historian), and his sardonic glee in exacting his own unique and witty form of revenge.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Historian’s Revenge (1964–mid-1970s) In his move away from late modern architecture, Scully had company. By the early 1960s, a number of architects and architectural thinkers had started to question the state of American architecture and ponder, if not actively pursue, an approach beyond that of the seemingly ubiquitous glass box and masonry mass. What that alternative approach should be, what the new architecture should do, and what that architecture would look like occupied many people’s minds. A glance at MoMA’s exhibition line-up for the Department of Architecture and Design, under the leadership of Arthur Drexler since 1956, reveals an interest in expanding the definition of good design beyond the accepted modernist works of Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies, and even of the next generation, such as Kahn and Saarinen. In late 1964 MoMA mounted Architecture Without Architects, an exhibition coordinated by architect/ critic/educator Bernard Rudofsky, which examined “communal architecture . . . produced [not] by the specialist but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting under a community of experience.”1 Rudofsky’s exhibit resonated with the idea that contemporary society had much to learn from the wisdom, knowledge, and philosophy of anonymous builders, a message conveyed with examples of “non-pedigreed architecture” that ranged from the Babelesque Tower of Samarra in Iraq, from the ninth century CE, to the terraced amphitheaters of Muyu-uray, constructed by the Inca tribe of the Maras in the thirteenth century, to soaring bamboo structures built by New Guineans in the present day.2 Such vernacular architecture would no doubt have been of interest to Scully, who was then initiating his Pueblo investigations in the American Southwest. Aside from exploring “non-pedigreed architecture,” MoMA turned its gaze to an architecture that had recently been considered too pedigreed. Indeed, just three years after the Architecture without Architects show, Drexler and staff started planning a major exhibition on the architecture of 165

166

VINCENT SCULLY

the École des Beaux-Arts, which would further expand the purview of what was considered to be acceptable design, especially as featured within the context of a museum dedicated to modern art. The Beaux-Arts show would comprise more than two hundred drawings from students and masters of the French academy, dating from the late 1700s. In the preface to the exhibition catalog, Drexler commented on the need to confront the “antihistorical bias” connected to modern architecture’s “moralizing fixation on utility and industrial technique.” He continued, “Reviled during the first quarter of the century, and forgotten until the ‘60s . . . [the] architecture taught and practiced by the École des Beaux-Arts again rewards thoughtful study.”3 This statement, made on behalf of a museum founded to propagate modern art and architecture, is remarkable in itself. And while the exhibition took the better part of a decade to mount, opening in October 1975, its origination in 1967 stands alongside Rudofsky’s contribution in demonstrating the range of architectural reconsiderations during the mid1960s. In a similar vein, in the fall of 1964, Scully received an invitation from Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, and Thomas (Tim) Vreeland to discuss the trajectory of architecture with a handful of other architects and educators. According to Graves, he and Eisenman, then teaching at Princeton University, missed the contact with colleagues of their earlier academic days and were keen to stimulate architectural conversation.4 And no doubt, they sought to position themselves at the forefront of that conversation. Thus they, with Vreeland—then teaching at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)— organized a gathering at Princeton for November 13 through 15, with the expressed intent to take “an active and creative role in the future architecture of this country.”5 Scully traveled from New Haven to New Jersey, likely by train through New York, to attend the conference, which took place at the Walter Lowrie House adjacent to Princeton’s campus. In addition to the men who issued the invitation, this initial meeting was attended by Michael McKinnell (of Harvard, designer with Kallmann and Wood of the new Boston City Hall, then under construction), Henry Millon and Stanford Anderson (architects/historians, of MIT); Kenneth Frampton (of the journal Architectural Design in London), Robert Kliment (architect and professor at UPenn), Richard Meier (architect in practice in New York City), Giovanni Pasanella and Jacquelin Robertson (architects and instructors at Yale), and Venturi (of Yale and UPenn, practicing in Philadelphia). Also in attendance was the British historian and architect Colin Rowe, then teaching at Cornell. He and Scully, both in their mid-40s, were the elder statesmen of the group, which was largely composed of men in their late 20s and early 30s. From the onset, the attendees exhibited marked differences in opinion and intent. As a later report noted, “Scully looked for a new image [for architecture]; Venturi (and with him the practice-oriented McKinnell and Vreeland) sought work; Eisenman wanted a manifesto; while Jaque [Robertson] and Pasanella represented an ‘opportunistic realism’.”6 In an

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

167

attempt to unify these disparate interests, a second meeting held six months later, from April 2 though 4, 1965, was spent largely coming up with a name for the group, which henceforth was known as the Committee of Architects on the Study of the Environment, shorted to the acronym CASE (not coincidentally reminiscent of its famous European predecessor, CIAM). Scully, who was put off by what he saw as the inward-focused, modernist pretensions of the Princeton contingent, did not attend the second meeting, nor did Venturi. Shortly after this second gathering, both men formally withdrew from the group.7 Scully felt that he was such a poor fit with CASE that, when Anderson (as the organization’s executive secretary) inquired if Scully should be counted as a member, Scully wrote, “I must . . . decline to join your group. I am, in fact, surprised that you invited me to do so.”8 With the addition of a handful of new members, and minus Scully and Venturi, CASE met more or less twice annually for the next few years before dividing into regional branches and then dissolving entirely.9 Despite its limited existence, though, CASE proved a fruitful endeavor, generating for many of its participants career-boosting opportunities—including a MoMA exhibition called The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal, commissioned by Arthur Drexler and staged at MoMA in 1967; the formation of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), established by Eisenman with MoMA’s support later that year; and the book Five Architects, showcasing the work of Eisenman, Graves, Meier, John Hejduk, and Charles Gwathmey, published in 1972. As did Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture less than a decade before, Five Architects contained an opening text by Drexler—in the case of Venturi’s book, a foreword, and in Five Architects, a preface. It is fitting that Drexler’s imprimatur appeared in each publication, as together they presented different attitudes toward what architecture should do in the wake of late modernism. Venturi’s approach, with its call for inclusivity and the “difficult whole,” embraced historical, modern, and vernacular precedents as well as pop culture (especially once the studies associated with Yale’s Learning From Las Vegas studio of 1968 appeared on the scene). In contrast, Eisenman et al.’s work, as put forth in Five Architects, focused on architecture’s disciplinarity and positioned meaning as deriving from architectural form itself, ideally divorced from its context—historical, cultural, political, physical, and otherwise. In the preface, Drexler characterized the five architects as a “New York school” for precisely this emphasis on form and the disavowal of architecture as an agent of change. In terms of the former, Drexler suggested that their “formal properties derive first and foremost from Le Corbusier of the twenties and thirties,” in other words, from the Villa Savoye era, and from “Louis Kahn . . . [in his] use of the diagonal in plan.”10 Concerning the idea of architecture for its own sake and what architecture can do, Drexler proposed that “an alternative to political romance is to be an architect, for those who actually have the necessary talent for architecture.” He continued, “The young

168

VINCENT SCULLY

men represented here have that talent . . . and their work makes a modest claim: it is only architecture, not the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth. For those who like architecture that is no mean thing.”11 Following Drexler’s comments were those of Rowe, who positioned himself as the five architects’ resident historian and protector. Rowe’s essay—which he described as “a largely negative introduction—an attack upon a potential attack”—read as a preemptive justification of the work presented in the book.12 Rowe’s basic premise proceeded as follows: it was by then clear that modern architecture’s “central and socialist mission” had failed, or at the very least had been overrun by bureaucracy to such an extent that it could no longer be seriously entertained. As a result, an array of alternatives had emerged, which he listed as “Miesian neoclassicism” (think derivatives of the Seagram Building and IIT’s campus), the “New Brutalism” (such as Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building and Boston City Hall), the “Futurist Revival” (like Archigram and the Metabolists), and what Rowe called the “research and data-collection” contingent (likely a reference to Nicholas Negroponte and his Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which explored the implications of using artificial intelligence to shape the environment). To this list Rowe also added “the neo-art nouveau (which, both in its Shingle Style and Italian ramifications, insists that if we only retreat to the Eighteen-Nineties—and also simulate a naivete—then health will inevitably ensue.” It was within this context, as yet another alternative approach to a failed modernism, that Rowe placed the work of the five architects. For despite the diversity evident in their designs, they shared the point of view that, rather than constantly to endorse the revolutionary myth [of modernism], it might be more reasonable and more modest to recognize that, in the opening years of this century, great revolutions in thought occurred and that then profound visual discoveries resulted, that these are still unexplained, and that rather than assume intrinsic change to be the prerogative of every generation, it might be more useful to recognize that certain changes are so enormous as to impose a directive which cannot be resolved in any individual life span. In other words, each generation did not need to seek something new; perhaps it was wiser to continue the worthy quests of an earlier generation in the hopes of finding a satisfactory conclusion. This barb could have been aimed directly at Scully, who had been and would continue to be closely wed to the notion that each generation searches for its own order. Yet in Rowe’s estimation, the mid-twentieth-century architect’s continued investigations into “the plastic and spatial inventions of Cubism”—namely the impulses underlying Le Corbusier’s work of the late 1920s and early 1930s—was a goal far preferable to “indulg[ing] his most trivial moral enthusiasm at the expense of any physical product.”13

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

169

Rowe’s reference to “the Shingle Style and Italian ramifications”— referring in the first instance to Venturi and others operating in that vein; and in the second to the Italian Rationalists, such as Aldo Rossi, with whom Scully would become closely connected in the coming years—was a direct nod toward Scully’s position. And Rowe’s language—“retreat to the Eighteen Nineties,” “naivete”—carried an intentional sarcasm to which his fellow (and, in a way, rival) historian could have easily taken offense. Similarly, Rowe’s disavowal of generational searches could have rubbed Scully the wrong way. Yet, these jibes probably did little to rattle Scully. Rather, it was the larger implication underlying Drexler’s and Rowe’s texts—as enunciated by Drexler as “it is only architecture”—to which Scully likely felt dutybound to object. Indeed, imagine what such a declaration meant for Scully, for whom there was no such thing as “only architecture.” Rather, everything a society builds “is all architecture. It always grows out of us, forms us, and shows us what we are.”14 True, Scully recognized that modernism’s revolutionary claims were overblown, yet to flip to the opposite extreme and disclaim all social responsibility would be a reckless—and unrealistic—move. What, then, did Scully make of Eisenman’s self-labeled cardboard architecture, which was intended to critique existing architecture by reducing forms such as columns, walls, and beams to “deep structure,” stripped of accumulated meaning?15 How could Eisenman’s formal endeavor have squared with Scully’s foundational and humanist belief that architecture is shaped by and shapes society? It was this inward-looking, self-referential approach to architecture that Scully had found disagreeable at the initial CASE meeting. And furthermore, to see the New York Five (as these architects would come to be known) positioned as the rightful heirs to the legacies of Le Corbusier and Kahn (who had passed away only months before) . . . Why, Scully had already done this with Venturi in multiple venues, from the introduction to Complexity and Contradiction to the text proper of American Architecture and Urbanism and in an array of other articles and talks. What was Scully to do? For a time, Scully issued no response. Nor, likely, did he feel the need to. Indeed, his attention was trained on Europe, where he was ensconced during 1972/73 for a year-long sabbatical. Meanwhile, stateside, Scully’s former student Robert Stern publicly joined the discussion. Since earning his master of architecture degree in 1965, Stern had returned to New York City and worked in various architecture-related positions before starting his own firm with fellow Yale classmate John Hagmann. After Five Architects appeared in 1972, Stern and four similarly minded architects issued a response in the May issue of Architectural Forum. Likely this conglomerate of essays, collected under the title “Five on Five,” was conceived as a publicity stunt by Eisenman, Graves, and Stern, who were well acquainted with each other through the New York architectural scene in the late 1960s.16 In the text preceding the critiques, however, Forum credited Stern with the idea.

170

VINCENT SCULLY

Stern organized the team of critics because he felt that Five Architects presented an opportunity (too rare these days) to discuss current architectural attitudes. It is only to be expected that Mr. Stern sought a team [himself along with Jaque Robertson, Charles Moore, Allen Greenberg, and Romaldo Giurgola] whose orientation is more or less opposite that of the original Five—a stance that could be loosely described as sympathetic to the Yale–Philadelphia Axis, meaning Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. It is the Forum’s position that confrontations between various philosophical camps are much needed, and sallies like the ones you are about to read are not enough with us. Thanks are due to the original Five, of course, for being so sporting.17 It is no accident that this introduction, with its use of terms such as “team,” “sallies,” and “sporting,” conjured an athletic event where participants battle for bragging rights and the crowd’s entertainment. This was precisely the organizers’ intent. As subsequent years would show, Eisenman and Stern

FIGURE 12.1 Le Corbusier moderating the White versus Gray Debate. Illustration by Tim Prentice, originally published in A+U: Architecture and Urbanism 75, no. 4 (Apr. 1975): 3.

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

171

shared an acute self-promotional impulse, and here it combined in the orchestration of opposing architectural sides that would be known as the Whites—so called for the overwhelmingly white, form-driven architecture exhibited by the New York Five—with Eisenman at the fore; and the Grays, led by Stern, and named in counterpoint to the Whites as well as in reference to a line in Complexity and Contradiction in which Venturi asserted that he prefers “black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.”18 There was significant overlap of the White and Gray sides, including the fact that one of the “Five on Five” Stern-recruited commentators was Robertson (an original member of the CASE group); Stern himself (the head Gray) had worked in the office of Meier (a White); Gwathmey’s included projects weren’t even white, but rather a weathered cedar; and Graves, who teetered precariously on the White edge, would soon defect to the other side, revealing his undeniable Grayness. Yet, the choreographed showdown served its purpose: to bring attention to the participating architects.

172

VINCENT SCULLY

That the aesthetic and philosophical divide between White and Gray was hardly clear-cut seemed irrelevant, or at least incidental, to Eisenman and Stern (and Architectural Forum). Indeed, over the next few years, they distilled and packaged their respectively hued camps into a reductive (albeit entertaining) debate. White and Gray would become shorthand for two seemingly opposed architectural approaches: the autonomous architecturefor-its-own-sake Whites and the historicist anything-from-the-past-goes Grays. In a special feature called “White and Gray” of the Japanese magazine A+U: Architecture and Urbanism in April 1975, the sides were visually depicted as two groups of architects (easily distinguishable sketches of Eisenman, Stern, Moore, and the others) at a linear table flanking the bespectacled Le Corbusier, who presided Jesus-like over a Last-Supper-esque gathering. (In this representation, the artist even added an additional architect each to the Whites and Grays to bring their total count to twelve, to further mimic Leonardo Da Vinci’s depiction of the famous religious scene.) The A+U issue was guest edited by Eisenman and Stern, who presumably approved the following description of the White versus Gray ideologies. The Whites are idealists in the European tradition. The Grays are American pragmatists. Whereas the Whites are elitists, the Grays stand for the common people. The Whites are intellectualists; the Grays are emotionalists. The Whites champion High Art, the Grays Popular Art . . . The Whites are believers in the abstract and the pure. The Grays prefer the concrete and the eclectic. The Whites are poetic and the Grays prosaic. In short, the difference between the two is a difference between tradition and creation and may be interpreted as an attempt to discover how we ought to accept our heritage. It is further a matter involved with adjusting native architecture and foreign influences. In other words, the Whites and Grays do not represent temporary fashion: theirs in a question of perennial architectural importance.19 This reductive list of binary characteristics—idealist versus pragmatic, elite versus common, thinking versus feeling, poetic versus prosaic, pure versus eclectic—offers the impression of an established divide between White and Gray that, in reality, hardly existed at all. It also suggests that Eisenman and Stern were keen, perhaps anxiously so, to register their respective White and Gray efforts as addressing enduring architectural concerns, such as generational inheritance and relationships to the past, rather than mere passing fads. In other words, their choreographed debate was important to the future of architecture and the determination of ultimately who would carry Le Corbusier’s mantle forward. Might it be the Cornell/Princeton axis of the Whites, with Eisenman as head architect and Rowe as intellectual guru, or theYale/UPenn axis of the Grays, with Stern at

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

173

the fore, waving the banner of Venturi and his champion Scully?20 That Venturi and Scully had withdrawn from this particular conversation the previous decade when they left CASE—which directly led into Five Architects, “Five on Five,” and the White versus Gray debate—mattered little to Stern and, presumably, to his colleagues. The architect/historian pair made an excellent figurehead, perhaps all the better in that they deliberately refused to enter the fray. By this point, Venturi (together with Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) had further extended his Complexity and Contradiction theories to examine the American suburbs (Levittown) as well as the honky-tonk strip (Las Vegas). They developed their idea of the duck and the decorated shed (with a “duck” as a building that, in its form, expresses its single, and often restrictive, purpose; and the “decorated shed” as a box that can accommodate any number of functions, with an affixed sign announcing its use). Meanwhile, Scully, having largely rounded out the research that would be published as Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, returned to an earlier scholarly fascination: French architecture. Recall that through the Fulbright fellowship he had received for the 1950/51 academic year, Scully had originally intended to study French Gothic architecture; yet, after a year’s delay to help with Yale teaching duties, he shifted his subject of inquiry, bringing his family to Florence, Italy, for 1951/52. Two decades later and supported by a National Endowment of the Humanities senior fellowship, Scully returned to Europe during 1972/73, this time to study Gothic cathedrals, French classical gardens, and—an interest he developed during his time in Florence twenty years before—Renaissance fortifications. He, Marion, and Katie (6 years old) took an apartment outside Lausanne, Switzerland, which served as Scully’s launch point for the year’s investigations. Work was not the only item on the schedule, judging from a shipping manifest that listed skis as items being returned to Yale’s Morse College at the end of their stay in July 1973. While Scully had removed himself from the White versus Gray discussion before it had even started with his abstention from CASE, and then had physically withdrawn from the United States during his French sabbatical, upon his return, he felt compelled to comment. So Scully spoke up, initially with a lecture at Columbia in September 1973 that he then expanded and published the following year as The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge. It would be a mistake, though, to think that Scully was looking to rejoin the conversation. Rather, with an ironic smirk on his face, he was looking to end it. *

*

*

As the latter half of the title indicates, The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge served as Scully’s retaliation, in several senses. Indeed, the resurgence of an interest in history in the wake of dogmatic modernism

174

VINCENT SCULLY

certainly wound throughout the text as an underlying theme. Yet, the most obvious intention of the book was to chronicle the current revival of the Shingle Style after Scully’s initial identification of it as a style (hence the addition of Today to the title.) This text also served as a response to Five Architects—a takedown, so to speak, of the architects and their resident historian, Rowe. The Shingle Style Today acted as a multipronged attack during which Scully definitively presented Venturi as the heir to Le Corbusier, a conclusion that rested on two basic tenants developed simultaneously throughout the book. First, Scully demonstrated that Venturi is a great architect in his own right, worthy to be considered a successor of Le Corbusier; and second, in order to portray Venturi as the only legitimate heir to Le Corbusier, Scully invalidated the premises underlying the work of the New York Five, rendering it virtually impossible for them to be seriously considered as Le Corbusier’s legitimate successors. In the end, Venturi and his architectural approach as presented in Complexity and Contradiction were left standing as the most logical path forward for the present day. And as Venturi’s early champion and the purveyor of Venturi’s inspiration—the Shingle Style—Scully was, by extension, the avenged historian. How, then, did Scully accomplish this in the text? Scully opened The Shingle Style Today by declaring, “This book is about the influence of the Shingle Style of the 1880s on a number of American architects over the past fifteen years.” Next he briefly described the characteristics and development of the original Shingle Style in conjunction with its modern-day manifestations.21 Scully then introduced a theory of artistic influence devised by his good friend and Yale colleague, the literary critic Harold Bloom.22 In his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom discussed the technique of the swerve, the tendency of the strong poet to intentionally misread and build on the work of a worthy predecessor. Scully adapted the theory of the swerve to architecture, asserting that “the strong young architect, no less than Bloom’s ‘strong poet,’ inevitably fastens on the work of his chosen precursor, purposely ‘misreads’ it, and finally ‘swerves’ from it to create a new field of action for his own design.” In this manner, “new architects wrestle with their precursors in order to find a way to begin and room to operate for themselves.” Through a series of maneuvers, Scully established the technique of swerving as a valid architectural practice instrumental in the history of architecture and crucial to the formation of the Shingle Style. And for Scully, the strongest architects of the present generation were those who had chosen the most forceful of their predecessors from whom to swerve, “to emulate and outdo.”23 Not surprisingly, Venturi emerged as the example par excellence. Venturi’s earliest swerve, according to Scully, was “the first major project of the new Shingle Style, his Beach House of 1959.” While Venturi was not the first architect of the 1950s to attempt an adaptation of the Low House, his design was the one that veered successfully. The Spaeth House of George

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

175

Nelson (1957) merely recreated the Low House in more contemporary, not exploratory, terms. In contrast, Venturi centrally exploded the broad gable with a huge jutting chimney, reminiscent of those of the original Shingle Style, “taking it all as far away from McKim, Mead & White as he could: the implacable reaction of the strong poet.”24 Once again, Scully turned to Bloom to emphasize the difference between a merely good architect and the great or strong architect. “[Bloom] notes that the ‘strong poet’ seems to go for the youthful rather than the mature work of his chosen precursor, because there it is still yeasty with the older artist’s own groping for form and is therefore at once more accessible to development and susceptible to swerves.”25 The mature work of a great master is impenetrable, “a closed system, complex and operable only by [the master himself].”26 Therefore, the great artist will leave the developed work alone and gravitate toward the early work. And through careful consideration, Scully felt that the great artist may even make the master’s early work appear to be a “less successful version of his own.” This was what Wright did, Scully suggested, to Bruce Price’s houses in Tuxedo Park, New York, with his own house in Oak Park, Illinois. To Scully, the Oak Park House of 1889 appeared to be a simplified version of Price’s Kent House of 1885–86; Wright’s design echoed and adapted the window configuration and grounding plinth of Price’s design. In turn, Venturi took Wright’s House and, with the Meiss House project of 1962, made “Wright look a bit parsimonious and prim.” The D’Agostino project six years later made “the Wrightian original look careful and a little dowdy.” Scully felt that the Vanna Venturi House of 1960–63 was in the same tradition, yet was so sophisticated a rendition of Wright’s house that it eluded comparison.27 In Venturi’s house for his mother, the arched window of the Oak Park House had become the mere suggestion of an arch traced onto the facade, mediating between the looming chimney above and the void of the entrance below. According to Scully, Venturi—the strong architect—had successfully swerved from the American master, Frank Lloyd Wright. With the creation of the Trubek and Wislocki Houses of 1972 on Nantucket Island, Venturi actually surpassed Wright. According to Scully, these houses reached beyond American tradition to address more universal principles. He compared the skewed positioning of the Trubek and Wislocki Houses with respect to each other and the landscape with the temples of ancient Greece, diminished to a humble scale. The houses stood alone, aloofly acknowledging one another while gazing out on the ocean. The small stature, thoughtful placement, and sparsely landscaped grounds of the houses were, in Scully’s opinion, the perfect reflection of the “unadorned” and “threatening” economic and social status of the United States in the early 1970s.28 Venturi, Scully implied, was the new master for a new age. This was signaled by Scully’s reassignment of Wallace Stevens’s poem “The American Sublime.” In 1960, he had aligned Stevens’s poem with Wright in his monograph on the architect; in 1974, in The Shingle Style Today, Scully

176

VINCENT SCULLY

transferred “The American Sublime” to the Trubek and Wislocki Houses.29 Much as Wright’s Oak Park House marked the culmination of the original Shingle Style, Scully offered the Trubek and Wislocki Houses as the pinnacle of the revived Shingle Style. Venturi’s swerve from the Low House, and from Wright, was now complete. Scully’s revenge, however, was not. In the last few pages of the text he introduced yet another swerve, Venturi’s swerve from Le Corbusier. As a strong architect Venturi went back to the early works of the master. Take, for example, the controversial Guild House, in which Scully saw echoes of Le Corbusier’s Villa Schwob (1916) and La Scala Movie Theater (1916), both in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. He compared the framed central blank wall of Le Corbusier’s works to the front void of the Guild House.30 In all three cases, this central space was flanked by punched windows, either square or oval. The configuration of the Guild House echoed the stepped back arrangement of the Villa Schwob, while the string course two-thirds of the way up the building (reminiscent also of Michelangelo) referenced similar detailing on the facade of La Scala. For Scully, Venturi had successfully swerved from the two architectural masters of the twentieth century, Wright and Le Corbusier. Next, Scully suggested that the Shingle Style was a source of inspiration for Le Corbusier, who likely saw a specific European publication of Shingle Style homes in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He cited an 1882

FIGURE 12.2 Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1916, by Le Corbusier. Prisma by Dukas / Getty.

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

177

FIGURE 12.3 Shingleside, Swampscott, Massachusetts, 1881, by Arthur Little. Drawing of double-height interior. Building News and Engineering Journal 42 (Apr. 28, 1882): 524.

FIGURE 12.4 Maison La Roche, Auteuil, France, 1923, by Le Corbusier. View of double-height interior. © F. L. C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2022.

178

VINCENT SCULLY

edition of the English journal Building News, which featured Arthur Little’s Shingleside design of the previous year, the first Shingle Style house to be published abroad. While he could not prove that Le Corbusier was familiar with this particular issue, Scully emphasized the resemblance between the double-height interior spaces of Shingleside and Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche of 1923. He also pointed to the appearance of Little’s two-story glass wall on the facade of Le Corbusier’s Citrohan House of 1927.31 This connection between Le Corbusier and the Shingle Style not only buttressed Scully’s claim that Venturi was the heir to the Le Corbusian tradition but also provided a foundation on which Scully could critique Rowe and his five disciples, positioned in Five Architects as the successors to Le Corbusier. Scully initiated the takedown of Rowe and the New York Five with a quote from one of their own, Gwathmey, whom Scully described as having been “protestingly bundled into the neo–Le Corbusian camp . . . ‘Don’t put me in with those white architects,’ Gwathmey says.” This implied that despite his inclusion in the book Five Architects, Gwathmey did not believe his work to conform to that of the Whites. And after an examination of Gwathmey’s work, Scully agreed. The historian argued that Gwathmey’s House for his father of 1967, rather than subscribing to the late Le Corbusian model adopted by Eisenman and Graves, combined the general massing of the Citrohan House with diagonal and cylindrical forms reminiscent of certain Shingle Style works, notably McKim, Mead & White’s Osborn House of 1885. Additionally, Scully saw such similarities to the Shingle Style in the more abstract design of Hedjuk’s House 10 (1966).32 And even if hints of Le Corbusier appeared in the work of Gwathmey or Hedjuk, Scully had already suggested Le Corbusier’s debt to the Shingle Style. In a single paragraph, Scully had cut the New York Five down to three. Scully attacked the remaining members of the Five toward the end of the text. Meier’s fall began with an inquiry as to why, if he was a strong architect, he had been unable to make the iconographic Villa Savoye seem to be “an immature version of his own work.”33 Clear similarities existed between Meier’s Smith House (1967) and the Villa Savoye—for example, the strip windows, piloti, curved ship-like imagery, and white-washed exterior. Why, then, did the Villa Savoye not read as an adolescent precursor to the Smith House? For Scully, the answer was painfully obvious; Meier had gone after the mature Le Corbusier. Recall that according to Bloom, the developed work of a master “is a closed system, complete,” operable only by the master himself. The strong architect is one who realizes that the mature work of a master is off limits.34 Thus, by turning to the Villa Savoye over the Villa Schwob, Meier demonstrated his failure as a strong architect. Incidentally, Scully did not mention Graves in The Shingle Style Today, despite the fact that Scully’s swerve critique applied equally well for that

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

179

FIGURE 12.5 Smith House, Darien, Connecticut, 1967, by Richard Meier. Bettman / Getty.

architect, whose Hanselmann House (1967) echoed the Citrohan House in massing and featured strip windows, piloti, and a white exterior. Yet, on the work of Graves, Scully remained silent. Perhaps this was because Graves had already begun to break away from the White camp with his overt use of color and increasingly frequent adoption of historically derived forms. Whatever the reason Graves was omitted from the text, the fact remains that he could have been impeached with Meier for failing to go after his master’s immature work. Thus, this argument removed Graves, even in absentia, from the running as Le Corbusier’s rightful heir. Scully then turned to Eisenman. The “unquestioned intelligence” of the group, Eisenman didn’t make the same mistake as Meier; he realized that no one can successfully swerve from Le Corbusier’s mature work.35 Instead he tried to avoid it. Scully offered an image of Eisenman’s House II in the Cardboard House series, also known as the Falk House (1969), and suggested that Eisenman’s claim to work within an autonomous, selfreferential language served as an elaborate method of evading Le Corbusier, a protective device to “clear out a space for his own design.” Eisenman’s use

180

VINCENT SCULLY

of linguistic analysis and diagrammatic manipulation was “his way of swerving—to Mars if necessary” to justify his work.36 Here Scully used the analogy of the swerve, revived and applied to Eisenman, to deflate the final member of the New York Five. Not quite finished, Scully addressed Rowe. In 1950 Rowe published an article in Architectural Review entitled “Mannerism and Modern Architecture” in which he discussed Le Corbusier’s Villa Schwob. Yet, despite the attention Rowe gave to Le Corbusier’s early work, those of the New York Five who were, as Scully wrote, “obsessed with Le Corbusier,” failed to go after him young enough. Scully observed, “They may have done well to mark the research of their own historian, Colin Rowe,” who acknowledged an important architectural moment. Yet, Scully implied that Rowe failed to recognize the potential inspiration to be derived from that moment, and while Scully lamented the architects’ failure to seize on the early Le Corbusier, he hinted that their presiding historian had no excuse. Scully drove this point home by chiding both the New York Five and Rowe, the former for looking to the mature work of Le Corbusier, and the latter for allowing them to do so. Venturi, by contrast, spared the dogmatic modernist blinders, recognized the need to reach beyond the purist architecture of the 1920s. He was able to identify the importance of Le Corbusier’s early works, interpret them, and adapt them to the present day. Rowe and the New York Five’s failure to benefit from Le Corbusier’s early work was heightened by Venturi’s success. For Scully, Venturi was, indeed, the rightful and single successor to Le Corbusier. Highlighting this became Scully’s final stroke of revenge. He remarked, How upsetting for Le Corbusier’s self-appointed heirs to discover that the hoodlum from Philadelphia had met their daddy at the crossroads long before, and might even—an old American fantasy—turn out to be the Dauphin after all. It is surely one of the historian’s dirtiest, least demanding, and most satisfying of revenges to be able to point connections like this out.37 With these words, Scully’s commentary—and his revenge—were complete. The New York Five had fallen and Venturi was king. And Venturi’s success was the victory of his patron and ardent supporter, Scully. Indeed, through Venturi’s triumph, Scully had proven himself to be a strong historian, blessed with the insight to distinguish the historical moments most relevant to the present. Scully, the architectural historian, had exacted The Historian’s Revenge. *

*

*

The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge received few published reviews, perhaps due to its brevity—it amounted to just over forty pages of text with 134 accompanying images over seventy additional pages. Published

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

181

by Braziller with a similar format as the previous series (yet without such affiliation), The Shingle Style Today was a libretto at best, more of an illustrated lecture. Maybe this explained the dearth of reviews. Or perchance it was the less-than-sober subtitle The Historian’s Revenge that was responsible. Nevertheless, as was to be expected from Scully publications, readers seemed to either love or hate the book. Charles Moore noted as much in his review of the text in Progressive Architecture, observing that “everything Vincent Scully writes delights some people and infuriates others. The Shingle Style Today will not be the exception.” Moore—by this point on sabbatical from his professorial position at UCLA to serve as architect in residence at the American Academy in Rome—was himself delighted, and not only because Scully included him in the book in a favorable light. Rather, Moore voiced his appreciation that Scully “for decades . . . has been making the history of contemporary architecture interesting.” But more so, Moore expressed his pleasure that architects could publicly admit that they are indeed influenced by the work of predecessors. He situated this “milestone,” namely the dismantling of the prohibition on influence, in cultural terms, quipping that now “influence, like sex, can be openly discussed. It didn’t even need a Supreme Court decision,” and Scully certainly had been “instrumental” in this groundbreaking shift.38 While Moore applauded The Shingle Style Today, architect/educator/ preservationist James Marsh Fitch fell into the infuriated camp. In a piece in the Journal of Architectural Education, Fitch lambasted the state of architectural criticism in the mid-1970s, citing Stern, Moore, the New York Five, and others as engaged in “solipsism” and “in-group backslapping” rather than addressing serious issues related to the recession’s impact on the profession. In this context, with what Fitch described as a “petulant, selfserving opus,” Scully appeared no better.39 In terms of what Scully’s targets thought of his revenge, it seems that there were no New-York-Five-authored reviews. Yet, their leader, Eisenman, didn’t appear to take Scully’s barbs to heart. To the contrary, Eisenman invited Scully to speak at the IAUS in 1974, and the same year the men— along with many others, White and Gray—met in Los Angeles to take part in a conference entitled Four Days in May, where representatives of the White and Gray East Coast tendencies were invited to discuss design ideas with the West Coast Silvers, a group organized by former CASE member Tim Vreeland, who was by then a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.40 There Scully delivered a lecture that rehashed The Shingle Style Today argument, prompting a Progressive Architecture News Report to refer to the historian as a lecturer “for the ‘grays’.”41 What made Scully attend the Four Days in May conference is unclear. Less than a decade earlier, he had refused to take part in the CASE meetings, citing their insular, self-referentiality. What had changed in the intervening years? Perhaps the orchestrated public debate between the

182

VINCENT SCULLY

Whites and Grays had made the situation less threatening and more entertaining to Scully. Or more likely, maybe Scully recognized that, with his lecture at Columbia in 1973 and The Shingle Style Today, he had already stepped into the debate, and to pretend otherwise was futile. Regardless, what is clear is that, like he had when he revised his thoughts on modernism, Scully had shifted his perspective. In coming years, he would cringe at the term postmodernism and the at times shameless historical appropriation with which it became aligned. For whatever reason, though, he decided to make the trip to Los Angeles in May 1974 and speak, if not for the Grays, then at least in support of Venturi. *

*

*

It is intriguing to note that Scully’s allegiance to Venturi, as communicated in The Shingle Style Today, didn’t fully reflect the historian’s outlook on the new direction the architect’s work had headed in conjunction with Scott Brown. Together the two explored architecture as communication in the Levittown and Las Vegas studios in the late 1960s. While Scully still considered this work to be a valuable contribution to architectural thought, he “personally was a little less enthusiastic.”42 Twenty-five years later, Venturi distinctly recalled what he took to be Scully’s disappointment with the architecture-as-meaning investigations, noting that the historian was “pretty negative [and] aggressively not polite” while serving as a jury member for the Las Vegas studio review in 1969.43 On his part, Scully remembered feeling admiration for the Las Vegas exploration, of which his son Dan, then studying for his master of architecture degree at Yale, was a part. Scully likewise commented that he saw the Venturi/Scott Brown notion of the duck and decorated shed as “on the ground-breaking edge,” in keeping with literary analysis and semiological studies of the day. Yet, he admitted that he couldn’t quite muster the same appreciation for studies of the Las Vegas Strip as he had for those of Main Street, USA.44 Despite Venturi’s shift in focus, though, Scully stood loyally by the architect. When the American Institute of Architects (AIA) awarded Scully the Gold Medal in 1976 yet failed to appoint Venturi as a fellow of the organization, Scully turned down the prestigious honor. He explained to AIA president Louis de Moll that, despite immense gratitude for the offer, he had to decline. “You well understand,” Scully wrote, “that as an historian of American architecture I cannot in good conscience accept an award, however welcome, in the same year that the most important architect of my generation is denied a fellowship.”45 Nevertheless, it would seem that, for Scully, the pinnacle of Venturi’s work would forever remain the Trubek and Wislocki Houses, “turning slightly toward each other lie, on the one hand, Greek temples, or, on the other, seabirds themselves. All this produces a modern architecture which is liberated from abstraction by its link to vernacular traditions and to simple,

THE HISTORIAN’S REVENGE (1964–MID-1970s)

183

ageless building types.”46 In the late 1970s, Scully would find a different architect preoccupied with ageless building types across the Atlantic Ocean. Aldo Rossi’s work—purely minimalist, stripped of time and place, yet drawn from the specificity of the European city—would figure into Scully’s understanding of classicism and the vernacular throughout the coming decade.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

What Seas, What Shores (late 1970s–1991) By the mid-1970s, Scully had reached the pinnacle of his field as a critic, scholar, and teacher, achieving a level of influence he would maintain throughout the following two decades. Perhaps this renown and respect, more so than the burgeoning of a new Shingle Style and the emergence of Venturi as an architectural forerunner, was in truth the historian’s most satisfying of revenges. As if signaling his position as a prominent figure in the architectural world, an invitation was issued in fall 1979 requesting that Scully take part in the first Venice Architecture Biennale to be staged the following year. Along with critics/educators Charles Jencks, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton (who would soon withdraw from participation), Scully was to help organize the show and to be part of an actual exhibit—the Critics’ Show (Mostra dei critici)—that would fashion the framework within which the architects’ works would be viewed. A few years prior to the Biennale, Jencks had published The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in which he announced the death of modern architecture, tying the latter with the 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development in St. Louis, Missouri.1 Jencks had been working through his theory of postmodernism for years before the 1977 appearance of the aforementioned book, and he would continue to refine the concept well into the next century. Despite how Jencks tweaked the definition, though, for him postmodernism boiled down to understanding architecture as a language, a system of communication that should speak to multiple audiences in various ways, often simultaneously. Two paradigmatic examples of postmodern architecture both date from the late 1970s. The first, Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, Louisiana (completed 1978), was intended to honor the city’s largely unacknowledged history of Italian immigration. Moore conceived of a playful design for the downtown plaza that featured reinterpreted classical 184

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

185

orders and temple components rendered in vivid colors, stainless steel, neon lights, and water jets. These fragmented colonnades curved partway around a sizable boot-of-Italy-shaped water basin, itself inscribed within concentric rings of black granite and white cobblestone pavers. The other prime postmodern specimen, the AT&T Building in New York City, was conceived in the late 1970s and ultimately completed in 1984. This skyscraper was designed by Philip Johnson, who with Mies van der Rohe was responsible for the Seagram Building nearly three decades prior. Yet the AT&T building, sheathed in pink granite and modeled after eighteenth-century cabinetry, was quite distinct from Mies and Johnson’s earlier landmark. In a metropolis dominated by modern flat-roofed towers and their stepped-top Art Deco predecessors, the AT&T’s singular profile, echoing that of a Chippendale highboy, stood out in comparison. Here as at the Piazza d’Italia, color, symbolism, and ornament ran rampant in varying degrees, as did an element of wit and even waggishness; Moore’s very own face appeared as a waterspewing rondel, and a massive piece of furniture loomed over midtown Manhattan. With postmodern architecture, perhaps anything was fair game? Unchecked pluralism coupled with the potential for unjustified historical quotation would become main objections registered by postmodernism’s detractors. Others were disturbed by the terminology, with the prefix post implying that modern architecture was, indeed, in the past or even dead, as Jencks had suggested. Scully likely objected on both accounts; he saw

FIGURE 13.1 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1978, by Charles Moore. Serhii Chrucky / Alamy.

186

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 13.2 AT&T Building, New York City, New York, 1980, by Philip Johnson. David Shankbone, CC-BY-SA-3.0. architecture as having a larger social purpose, not solely as a system of communication, and he viewed the modern movement as a valid source of inspiration alongside historical architecture. Scully therefore rejected the category of architectural postmodernism, even as he was credited, along with Venturi, for fostering the atmosphere that made its existence possible. Complexity and Contradiction was hailed as the manifesto for postmodernism, despite the fact that Venturi, like Scully, spurned the label. Even decades later, the two men bemoaned their perceived involvement in what Scully referred to as “so-called postmodernism.” In a 2008 videotaped conversation, as Venturi declared that his message had been misunderstood,

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

187

Scully lamented that the two of them “constantly get tarred with that [postmodern] brush.”2 Indeed, postmodernism was not the intended star of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. Rather, the exhibition was conceived to showcase contemporary responses to modern architecture. After much discussion, though, the theme was declared to be The Presence of the Past, zeroing in on what the Biennnale director, the architect/historian Paolo Portoghesi, characterized as “the end of prohibitionism” and “the return of architecture to the womb of history.”3 There was no explicit mention of postmodernism, at least not in the show’s title. Yet, in combination, the work on display at the Biennale conveyed the message that historicism—slanted heavily toward references to classicism—was the reigning architectural tendency of the day.4 The exhibition’s main attraction, the Strada Novissima, featured side-by-side scenographic facades designed by twenty architects, half American and half European. The Americans had been handpicked by Robert Stern; and the designs by Venturi, Moore, Graves, Stanley Tigerman, Allan Greenburg, and Stern himself all landed squarely in the historicist camp (which included what Scully had characterized as the American vernacular, as developed in The Shingle Style Today).5 The European facades were likewise laden with historical reference, yet often of a more abstracted sort. Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s contributions, while not ultimately included in the Strada Novissima, offered an illustrative example. Initially, Rossi had been invited to design a facade alongside the other twenty architects. He declined to participate in that portion of the show, though, and instead agreed to create an entrance portal for the building in which the Architecture Biennale would take place and to contribute the floating Teatro del Mondo, which he had already been drafted to design for the theater portion of the Biennale.6 Scully had encountered Rossi’s architecture a few years earlier. Likely in 1975 or 1976 the historian had visited Rossi’s Gallaratese housing project (1974) in the northwest quarter of Milan, Italy. Alongside the two earthbrown, quasi-mountainous extrusions that comprised Carlo Aymonino’s portion of the project, Rossi’s wing appeared as a “stiff white shaft,” crisp and rectangular, raised on thin piers that transitioned to thick round columns. Scully was struck by Rossi’s design, particularly by the experience of traveling the walkway beneath the building, with the piers and columns stretching out along both sides. “When I saw the Gallaratese I wrote [Rossi] a fan letter,” Scully recalled; “I said, wow, it was magnificent.” Rossi replied, and the men developed a correspondence, soon becoming friends. By the end of the 1970s, Rossi had been invited to teach periodically at Cooper Union in New York City, and while on the East Coast, traveled to Connecticut to meet with Scully. For the spring 1981 term, Rossi served as Davenport Chair at Yale School of Architecture, a post he received through Scully’s support.7 Until Rossi’s premature death in 1997, the architect would often stay at Scully and Tappy’s house when he was in New Haven. The couple would later name their Siberian husky puppy “Aldo” in honor of their departed Italian friend.

188

VINCENT SCULLY

In Rossi’s work, Scully felt that he had found the natural complement to that of Venturi. Scully adored Rossi’s architecture; furthermore, he “thought that like Venturi’s, it was reviving the classical tradition, and that [Rossi and Venturi] were really constituting a movement.” “First of all, they were both using the vernacular, in different ways,” Scully explained. Rossi was someone who could reduce it to this kind of dream, whereas Venturi was clear, not haunting, intelligent, witty, but not emotional. Most of all, both of them, I thought, were doing the first original thinking in architectural theory since Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture of 1923, and their seminal books both came out in the same year, 1966: L’Archittetura della cittá and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. They started everything anew.8 Thus when Rossi’s A Scientific Autobiography was published in 1981 by IAUS and MIT, it concluded with a postscript by Scully entitled “Ideology in Form” in which the historian positioned Rossi on equal footing with, if not as slightly favored over, Venturi.9 First, Scully discussed Rossi’s pared down repertoire of forms (cube, cone, column, gable), characterized as distilled from the architect’s memory, personal and collective. These elements emerged sans hierarchy; for Rossi, a modernist slab was as valid an inspiration as was a beach shack or an ancient temple. According to Scully, the design for the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena, Italy, collected these forms to create “a richer assemblage of memories than does any other of Rossi’s works.”10 Next, Scully conjured his usual suspects, Rossi sharing commonalities with each in turn: Wright and his penchant for geometrical abstraction; Kahn and his use of “‘ruins’ devoid of glass”; the Pueblo people and their ever-present awareness of death. Rossi and Venturi shared even more similarities, as was demonstrated through their respective uses of the cross-mullioned window and gable motifs, Rossi at his Teatro del Mondo and an elementary school at Fagnano Olona, Venturi at the Trubek and Wislocki Houses. In each case, the Italian and the American, it is a question of a vernacular element (the cross-mullioned window is a standard nineteenth-century type) which has been distilled into a square form of arresting iconic power: the window as void, barrier, eye. When combined, as it more or less is in each instance, with a sharp gable, the sense of a continuity of intention and method between the two architects in question—previously considered polar opposite—grows strong. Each has been able to see, perceive, and remember the vernacular forms of his own culture and hence to break out of modern “design” to something deceptively more simple, even abstract, but in fact more traditional, basic, and enduring.11 For Scully, Rossi’s architecture—comprised of mute, abstracted elements— was of its own moment and simultaneously embodied all others. And perhaps

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

189

FIGURE 13.3 San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy, 1972, by Aldo Rossi. Mirko Pradelli / Alamy.

even more appealing to Scully was that, in Rossi, the historian found someone with whom he shared common ground. In Scully’s estimation, Rossi regarded architecture “primarily as a setting for human action,” as an environment “to be populated.” Architecture for Rossi, then, wasn’t about “linguistic gestures” but rather about lived—and remembered—human experience.12 This concept deftly dovetailed with Scully’s understanding of architecture’s role in both shaping a society and revealing to that society its own values. *

*

*

Back in New Haven, Scully’s lectures had attained near mythological standing. His History of Art 112a, Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to Renaissance (formerly HA 12), regularly topped Yale’s list of most popular classes. Held in the Law School auditorium and affectionately nicknamed by students “Darkness at Noon” in reference to its meeting time (12 p.m.) and ambiance (a dimly lit lecture hall), HA 112a was the largest fall class for years running, with between 300 and 400 enrolled students depending on the term.13 In 1981, 413 students signed up for the course.14 A Yale Daily News class guide for the same year noted that, while the work expected of the students felt more demanding than that of a true introductory course, “Mr. Scully’s lectures are legendary. His enthusiasm for ideas and forms engages hundreds of people each year.”15 Between HA 112a and the

190

VINCENT SCULLY

smaller yet likewise admired History of Art 53b: Modern Architecture, which ran in the spring, and other select seminars (often advanced topics in modern architecture or architectural theory), each year nearly a fifth of Yale’s annual undergraduate population cycled through Scully’s class. The preponderance of these students had declared majors outside the history of art department.16 While Scully’s reputation as a dynamic orator attracted students to his courses, it was his personality that won students’ adoration. Architectural historian and educator Esther da Costa Meyer, a graduate student of Scully’s in the mid-1970s and then his Yale colleague in the later 1980s and 1990s, noted that the historian truly cared about his students.17 Anecdotes of his attention to his charges abound, from allowing a panic-struck student to retake his final written exam in a more comfortable oral format (long before such accommodations were regularly made), to visiting a lonely student recovering from surgery in the hospital daily to bailing yet another student out of jail when he was arrested during a New Haven protest.18 When Yale College accepted women beginning in fall of 1969, Scully’s first year as the master of Morse College, he worked to create an environment that would be welcoming to the incoming coeds, intentionally appointing a female dean of student life as an on-site presence for the women, who were far outnumbered by their male counterparts.19 During the tumultuous protests surrounding the spring 1970 Black Panther trial in New Haven, Scully worked with the Black Student Association of Yale (BSAY) to hold a participatory teach-in, providing a venue for students and faculty to discuss the racial implications of New Haven’s urban renewal campaign.20 In addition to his renown at Yale, Scully had achieved notoriety beyond the university’s walls. The October 1975 issue of People magazine included Scully as one of the country’s “Great Professors,” pictured alongside eleven other (white male) academics on the cover. And in 1979, talk show personality Dick Cavett hosted Scully on his eponymous television program, which aired weekday evenings on PBS with guests such as Katharine Hepburn, Jimi Hendrix, Gloria Steinem, and Gore Vidal. Scully’s course had helped Cavett, as a Yale undergraduate, see the built environment “in a whole new light,” and Cavett’s show brought Scully’s engaging architectural narrative into living rooms across the country.21 In February 1980, another opportunity for a popular audience to learn about Scully and his thoughts on architecture appeared in the New Yorker. In a profile entitled “What Seas, What Shores,” author James Stevenson collaged details from Scully’s teaching activity, major writings, and personal recollections to portray the historian as profound yet down-to-earth, possessing expansive knowledge yet striving continuously to learn, especially from his students. In Stevenson’s deft hands, Scully emerged as an aesthete and an athlete, a finetuned product of both his working-class upbringing and his elite Ivy League education, a charismatic man who, with his perceptive insights and vivid descriptions, broadened the minds of those he encountered.22

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

191

The same impulse that prompted the New Yorker profile led Scully toward an even more popular outlet—the medium of film. In previous years, Scully had been involved with potential film projects, most notably an illfated production on Egyptian architecture shot by the LIFE Magazine photographer Elliot Elisofon in the mid-1960s. In the early 1980s, the chance to star in and narrate a series on architecture came his way again when Mary Vernon, a painter and professor at Southern Methodist University, approached him with an idea. Vernon had long admired Scully’s work, especially his writings on the American southwest, which resonated with her as a New Mexico native. Armed with a media consultant and a generous investment from Texas oil magnate and patron of the arts Jack Stroube, Vernon traveled to New Haven, where she convinced an initially reluctant Scully to sign on to the project. She then recruited as director and producer the experienced documentarian David Kennard, who had recently completed Carl Sagan’s highly acclaimed Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, a thirteen-part series that aired on PBS. In 1982, Vernon, her husband, Scully, Kinnard, and his assistant set out in a station wagon in New Mexico for a week and a half to shoot footage for the pilot. Entitled The Architecture of Nature and The Architecture of Man, the series was to contain ten 30-minute episodes based on Scully’s wideranging research. Content was to begin with the Pueblos of the American Southwest, then move to ancient and classical Greece, over to continental Europe to investigate Gothic cathedrals and French baroque gardens, and finally return to the United States to explore vernacular architectural traditions and “twin poles of American life and invention: the center city office [skyscraper] and the suburban home.” A glossy illustrated brochure, produced to attract additional investors, described the show’s premise. “With Professor Scully as a guide, we learn the valuable lessons left for us in historical constructions. Since we have lost the constant natural awareness of the Greeks and the American Indians’ identification with nature, we need Vincent Scully’s thorough knowledge and striking insight to find those relationships.” As the brochure further explained, “A society’s construction tells us what the society thinks of itself. Since building always involves a relation between the natural and the man-made, our relationship with nature shapes our environment. To see what they thought of themselves, to see their relationship to creation, we have only to look at what men built.” In addition to these elucidatory sound bites, the six-page brochure contained nine color photographs of buildings to be covered throughout the series, including Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, Ste. Chapelle in Paris, and the Parthenon in Athens. The brochure’s rear cover featured a picture of Scully and Kennard, who reportedly got along quite well, on site at San Ildefonso, New Mexico. Clothed in khaki and sporting a western-style hat, Scully perfectly fit the part of tour guide amid the adobe structures and arid landscape as he gazed beyond Kennard, perhaps toward a sacred mountain in the distance. The image’s accompanying text extolled Scully’s

192

VINCENT SCULLY

“passion and wit,” which “draw hundreds of students to his classes every year.”23 Thirty years later, the thoughtfully planned and well-crafted brochure evokes a wistfulness for a television series that never came to be. With Scully’s charismatic presentation, the show would have been entertaining and informative, likely a success, if only it had been fully funded. Stroube refused to reinvest after his initial contribution ran out. Committed to the show’s vision, Vernon worked valiantly to find a sponsor among cable networks and production companies; she even landed a meeting with the Weinstein brothers at Miramax, who offered advice but declined to pursue the project. Sadly the plans for the show fell by the wayside, but a seed had been planted for Scully’s foray into the world of film. In 1983, Scully drafted, hosted, and narrated New World Visions: American Art and the Metropolitan Museum (1650–1914). Filmed at the Met’s collections in Manhattan and in locations throughout the American Northeast, the two-part series traced developments in American painting, sculpture, decorative art, and architecture, all woven together by Scully into a grand discussion of an emerging American consciousness during the early centuries of the country’s establishment. The series was sponsored by WNET (part of PBS) and the Met in association with the BBC, with British director Lorna Pegram at the helm.24 She had worked with Australian art critic Robert Hughes a few years prior on The Shock of the New, the BBC’s successful eight-part series on modern art from impressionism to Warhol.25 Pegram was initially perplexed by Scully’s refusal to write out the script for the shows; while this was in keeping with his characteristic lecturing style— no notes, well prepared yet off the cuff, working from visual cues and memory—it clashed with the BBC director’s experience and expectations. Pegram wanted a script. In the end she had assistants follow Scully through the museum’s collection as he charted his course, and they transcribed his monologue to create a workable script, to which Scully himself never referred.26 Asked about this, Scully commented, “Only real actors can memorize lines, and academics aren’t actors. The important thing is that a lecture is all one rhythm, one dance, but on television the rhythm belongs to the film cutter.”27 New World Visions was well received, ultimately showing on both PBS and the BBC. It aired in the United States in the spring of 1985, with the two 1-hour halves broadcast on WNET/Channel 13 on Friday nights, three weeks apart. A review in the New York Times noted that the show attempted to cover a huge amount of territory, more than 250 years’ worth. Yet Scully—“one of those gifted teachers who are able to both instruct and . . . inspire enthusiasm for the subject”—managed to make it work, covering “vast areas, leaping from one cogent point to another with imagination and skill.”28 Scully’s themes included the treatment of minorities and women as well as the human ability to experience a work of art through empathy and association.29

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

193

In his typical fashion, Scully cast his attention wide during the early 1980s. While working on New World Visions, he continued his teaching and academic service at Yale, and he traveled, lectured, and published extensively. Furthermore, he began to regularly contribute pithy yet passionate articles to Architectural Digest (AD), a popular monthly magazine that catered to a design-conscious yet not necessarily professional readership. AD broadcast Scully’s message beyond academic and architectural circles, and introduced him to readers as “America’s Eminent Architectural Historian.”30 Indeed, Scully’s association with AD was a calculated move—one designed to boost not his notoriety, but his bank account. By 1981, when Scully contributed his first article to AD, his personal life had taken yet another turn. The late 1970s saw Scully and Marion divorce; Katie, an adolescent, remained with her mother. His sons, now adults, had struck out on their own—Daniel as an architect; Stephen as a classics professor, having received his PhD from Brown University in 1978; and John, as an artist/printmaker. In 1980, a few months after turning 60, Scully married for the third and final time, wedding Catherine (Tappy) Lynn, an American studies scholar from Lynchburg, Virginia, then earning her doctorate at Yale and twenty-two years his junior. Alimony for Nancy and financial support for Katie on top of his own life’s expenses proved to be quite taxing, and AD offered a much-needed infusion of funds.31 During the 1980s AD’s circulation passed half a million and would eventually reach 800,000 issues a month. AD paid well—compensating Scully $3,000 to $4,000 per article, a rate far higher than smaller journals with more specialized readerships were able to afford.32 So Scully signed on, writing more than two dozen articles for AD between 1981 and 1990. Scully’s initial contributions to AD covered the work of contemporary architects, beginning with Robert Stern in 1981 and then, over the following years, Gwathmey Siegel and Associates; Margaret McCurry/Stanley Tigerman; Venturi, Rauch, and Scott Brown (twice); Philip Johnson; Charles Moore; David Sellers; Ricardo Bofill; Michael Graves; and Stern again (two additional times). Scully also wrote a seven-part series for AD called “Architecture in Context,” which ran throughout 1984 and 1985. In these articles, the historian explored his thoughts on “the Natural and the ManMade,” targeting a nonspecialist audience and echoing the proposed sequence for the then-abandoned film project with Vernon. Finally, Scully wrote pieces for AD drawn from various aspects of his life experience, including on the relationship between Wright and Johnson, whom Scully and others witnessed trading barbs in the 1950s, as well as the historian’s trip to the Soviet Union with Kahn in 1965 as American representatives for the Modern Architecture USA exhibition.33 One noteworthy article from this latter life-stories category detailed Scully’s encounter with a seal while he was rowing in the Long Island Sound. In 1974, Scully purchased a 16-foot Gloucester Gull, a lightweight dory he proceeded to row almost daily, for upwards of two hours, down the Branford

194

VINCENT SCULLY

River and out into the sound. During the frozen winter months when he lacked access to a dock, Scully would row a wooden pram half the Gull’s size, which he launched from land, either dragging it over the icy marshland until he found unfrozen water, or after transporting it in his car, hanging half out of the open trunk. Summer or winter, in wind or calm, seas wild or still, Scully would exercise his body and mind, rehearsing his thoughts while rhythmically gliding, stroke by stroke, toward the horizon and back. In the mid-1980s on one such sojourn, Scully encountered a seal near an outer shoal. This chance meeting unsettled and fascinated Scully in equal measure, and as he rowed back to shore—the seal following him a good portion of the way—he pondered the creature’s courage and its clear interest in his land-based counterpart. Scully detailed this scene in an article he succinctly entitled “The Seal,” and it came out in the October 1985 issue of AD.34 Despite its publication in a design magazine, “The Seal” was not about design. Rather, this article focused on the interaction between nature and man—in this case, the interplay between Scully, the seal, the land, the water, and the elements. It situated humanity as a partner with, or perhaps even at the mercy of, but certainly not superior to, nature. Appearing as it did in AD, the article offered a clear example of how, for Scully, architecture and nature, in its many forms, intertwined to form life as a whole. The text offered a glimpse into Scully’s habits (rowing as an integral part of his daily routine) as well as his thoughts, and suggested that there was no separation for him between the various facets of his life. Another thing worth noting about this particular article is that, without Scully’s knowledge, AD—perhaps looking to ennoble the straightforward moniker, “The Seal”—added a subtitle: “An Existential Odyssey at Branford Harbor.” Upon seeing this amended title in print, Scully promptly unloaded, at great volume over the phone, a profanity-laden diatribe on his AD editor, who no doubt cringed on the other end of the line.35 Scully was upset that the title had been changed without his consent; more so, though, he was embarrassed by the pretentiousness of the appended subtitle. Every one of AD’s readers would think that Scully had labeled his row—which he described as a “short journey” in the text itself—as “An Existential Odyssey,” seemingly referencing the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (whose notions of existentialism and phenomenology remained in vogue after his death in 1980) or the Greek hero Odysseus, as described by Homer in his epic poem. Or worse, perhaps readers would think that Scully intended to align himself with both Sartre and Odysseus. The hubris! True, “The Seal” spoke of a mental journey prompted by Scully’s encounter with the aquatic mammal, but the actual message of his text—that he as a man was no greater than, and likely even inferior to, the seal—stood in direct opposition to the self-importance the subtitle assigned to the article, as evidenced by Scully’s characteristically witty and self-effacing final lines: “Later I looked him up in the Encyclopedia Britannica and found that he

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

195

was probably a Common Seal . . . I told a friend about this and she said, ‘Yes, and he went down, looked you up, and found that you were probably a Common Man’.”36 *

*

*

An impressive array of honors and awards was bestowed on Scully throughout the 1980s. He served on competition juries for large-scale projects, including the Alaska State Office Building in Anchorage (1983) and the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago (1989); received awards from the American Institute of Architects (1986), Royal Institute of British Architects (1988), New Haven Preservation Trust (1988), and University of Virginia (1982), among others; and in 1983 achieved the ultimate honor at Yale when he was appointed Sterling Professor, an academic rank assigned to select tenured faculty at the top of their field. This was the second time in his life—the first being the scholarship that funded his undergraduate studies—that Scully was the beneficiary of John Sterling’s large financial bequest to the university. Two particularly noteworthy events, both lectures, warrant attention for their honorific nature as well as their content. The first occurred in 1982, when Scully was chosen to give the annual A. W. Mellon Lecture in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Four decades earlier this lecture series was founded by Paul Mellon (the patron responsible for the Yale Center for British Art, designed by Kahn) and his sister Aisla Mellon Bruce “to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.”37 Scully used the occasion of his lecture, which he entitled “The Shape of France,” to explore the relationship between architecture and nature in Gothic cathedrals, seventeenth-century French gardens and fortifications, and modern urbanism. He further explored these connections in the DeVane Lectures he delivered at Yale in 1988/89. The series of lectures, open to students and the public and staged throughout the year, featured a selected professor that connected their topic of expertise to the humanities.38 Scully shaped his DeVane Lectures to embody the overarching focus of his career, which he had addressed in his research and taught in his courses throughout the previous four decades: the relationship between architecture and nature.39 By 1991, this material would comprise a book, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, that would be selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year and described as “nothing less than an interpretation of the whole history of Western architecture from the earliest times to yesterday.”40 Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade was indeed ambitious in scope, rehearsing Scully’s work beginning in the 1940s. The book’s eleven chapters conveyed the project’s sweeping nature, addressing “the sacred mountain” across four continents and commenting on developments from ancient Egypt to contemporary America.41 While many of these subjects

196

VINCENT SCULLY

sounded familiar, Architecture was not a recitation of Scully’s previous exploits. Indeed, as Scully discussed in the preface, he had already treated some of the book’s topics—namely Greek and Pueblo architecture—at length in earlier publications, and thus in Architecture they appeared in more summary fashion. In contrast, Scully’s work on France was covered in detail, comprising nearly a third of the book’s content.42 Yet, the argument governing these in-depth chapters was likewise familiar, in that Scully approached French cathedrals (late Middle Ages), fortifications (seventeenth century), and classic gardens (late seventeenth/early eighteenth century) precisely in the same manner as he did Greek temples, the Pueblos of the American Southwest, Shingle Style houses, and modern architecture earlier in his career: architecture is shaped by, and at the same time shapes, the society that produces it. This book synthesized Scully’s life’s work into an overarching narrative that situates architecture as our attempt to understand and influence our place in the natural world, regardless of century or civilization. Ultimately, architecture shows us who we are and who we want to be. Scully’s books preceding Architecture treated a single topic or architect, such as the Shingle Style or Pueblo architecture, Kahn or Wright. Even books on broader subjects—for example Modern Architecture or American Architecture and Urbanism—operated within a defined geographic or temporal frame, such as North America or the mid-eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Architecture was different, moving from Europe to America and back again, from the third millennium BCE to the late twentieth century, at times within a single chapter, weaving a rich tapestry that incorporated the built environment of the ancient Greeks, sixteenth-century Indigenous Americans, and 1980s Manhattanites. The range of subjects addressed in Architecture is noteworthy for more than the cohesive history Scully crafted around it. By the end of the twentieth century, unlike in the 1940s when Scully began his career, it had become rather rare for a scholar to undertake in-depth research on more than one geographic location, time period, or building typology. Architectural history, and nearly all academic subjects, had grown increasingly siloed, even within ostensibly discrete disciplines. Scully’s renown, along with his membership in an older generation of scholars, granted him license to cover this breadth of topics, spanning thousands of years and miles, not to mention cultural differences. While others zeroed in on a specific area of study, Scully drew back, focusing at a macro scale on common attributes that societies and their architectures share. This expanded view ran counter to the dominant academic impulse in the later twentieth century, and it makes Scully’s insights all the more striking and unique for their day. Furthermore, it is worth exploring the fact that Scully, throughout his career, openly avoided theory, especially as it appeared on the architectural scene in the 1960s. While architects and educators such as Eisenman and Jencks harnessed semiotics, structuralism, and other models external to the discipline as lenses through which to view architecture, Scully refused to do

WHAT SEAS, WHAT SHORES (LATE 1970s–1991)

197

so, even as he flirted with the technique himself—for example, using Bloom’s theory of influence to explicate the architectural production of the 1960s and 1970s, or employing Freud’s concept of the dream-work, with its ideas of condensation and displacement, to unpack Wright’s unconscious.43 What did he see as the difference between Eisenman et al.’s use of theory and his own? In 2006 he explained that the main thing is they weren’t dealing with architecture. They’d go on and on and on, and none of it really affects your perception of a building, what it means, what it is all about . . . And none of it ever seemed to be extended in any intelligent way to the basic problems of architecture, like the relationship of everything to everything else, the relationship of architecture to nature, to creation of the town.44 For Scully, then, the issue didn’t seem to be the use of theory itself, but rather the ends to which theory was used. He even appeared to soften his stance, noting, “I’ve become less worried about theory than I used to be, and I think that I was probably a little bit closeminded . . . well, maybe a lot closeminded . . . [Now] I am willing to see [Eisenman’s] self-absorbed, self-referential stuff as one man trying really frantically to work it out.”45 In reality, Scully had developed his own theory—that architecture shows us who we are and who we want to be. While he did not discuss it in such terms, his concept of architecture as a mediatory device through which people perceive and navigate the world bears a resemblance to what literary historian and critical theorist Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, labeled cognitive mapping. Jameson built on urban planner Kevin Lynch’s notion of cognitive mapping, whereby urban elements (nodes, paths, districts, landmarks, edges) allow humans to shape a mental representation of where they are within a city.46 Jameson expanded the concept of cognitive mapping to encompass the totality of life, including its interconnected political, social, and spatial components.47 He posited “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping,” described as a “pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system.”48 For Scully, architecture—as it manifested the realities and aspirations of the society that created it—functioned in this instructive way. Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade served as Scully’s written record of this relationship. *

*

*

At the time of its publication, Architecture must have seemed like the culmination of Scully’s 45-year-long career. This idea was likely supported by that fact that Yale forced the professor to retire that very spring. Scully challenged the university’s long-standing policy that mandated retirement at age 70, but to no avail. Thus, on Friday, April 26, 1991, Scully arrived at the Law School auditorium to teach the final installment of his Modern

198

VINCENT SCULLY

Architecture class, a version of which he had initially taught in 1947 while covering for his professor, Carroll Meeks. It was perhaps poetic, then, that what had been his first course would serve as his last, at least as a full-time professor. This emotional event was made all the more so for Scully when he arrived, glanced around the lecture hall, and found a host of unexpected guests: Philip Johnson, whom he had known for more than forty years; Cesar Pelli, former Department of Architecture dean; Robert Stern, who would become dean of the same department in 1998; Maya Lin, who, as an undergraduate in 1981, was inspired by Scully’s discussion of war monuments and went on to design the winning entry in the international competition for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC; Paul Goldberger, Scully’s former student and architectural critic for the New York Times; as well as architects Kevin Roche, Leon Krier, and more. Along with Tappy and other long-time Yale colleagues, these friends and past students had assembled with the enrolled undergraduates to experience the occasion of Scully’s last performance as a Yale professor. Upon seeing this illustrious crowd, Scully’s eyes went wide in surprise. He turned on his heel and walked out the door, pausing a moment to gather himself before returning to the room, striding to the stage, and calling for the projectionist to dim the lights. Then, bamboo pointer in hand, he began the lecture. When Scully finished, a luncheon to honor his retirement was held at Cavanaugh’s, the same Irish watering hole where, for the previous decades, he had treated his Darkness at Noon teaching assistants weekly to food and drink.49 Scully’s final lecture and retirement garnered such significant cultural interest that the New York Times sent a reporter to cover the event for the Sunday issue. Two days later, Scully and Tappy sat up in bed in their New Haven home, fruitlessly searching the Arts section for the article. In mild disappointment, one of them tossed the paper aside, saying something like, “Well, I guess they decided it wasn’t of much interest after all.” The paper landed, facing up, and they saw the error of their ways. The Times had indeed covered Scully’s last class, and they hadn’t bothered to bury it in the Arts section. There, on page one, section 1—the front page, below the fold— ran the headline in bold: “Mr. Scully’s Class Is Dismissed.”50 So went Scully’s first retirement. It didn’t last long.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

New Urbanism, New Horizons (1980s–2000s) Despite his forced retirement in the spring of 1991, Scully refused to stop teaching. That very fall, he led a lecture course entitled The Natural and the Manmade, a historical survey that largely followed his recently published book. The course was offered in the School of Architecture, not Scully’s former history of art department, allowing him to sidestep a Yale regulation that barred professors after the age-mandated retirement from teaching in their former department for a year.1 After that period, though, they could return if there was sufficient demand and available funds. Thus, in the fall of 1992 and with the new title of professor emeritus, Scully began teaching HA 112a: Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to Renaissance, which he had led since 1965. The Yale Daily News documented Scully’s homecoming with headlines such as “Scully Returns to Rousing Welcome” and “To Joy of Undergraduates, Old Class Is Back,” noting that 510 students registered to take his signature course.2 After the semester ended, he traveled to Florida with Tappy, where he taught a spring-term course at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture. And so proceeded Scully’s retirement as he established a routine that he would maintain for seventeen years. Well into the next century, he would split his time teaching one course during the fall semester at Yale, and then another as distinguished visiting professor at the University of Miami during the spring. Scully’s connections to the University of Miami were forged in May 1990. Accompanied by Tappy, Scully journeyed to the university’s campus in Coral Gables to accept an honorary degree. While there, they met up with Scully’s former students, husband-and-wife architectural team Elizabeth PlaterZyberk and Andrés Duany. The pair urged their former professor to visit Seaside, a new town recently constructed on Florida’s panhandle coast. Seaside had become the foremost example of the burgeoning movement that would be known as New Urbanism, the architectural focus that would occupy Scully for the rest of his life. 199

200

VINCENT SCULLY

FIGURE 14.1 Seaside, Florida, 1981, by Andrés Duany and Elizabeth PlaterZyberk. Photo by Alex MacLean.

Seaside came into being in the late 1970s, when Miami-based real-estate developer Robert Davis set out to transform an inherited 80-acre oceanfront parcel into a second-home community grounded in southern smalltown coastal traditions. For planning services he turned to Duany and PlaterZyberk, young designers a mere half-decade out of architecture school. They welcomed the chance to develop the urban ideas they had first explored as Yale graduate students under Scully’s tutelage. These concepts were in many ways old, drawing on traditional towns—for example, New Haven neighborhoods that had escaped urban renewal in the preceding decades. As Scully would summarize, at Yale Duany and Plater-Zyberk began to study New Haven’s 19th-century vernacular houses, with their frontal gables, shingles, and stick-style porches. They saw them in relation to each other on New Haven’s grid of streets, each on its narrow lot, fronted by a sidewalk and a strip of grass planted with trees . . . They saw in the modest streets with cars parked on them that not everything need be given away to the automobile, but that it could be disciplined in favor of more humane conditions.3 In short, schooled in an era when modernist dogma no longer reigned supreme, Duany and Plater-Zyberk saw an urban structure that had been rejected by modernists and recognized that it offered amenities missing from most modernist plans—a human scale, walkability, defined public spaces . . . namely an environment that supported an image of community.

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

201

These patterns of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urban development likewise presented an alternative to suburban sprawl, which grew exponentially following the middle-class exodus from the city center during the 1950s. The suburbs allowed (mainly white) residents to fulfill the America dream of single-family home ownership, complete with lawn and picket fence. But they also dictated dependence on the automobile and the rapidly expanding federal highway system to access places to work, shop, and socialize. This decentralization diluted population density, made pedestrian-friendly environments nearly impossible, and virtually erased shared public space. Some—including Scully—recognized suburbanization as the flip side to urban redevelopment and believed that, as these two trends evolved through the 1950s and 1960s, they had unintentionally eliminated the neighborhood structure that had, in the past, fostered a community mindset. In this way, the erosion of public space along Manhattan’s Park Avenue was as damaging as the seemingly bucolic suburban housing developments like Levittown. Scully seeded these ideas in his students, not quite knowing what flowers would bloom—until he saw Seaside. In his visit to Siena in the early 1950s, Scully had been struck by Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century frescoes—Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government—depicting the privileges afforded citizens by beneficent leadership. A decade later, Scully had lamented the death of Park Avenue and the urban defacement caused by the Athens Hilton, both the result of unchecked private development. To redirect attention to the city as a space for the public, instead of a building ground for the wealthy, Scully called for regulatory oversight by a “competent local authority.”4 With their design for Seaside, Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ, as their firm would be known following its formation in 1980) built this regulatory oversight into the town plan, setting forth principles to govern its layout and codes to shape its future growth in two and three dimensions, all with the goal of crafting an environment that would foster a strong sense of community. At Seaside, DPZ explored ideas that they envisioned as applicable to a range of scales, from urban infill to the creation of new towns to the revitalization of entire regions. They would later refine their thoughts to provide a framework for the development of New Urbanism, noting that The fundamental organizing elements of the New Urbanism are the neighborhood, the district, and the corridor. Neighborhoods are urbanized areas with a balanced mix of human activity; districts are dominated by a single activity; corridors are connectors and separators of neighborhoods and districts. A single neighborhood standing free in the landscape is a village. Cities and towns are made up of multiple neighborhoods and districts, organized by corridors of transportation or open space. Neighborhoods, districts, and corridors are urban elements. By contrast, suburbia, which is the

202

VINCENT SCULLY

result of zoning laws that separate uses, is composed of pods, highways, and interstitial spaces.5 In terms of the neighborhood, DPZ, like many before them, proposed “a model of urbanism that is limited in area and structured around a definite center.” Their notion of an ideal neighborhood design was grounded in the following principles: 1) The neighborhood has a center and an edge; 2) The optimal size of a neighborhood is a quarter mile [a five-minute walk] from center to edge; 3) The neighborhood has a balanced mix of activities—dwelling, shopping, working, schooling, worshipping, and recreating; 4) The neighborhood structures building sites and traffic on a fine network of interconnecting streets; 5) The neighborhood gives propriety to public space and to the appropriate location of civic buildings.6 In combination, these principles would insure that a given town had a legible hierarchy, was pedestrian-friendly, supported a variety of uses, was easy to navigate, and prioritized the notion of the public. DPZ employed these concepts in Seaside’s design, which included 350 housing units in various configurations, a town center with civic and retail structures, a chapel, a school, and other amenities. When laying out the master plan, DPZ first mapped out the town’s public spaces, which included not only parks and plazas but also streets, walk- and alleyways, and landscape features such as dunes and the beachfront. Around these public areas they designated where private buildings could be constructed, what functions these buildings could serve, and what forms they could take. The Seaside codes differed from traditional zoning and design regulations in that they emphasized building form—individually and collectively—as much, if not more than, the designated function. Another aspect that made Seaside’s urban code unique was that DPZ crafted a poster to graphically convey, succinctly and without legal jargon, the town’s urban code. The term form-based code, referring to a town or district’s regulations that consider “the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks,” has since entered the planning lexicon to differentiate it from more conventional use-based codes or land-use zoning.7 Seaside’s master plan contained eight different lot types distributed throughout the town. Employing simple diagrams with accompanying specifications, the poster illustrated possibilities for each lot type in terms of elements such as yards, porches, outbuildings, and parking requirements. For example, Type I lots defined the central plaza along the main street (Route 30A) that ran through town, and were earmarked for ground-floor retail with residential units above. They were required to contain party-wall buildings unified by an arcade along the street-facing facade, have no

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

203

outbuildings or parking, and be capped at a height of five stories. In contrast, Type VII lots were residential and situated along the east–west streets, where no view of the sea was possible. These lots were smaller, less expensive, and required a minimal front setback. (In other lot types, setbacks of various distances were necessary to protect the ocean view.) Type VII lots allowed for zero setback on one side, which created space for a yard on the other side of the property, if desired. Buildings here were limited to three stories in height. By connecting the master plan to the form-based code, DPZ established a framework to regulate Seaside’s shape and configuration, both from the start and as the development grew. This framework, DPZ argued, allowed for flexibility in that architects and owners, operating within the fixed system, had the freedom to express their stylistic and creative preferences. In other words, the houses built on Type VII lots would not be those of the standard suburban development, pre-set designs with a handful of aesthetic options. Rather, each house could be unique and sited as worked best for that design, as long as it followed the regulations spelled out in the town code poster. Davis envisioned a community that drew on vernacular traditions of southern towns, often citing modest wooden cottages with deep porches cooled by the ocean breeze. Nevertheless, DPZ’s framework provided for an array of housing types—from single family, to duplex and triplex, to boarding houses and apartments. It encouraged variety by leaving individual designs to the lot owner, via chosen architect or, for the more ambitious, through self-design. The list of prominent architects who designed buildings in Seaside would include luminaries such as Leon Krier, Robert Stern, Steven Hall, Machado and Silvetti, Steven Holl, and Deborah Berke. By the 1990s, Seaside had earned widespread media attention—including mentions in US News & World Report, Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, People magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly—for its charming, small-town atmosphere and immense popularity.8 Including Seaside in its “Design: Best of the Decade” write-up alongside Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial and Apple’s Macintosh Computer, Time magazine described Seaside in 1990 as “a real old-fashioned small town, built from scratch since 1981.”9 The public seemed to like it, as did factions of the architectural profession. The 1984 jury for the Progressive Architecture (P/A) Awards bestowed on Seaside a citation for “herald[ing] a return to historical development patterns.”10 DPZ’s approach to town planning garnered the attention of politicians as well. Perhaps most significant among them was Henry Cisneros, the head of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Bill Clinton. Appointed to Clinton’s cabinet after nine years as mayor of San Antonio, Texas, Cisneros took office in 1993 and set about strengthening the HOPE VI program, a government initiative intended to transform dilapidated public housing projects into desirable mixed-income developments. Cisneros visited DPZ-designed Kentlands, a new town in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to explore urban planning ideas there that could

204

VINCENT SCULLY

inform public housing. While Kentlands had been designed for an uppermiddle-class clientele—the town was comprised largely of townhouses and the occasional mansion—the project embodied principles of mixed-use, walkability, and increased density that would figure in future HOPE VI projects.11 Secretary Cisneros found the New Urbanism compelling enough to align himself with the movement as it grew through the 1990s.12 Despite a general embrace of DPZ’s urban concepts, some members of the architectural community found Seaside, and the New Urbanism movement that would develop in its wake, quite objectionable.13 To begin, since Seaside was planned primarily as a resort or second-home community, critics found it difficult to accept the town as a realistic prototype for fulltime communities, let alone communities including residents of lower economic status. Indeed, as Seaside’s notoriety grew, the town’s property values skyrocketed; homes that sold for $100,000 in the 1980s were, in 2005, reportedly valued in the millions, while an 825-square-foot condo was listed for $825,000, comparable to Manhattan real-estate prices.14 Such soaring prices further excluded all but those with money to spare. In 2005, in an article entitled “Seaside at 25: Troubles in Paradise,” Davis noted how the initial plan to “bring rich and poor together,” and to minimize dependence on the automobile by creating a place where people could work in close proximity to home, had been derailed by popular demand and market forces. “We failed miserably at maintaining affordable housing stock,” Davis said to the architectural journalist Fred Bernstein, conceding, “we have no industry to speak of, expect for tourism.” As vacationers poured into Seaside, they arrived in cars, which clogged the carefully planned pedestrianoriented streets. By the mid-2000s, Davis was considering parking management strategies, including valet parking and new signage directing visitors to park on the edge of town.15 Seaside’s detractors suspected that the New Urbanist principles explored there would be difficult to apply in situations other than towns built from scratch. In other words, for larger-scale projects, urban infill, or the redevelopment of rundown areas in existing cities, critics expected it would prove difficult (if not impossible) to institute overarching form-based codes. Indeed, the implementation of New Urbanist concepts in preexisting environments has posed challenges, but not necessarily beyond those that arise in any infill or revitalization project. What practitioners have come to learn is that each situation requires tailored code-related strategies to accommodate what is already in place while working to address the project’s desired goals.16 While some professionals appreciated Seaside and subsequent New Urbanist attempts to establish neotraditional planning, others saw the movement’s connection to tradition as fundamentally flawed. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the modernist belief in progress as a lifealtering force remained embedded in some architectural institutions, at least strongly enough that the idea of looking to the past for inspiration set off

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

205

mental alarm bells. This was especially the case at programs that maintained a predominantly modernist bent, such as the Harvard GSD.17 Indeed, the traditional towns to which neotraditional planning turned were from distant eras: the Jeffersonian grid of the early nineteenth century, and the City Beautiful–inspired town plans of John Nolan in the early twentieth century. In their design for Seaside, DPZ deliberately referenced patterns of development and vernacular elements found in small, southern towns such as Charlestown, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana. DPZ used features such as the village square and the deep-shaded veranda to foster a particular image of community and honor a unique southern context, accomplishments they felt most modernist planning techniques were unable to achieve. Yet Charlestown, New Orleans, and other traditional American towns—including colonial New Haven, with its nine-square grid centered on a public green—are rife with their own problematic histories. In many circumstances, such historic towns were built with enslaved labor, featured public squares where people were bought and sold, and often both. As the civil, gay, and women’s rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to 1980s Reaganism and conservative American politics, was it conscionable to replicate patterns of development that could be understood as physical manifestations of colonialization and what is now widely understood to be white privilege? Indeed, only very recently have institutions like Yale and Harvard begun to acknowledge the prejudice and slavery upon which its structures—physical and organizational—were founded. Such attempts to initiate accountability for these injustices have rarely stretched beyond corporate entities to local governments. To further muddy the waters, the stylistic attributes on display in the New Urbanist towns—for example, the Greek revival temple-turned-post office of Seaside—often fell, and continue to fall, squarely into the neoclassical category. Critics see this more traditional architecture (even if traditional alludes in some circumstances primarily to pitched roofs and punched windows) as aligned with postmodernism’s appropriation of historical forms à la Moore’s Piazza d’Italia and Johnson’s AT&T Building. What’s more, throughout the first half of the twentieth century there emerged an association between neoclassical architecture and political conservatism, even totalitarianism—think Hitler and Speer’s monumental Volkshalle or Stalin’s Palace of Culture and Science. For many, the use of pediments, columns, and the like not only flirted with cultural pastiche, it signaled an inherent conservatism, even if those who employed, commissioned, or appreciated these elements were anything but. Scully aligned himself with liberal politics, a position he maintained throughout his life. The accusations of conservatism assigned to New Urbanism angered him greatly, as he felt that the critics and architectural theorists at places such as the GSD, the “sort-of-neo-modernists, the big hot shots at all these schools” were acting out of “complete ignorance about what [New Urbanism] is.”18

206

VINCENT SCULLY

A final critique of the New Urbanism, often leveled alongside charges of conservatism, was that by collaborating with developers, designers played into an oppressive (capitalist) system that privileges the wealthy and exploits the poor. Of course, the reality is that it is next to impossible in the United States (and elsewhere) to build outside of the prevailing economic system. Nevertheless, even if unspoken, this complicit-with-capitalism stigma lingered, another holdover from a European-based critique that gave rise to modern architecture and found little purchase on this side of the Atlantic, in the early twentieth century or one hundred years later. A less outwardly ideological version of the capitalist-complicity charge was that of New Urbanists selling out, either by working with developers, embracing neotraditionalism, or both. In response to such accusations, DPZ argued that they simply provide what people want. Duany offered the following by way of explanation: There are three ways to do architecture. One is the architecture of personality: Meier for a Meier building, Gehry for a Gehry building. Second is the architecture of time: keeping up with the latest. Most modernist firms do that. Third is an architecture of place, in which you fit into the place. New Urbanists do an architecture of place—where there is a modern context they do modern architecture, and where there is traditional architecture they do traditional architecture. We ask people what they want, and in the United States people overwhelmingly want traditional architecture.19 In other words, Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and other New Urbanists claimed to commit not to a particular style or aesthetic, but rather to work within the existing context and honor the wishes of intended users. Neotraditional architecture, they asserted, was driven by market demand, not by designer preference.20 To detractors, such a declaration rang hollow, especially in connection with practitioners such as Leon Krier, who made a career of proclaiming classical architecture’s humanizing power. And then there was the undeniable fact that the New Urbanist patterns of development drew on late-nineteeth- and early-twentieth-century manners of urban organization— more City Beautiful than Le Corbusian Ville Radieuse, with a healthy dose of small-town colonial New England or whatever local vernacular existed. To such a critique, Duany no doubt offered the same retort: walkable, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods are what people want, and what these traditional patterns of development provide. *

*

*

Following his initial encounter with Seaside in spring 1990, Scully became a vocal advocate of its neotraditional/vernacular brand of urbanism and of DPZ. The first article he wrote on the Florida town appeared in the New York Times in January of the following year, just a few months before his mandated Yale retirement. With the title “Back to the Future, With a Detour

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

207

Through Miami,” Scully employed a pop culture reference—the Back to the Future franchise had been in full swing since the mid-1980s—to highlight two of Seaside’s foremost accomplishments: its popular appeal and its reliance on the past. Armed with knowledge he had gained from his visit to the 1950s, Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly had returned to the present and saved the future; DPZ, Scully’s article implied, were poised to do the same. He declared that Duany and Plater-Zyberk, by far the most interesting young architects practicing today . . . are coming close to bringing to fruition the most important contemporary movement in architecture. That movement is, of course, the revival of the vernacular and classical traditions and their reintegration into the mainstream of modern architecture of its fundamental aspect: the structure of communities, the building of towns.21 Scully then offered a succinct architectural history of the past century, setting the stage in a familiar way for architecture’s next step, as he had done before with Wright, Kahn, Venturi, and Rossi. This time he had a more concrete endgame in mind, though, beyond the generation’s search for order. Rather, he zeroed in on a concept that he had held close since his earliest years of life: that of community. For Scully, the establishment of community—or at least the physical conditions that would foster a sense of community—was the next step in architecture’s evolution, and he envisioned that the New Urbanism would ultimately usher it into being. Indeed, throughout the late 1980s, even before Scully’s campaign of support, the ideas that DPZ put forth in the creation of Seaside gained momentum and inspired additional projects, primarily new towns but also a handful of proposed urban revitalization or infill projects. Within months of Scully’s New York Times article, the term New Urbanism emerged on the scene and a group of likeminded practitioners—Duany and Plater-Zyberk along with Elizabeth Moule, Stefanos Polyzoides, Peter Calthorpe, and Daniel Solomon—set about planning the first three installments of an annual conference series, which launched in 1993 and recently celebrated its thirtieth meeting. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), modeled in part on CIAM as conceived some seventy years earlier, was intended to change the way practitioners thought about the places they design and build. At the same time, CNU sought to “undo some of the damage inspired by CIAM, such as ‘urban renewal’ that eradicated whole neighborhoods and streets.”22 Thus CNU, envisioned as both a homage and a corrective to the modernist CIAM, grew to encompass a mass of issues facing the built environment, as would be described a few years later in the preamble to the Charter of the New Urbanism: “The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.”23

208

VINCENT SCULLY

The first congress focused on the theme of Neighborhood, District, Corridor, and included none other than Scully as the esteemed keynote speaker. Scully’s presence at the initial CNU lent weight to the burgeoning New Urbanist movement, and his keynote talk, entitled “An Urbanism for Our Time,” incorporated much of his New York Times article’s content from two years earlier. It likewise drew on an essay he had written more recently, “The Architecture of Community,” which would be published in Peter Katz’s The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community a year after the conference. Katz’s book featured essays by the CNU founders along with twenty-four projects that illustrated different applications of New Urbanist principles. Scully’s text was intended to be the preface; however, alongside praise for the New Urbanism, Scully’s essay offered a healthy dose of criticism, prompting Katz to reposition the contribution as an afterword.24 While Scully found much to like about the New Urbanism, in “The Architecture of Community” he took issue with two points in particular, beginning with the movement’s name. Scully felt that the initiative, as discussed by its founders, neglected a full range of possible urban strategies— for example, DPZ and their colleagues failed to address historic preservation. Thus, for the movement as well as for Katz’s book, New Urbanism seemed to Scully “overly comprehensive.” And although the movement’s adherents hoped to apply its principles to all situations, thus far their primary efforts, in Scully’s estimation, had “to do with reshaping that sprawl of automobile suburbia into communities that make sense.” With this in mind, he argued, “The New Suburbanism might be a truer label.”25 Scully’s preferred name for the movement was the Architecture of Community—the very phrase he selected as the title of his essay.26 Scully’s second objection to the New Urbanism concerned what he saw as DPZ’s impulse to downplay the critical role of the vernacular in the movement’s success. In short, Scully found distressing . . . the tendency of Duany and Plater-Zyberk, when addressing Neo-Modernists, to suggest that they employ the vernacular in their projects only because it is popular with clients. This buffoonery, genial enough, leaves them open to charges of “pandering” to the public which their opponents are not slow to advance. But the pandering in this case is to the architectural magazines and the professional club. It makes a joke of everything Duany and Plater-Zyberk have come to stand for, and it denies the historical facts of their rise. That they should seem to need the approval of professional côteries that they have far outclassed may be taken as an aberration of success and an indication of the tight hold (like that of the Marine Corps or the Catholic Church) which the architectural profession exerts on anyone who has ever belonged to it.27 A not-so-subtle rebuff of DPZ, Scully’s objection revealed more about himself than the subjects of his article. Having been the target of colleagues’

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

209

attacks over the years—for example, the harsh dismissal of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods by archaeologists, or the accusation of impropriety surrounding the Yale Mathematics Building competition, or the “love story” critique leveled at his Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance—Scully appeared to be quite bothered by what he viewed as DPZ’s counterproductive (even self-sabotaging) attempts to forestall such criticism. Then again, by referencing the architectural profession alongside establishments such as the Marine Corps and the Catholic Church, which instill an unshakable need for conformity in their adherents, Scully conceded—in an extremely autobiographical way—that he could appreciate DPZ’s quandary. Perhaps even more autobiographical was Scully’s assertion that DPZ’s vernacular-is-popular-with-clients argument “denies the historical facts of their rise.” Scully had alluded to the sequence of events as he understood it in the New York Times article and fleshed it out even more so in “The Architecture of Community.” As Neil Levine explained, Scully subsequently expanded and delivered the essay in May 1995, as the 24th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, a prestigious event hosted annually by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1996 he gave a version of the talk at the University of Michigan as the Raoul Wallenberg Lecture (subsequently published by the university’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning).28 Finally, on the invitation of the White House Millennium Council on the occasion of the Twentieth Pritzker Prize ceremony, Scully delivered a condensed iteration of the talk at the White House in June 1998. To a largely lay audience including President and First Lady Clinton, Scully presented a history of architecture that masterfully encompassed the concepts that had occupied his mind for the better part of a century. Community and the city, democracy and law, freedom and order—these themes wove through Scully’s architectural narrative, which was his own personal history as well, offering a viable conclusion to the search for order that had defined his life and career. Scully’s lecture at the White House, entitled “Architecture at the Millennium: Architecture and Community” when it was published the following year, began by paying homage to Thomas Jefferson, the Clintons, and architect Renzo Piano, winner of the Pritzker and the evening’s guest of honor. Here Scully transitioned to the true subject of his talk; he had been asked to speak about New Urbanism, not Piano. Honoring such an “individual, highly idiosyncratic architect” as Piano, Scully noted, “also reminds us that architecture is a communal art, having to do with the whole manmade environment, the human city entire, rather than only the individual buildings in it.” He then took this well-rehearsed theme a step further, noting that this conception of architecture renders the discipline and its product both artistic and political, as it “touch[es] on fundamental issues such as the relationship of freedom to order, of innovation to stability, most of all of the individual to law.”29 In this way, Scully set the stage for a history of the American city grounded in the democracy and aesthetics of ancient and classical Greece.

210

VINCENT SCULLY

Scully initiated this history with Jefferson, who brought to the United States from his stint as ambassador to France “an urbanism fundamentally classical in derivation.” The State Capitol for Richmond, Virginia, which he designed in 1785 as the first state capitol in the newly formed country, echoed a classical Roman temple that rose over the James River below. Yet, the precedent reached back farther in formal and political inspiration. The image the classical temple created, Scully argued, “is of the Greek city-state, of the Parthenon, rising above Athens, embodying the passionate aspiration of Greek democracy for political power.” “So from the beginning,” he continued, “the idea of the city as a whole, however modest in size, is central to Jefferson’s perception of classicism.” Indeed, Jefferson’s hilltop Monticello, the “academic village” that is his University of Virginia, and the grid plan he instituted as the country expanded westward are classical at their core, Scully asserted. In L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington, DC, the classical grid formed a backdrop for radiating avenues à la the gardens of Versailles; yet in Washington, the grand diagonal allées cut through the gridded urban fabric instead of manicured greenery to create long vistas that, in years to come, would terminate in grand monuments commemorative of American political life. By the early 1900s, Washington had become a model for cities throughout the country, influencing designers such as John Nolen, whose new town plans intermingled the classical grid and French garden motifs—for example, in Venice, Florida (1926). When working within an existing context, as Cass Gilbert and Fredrick Law Olmsted did with their 1910 plan for New Haven, it was of utmost importance that the new plan supported, instead of destroyed, “the integrity of the city.”30 This era of city planning, described in almost idyllic terms by Scully, was brought to an abrupt halt as the country struggled, first under the Depression and then the Second World War. And when construction recommenced midcentury, new urban ideas inspired by a love for the automobile and modernist utopian visions had supplanted the 150-year-old tradition of American city planning. Thus “hero-architects like Le Corbusier” and “hero-administrators like Robert Moses” led the way, “reaming out the centers of cities, scattering neighborhoods . . . [and demolishing] some irreplaceable buildings,” including Penn Station in New York City.31 For Scully, a few positive glimmers came from all of this destruction, namely the historic preservation movement and community-level resistance to urban renewal. Indeed, as Scully and his fellow New Havenites rallied against the destruction of the older buildings surrounding the Green, they “rediscovered two ancient principles.” First, they quickly came to see that the nine-square colonial grid at New Haven’s center anchored the town as a whole. In other words, “the traditional plan counts and stabilizes the city.” And second, Scully continued, “we came to perceive something that had been forgotten in the arrogance of high modernism: that once upon a time buildings and cities had been designed to get along with buildings from previous generations, [thereby]

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

211

creating places that outlast individual human lives—as King Gilgamesh of Uruk had discovered in his own city more than four thousand years before.”32 He went on to explain, So when Cass Gilbert of the Woolworth Building designed New Haven’s Free Public Library in 1908, he shaped it to respect the churches on the Green, built a hundred years earlier. Here the principle of context was seen as more important than style or invention, and was intended to make the whole Green a little better on its own terms. Fortunately for all of us, a young architect, Robert Venturi . . . had begun to design in just that way once again. His Guild House of the early 1960s intends not to stand out as an invention, but to blend with its neighborhood, so strengthening the street and exhibiting that respect for the rest of the community which was embodied as well in the major, and peculiarly American, social movements of that time. I refer, of course, to the black liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation that have profoundly affected the way Americans think about who belongs to the community and what its structure should be.33 It is worth unpacking the messages embedded in the above passage, beginning with the rediscovery of “two ancient principles,” which turn out to be the role of the traditional urban plan and the criticality of context. These principles appear in Scully’s history as timeless, dating back to the world’s oldest city, the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. Tradition and context had been honored for millennia, up until the early twentieth century, when they were usurped by “the arrogance of high modernism,” much as Gilgamesh’s arrogance had, for a time, prevented him from recognizing his own mortality. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the king came to realize that his legacy would not be eternal life, but rather his achievements for his people, such as the protective wall he built around Uruk, which would outlast him for ages to come.34 As did the legendary hero king, architecture’s protagonists became wise to the errors in their thinking—Scully, “marinated in modernism,” had long included himself in this company—and, opening their eyes to the world around them (here the New Haven Green, and the buildings from different eras that existed around it without strife) “rediscovered” the temporarily forgotten yet firmly established principles of tradition and context. Scully delivered this talk at an awards ceremony honoring an inventive architect, Piano. And yet Scully emphasized tradition and context, stating that context—“intended to make the whole . . . a little better on its own terms”—was understood as “more important than style or invention.” Luckily, Scully noted, Venturi had come to the same conclusion, and his work even in the early 1960s revealed as much. Earlier the audience had heard that Piano’s work was in its own way sensitive to tradition and context. Yet, this acknowledgment was overshadowed by the fact that Scully focused his attention on the opposite of what the Pritzker Prize in general,

212

VINCENT SCULLY

and Piano in particular, represented: the individual architect. Rather, Scully zeroed in on community, both in terms of the physical neighborhood and basic human rights. Thus tradition and context—long-standing albeit temporarily forgotten principles—formed a foundation for the built environment, social growth, and reenvisioning what community could be. In this lecture, Scully made it abundantly clear that his gaze as both historian and critic was trained on “the revival of traditional town planning as a whole,” the next and logical step following Venturi’s evocation of tradition and context in the service of community. He traced a progression from Jefferson to Nolan to Venturi to DPZ, who picked up on the rich tradition of urban planning interrupted by modernism. This 200-year lineage encompassed the “historical facts of [DPZ’s] rise,” as Scully had maintained a few years earlier.35 Thus, when DPZ downplayed the role of the vernacular—which here encompassed tradition and context—in their success as well as that of the New Urbanism, it amounted to a denial, to Scully’s way of thinking, of the very conditions that produced them. DPZ’s “buffoonery” was an unintentional rebuff of the evolution of American architectural history, as written and understood by Scully himself. For Scully, DPZ’s place in the revival of traditional town planning was self-evident. Their plan for Seaside, so beautifully rendered in the final decades of the twentieth century, echoed Nolen’s plan for Venice, Florida, more than fifty years its senior. Yet, DPZ had taken it all a step further, Scully suggested, when they regulated the town’s code in two and three dimensions, not just the former, as Nolen and others had woefully come to regret. The codes established for Seaside, which would become a model for New Urbanist projects the world over, addressed use and form; they set parameters for the town’s fabric—width of streets, building placement on lots, the inclusion of certain elements—and left public buildings without such restrictions. So the majority of the plan was closely regulated yet allowed room for idiosyncratic buildings designed by Gehry, Piano, or the like, that are public and thus open to all. As Scully noted, “The code makes possible the ordered town and the special monument. The individual needs the law.”36 Scully looked to the past to demonstrate the physical expression of law. Indeed, “such codes created the great cities of Europe. The public gesture of Siena’s town hall seems to push back the facades of the buildings that shape the wonderful Campo of that city precisely because those facades were prevented by law from having any kind of projection that would encroach upon the public space.”37 New Urbanists, then, were continuing a wellrecognized practice of controlling, through law, the built environment. Here the historian returned to an image he had long held dear, Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. The best general description we have of the city as a product of law is [Lorenzetti’s] fresco inside [Siena’s] town hall . . . It shows the city all

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

213

FIGURE 14.2 Allegory of Good Government, detail, from Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government in the City and the Country, 1343, by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, fresco. Hall of Peace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Mondadori Portfolio / Getty.

214

VINCENT SCULLY

hard-edged, with people dancing in the street, set in a Tuscan landscape gentle and soft, where the farmers are reaping the wheat. Everything works together through Good Government, with the figure of Security presiding over the gate. Next to this scene is another in which the town sits enthroned; he holds a cord that is voluntarily grasped by all the citizens in their special costumes, affirming that each one of them gives up a little personal freedom in order to live in peace with everybody else. The city is “a product of law” in its built and social manifestations. Lorenzetti showed “a peaceful image of a human community” as a physical and social condition, and Scully had great hopes that the creation of such community was on the horizon.38 Scully ended his White House address with an appeal for the American government to help house the poor, who need—and have too long been denied—“what everyone else in the United States seems to want: a dignified place to live, a supporting community, the protection of the law.” “We once did all this right in the United States,” Scully declared, “and with the help of the Almighty, we’ll do it again.”39 That Scully, nearing 80 years old, concluded the millennium by delivering a moral entreaty to align the ideas of community with beneficent governance fits neatly as the culmination of his personal search for order. Scully had long yearned for a community of his own, first as a child among adults, then as a scholarship student and townie amid his wealthy prep-school classmates at Yale. As a Marine he temporarily found a sense of belonging, only to lose it, together with his closest friends and his sense of self (at least for a time), to the devastations of war. He returned to a new family and to Yale, and with architecture as an anchor, a community blossomed around him. Personal happiness seemed to elude him until well into his life, as his first and second marriages crumbled, finally to flourish with the third. Meanwhile, Scully’s search for order continued as he uncovered historical moments that helped him make sense of his own, from confrontation to accommodation, from an individualistic existentialism to a pragmatic realism. In all, Scully rehearsed a history of architecture that began in the late twentieth century, extending back in time to classical Greece and building forward to the present moment. This history was also Scully’s history, and New Urbanism— or as he preferred to call it, the Architecture of Community—was its capstone. As Vincent Sr. had done decades prior when, as a Democratic alderman, he orchestrated the first integrated housing project in New Haven, Scully recognized a government’s responsibility to address problems faced by its citizenry. While he never held public office, throughout the mid-1990s Scully served as an unofficial advisor to Cisneros for the HOPE VI program, which marked an optimistic moment for proponents of federal housing initiatives. In 1995, the HUD secretary (who would sign the Chapter of New Urbanism when it was ratified at CNU IV the following year) invited Scully to

NEW URBANISM, NEW HORIZONS (1980s–2000s)

215

participate in a two-day workshop held at Fort McNair focused on the city and sensitive urban issues. In a letter following the meeting, Cisneros personally wrote Scully to thank him. “We are living in a time when the old assumptions are out the window and urban conditions will change, for better or worse,” Cisneros mused. “Our task is to make change work to enhance communities and to improve people’s lives.”40 No doubt Scully shared this conviction and, like his father before him, had his mind set on fostering a more egalitarian future.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We Can’t Say It’s a Career Cut Short (1991–2017) Following Scully’s forced retirement in 1991 at the age of 70, he established a regular, and rather rigorous, migratory pattern. He and Tappy spent the fall in New Haven residing in their two-story Stick Style Victorian, set back from the sidewalk on Lawrence Street. Scully taught one of his two famous courses at Yale.1 After the term ended, the couple—along with their husky (first Jack; then Aldo, named in memory of Rossi; and finally Enzo, named after his human father, albeit in Italian [Vincenzo])—made their way south. Most years they paused to spend Christmas in Lynchburg, Virginia, visiting with Tappy’s mother in the family home constructed when Tappy was a teenager.2 They then continued their drive down the East Coast to Coral Gables, Florida. There they owned a modest terracotta-tile-roofed 1,000-square-foot house, which they purchased in April 1992. During the spring semester at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, Scully offered his class on Modern Architecture, while Tappy taught courses for several years related to her specialization in American studies and historic preservation, as she likewise did briefly at Yale. At the beginning of the term they reversed their travels, heading north to Lynchburg, where Scully, Tappy, and their canine companion typically spent the summer months. This pattern continued with relatively few interruptions throughout the first decade the twenty-first century. During this time, Scully continued to write articles and book contributions, often solicited prefaces or postscripts. The most notable publication came in 2004—Yale in New Haven: Architecture & Urbanism, coauthored with Tappy (as Catherine Lynn) and two of Scully’s former students, Erik Vogt (an architect/ educator trained at the University of Miami and Yale) and architecture critic Paul Goldberger (Yale undergraduate class of 1972). Issued by Yale University Press, Yale in New Haven was intended to commemorate the university’s 300th commencement in 2001, yet various setbacks delayed its appearance. Scully said this was just as well, as the book cast Yale’s relationship with New Haven 216

WE CAN’ T SAY IT ’S A CAREER CUT SHORT (1991–2017)

217

FIGURE 15.1 Scully and Catherine (Tappy) Lynn, 2003. Collection of C. W. Lynn.

in a more critical light than those commissioning the text had intended.3 Indeed, Scully’s contribution included his assessment that “in the first half of the twentieth century Yale created a paradise for itself, and something approaching hell soon began to threaten the town. That is and remains an unstable situation.”4 Alongside such unvarnished opinions, though, Scully offered an overall positive appraisal of the university and his time there. In a piece entitled “Modern Architecture at Yale: A Memoir,” he discussed the university’s mid-twentiethcentury building campaign and the notable architects that passed through Yale as instructors and/or students in those years—including Kahn, Saarinen, Johnson, Rudolph, Stirling, Moore, Venturi, Stern, and Cesar Pelli—many of whom left new structures in their wake. Scully worked his way up to the early twenty-first century and ended on a hopeful note, emphasizing architecture’s positive impact. He again referenced Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who “over five millennia ago . . . came to realize that his city offered a kind of immortality to him, perhaps to all human beings. The buildings they built lasted far beyond the span of their individual lives and helped shape the world for generations to come. University buildings are especially like that,” Scully continued. “It is, after all, something like immortality they deal in, offering an escape from the restrictions to life that ignorance imposes, and a promise to lives unborn.”5

218

VINCENT SCULLY

During these years of so-called retirement, Scully accrued a list of increasingly prestigious honors including an appointment to the National Trust of Historic Preservation’s Board of Trustees (1992), the aforementioned invitations to deliver the NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (1995) and speak at the Millennial Pritzker Prize ceremony (1998), the establishment of the endowed Vincent J. Scully Chair at Yale (1997), and the bestowal of the Urban Land Institute’s J. C. Nichols Prize (in 2004), which declared him a visionary in urban development, as well as the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Louise DuPont Crowninshield Award (2009), which honored his lifetime achievement in the field of historic preservation.6 Aside from being awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2004 by President George W. Bush and Laura Bush, perhaps the most remarkable honor Scully received in these years was the establishment of the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum in 1999. Scully himself received the first prize, which has since been awarded annually in recognition of “excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design,” all areas with which Scully was intimately involved.7 Honors of a different sort, namely in-residence awards, were likewise bestowed on Scully during these years. He and Tappy spent spring 1995 in Los Angeles, where Scully served as Mellon Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology. This was the first time since his days as a Marine officer at Camp Pendleton that Scully had the opportunity to spend an extended period on the West Coast, and he found Los Angeles—with its endless highways and dependence on the automobile—both fascinating and appalling. Three years later, Scully received an appointment as a visiting resident at the American Academy in Rome, and he and Tappy spent spring 1998 living in a fine apartment on the Janiculum Hill. While Scully delivered a few public talks, most of the couple’s stay involved touring the city on foot by day and sometimes dining at the academy with the fellows in the evening.8 The pair continued their sojourns between New Haven, Coral Gables, and Lynchburg with regularity up through late summer 2011, with one landmark change that occurred in 2009: Scully retired from teaching—this time, for real. That autumn, Scully was slated to teach his Introduction to the History of Art course at Yale, which he had faithfully done, with rare exceptions, since 1949. As the semester approached, Scully forced himself to admit his overriding exhaustion and declining health. Apologizing prolifically, the 89-year-old historian cancelled his class just a few weeks before it was scheduled to begin. In a phone interview with the Yale Daily News, he expressed deep regret at not having made the decision sooner. “I kept hoping it would be all right,” Scully said. “I feel very sorry.” He noted that he likely would not teach in the spring at the University of Miami, remarking, “I’m going to miss teaching because that’s what I focused on [for] most of my life.”9 Goldberger offered an optimistic take on the situation. “There were 18 more years than we thought there would be. We certainly can’t say it’s a career cut short!” Goldberger continued, “One

WE CAN’ T SAY IT ’S A CAREER CUT SHORT (1991–2017)

219

can’t get greedy here. There’s only so much of anybody that the world is entitled to.”10 While the decision to truly retire was emotionally difficult for Scully, he had little choice; the physical effects of what would be diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease had become increasingly clear. Indeed, symptoms such as extreme fatigue and a growing lack of motor coordination had likely played a role in a devastating incident the previous autumn. While delivering a lecture on Roman art and architecture in the Introduction to History of Art course during the fall 2008 semester, Scully tripped over the wire for the slide changer and crashed to the stage. The paramedics arrived at the Art Gallery auditorium and carried out the 88-year-old on a stretcher. He was bleeding profusely from a gash on his head. Elizabeth LaRocco Boyce, a doctoral student and Scully’s head teaching assistant, recalled that Scully was quite shaken by the whole event. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the subsequent class session Scully received a standing ovation when he climbed onto the stage and announced, after a dramatic pause, “And that is how you illustrate the fall of the Roman Empire!”11 Such showmanship played into Scully’s well-earned reputation as an impassioned professor. Caught up in his subject matter, he had once fallen from the stage mid-sentence, only to jump up and continue on without missing a beat. Another time, when Scully’s oversized pointer—at that time a long pole capped with a hook used to open high windows—banged a hole in the projection screen, he worked the whole mishap into the narrative stream of his lecture. Scully’s 2008 fall only bolstered the legend of the impassioned professor. It stands as a triumphant, and poignant, moment in what would be his last term at Yale. Life took another dramatic turn for Scully and Tappy when, in late summer 2011, they returned to New Haven to find that he could no longer navigate the stairs to the house’s only bathroom, on the second floor. They had left Connecticut the previous winter, and between their accommodations in Lynchburg and the one-story house in Coral Gables, Scully hadn’t climbed a full flight of stairs for nine months. Having grown less steady on his feet, he no longer could. “Vince refused to ruin our little house with a first-floor addition,” Tappy recalled, “so we fled back to Lynchburg.”12 The two-story brick colonial had been renovated years before for Tappy’s aging father. In recent years, this first-level suite of rooms had become Scully and Tappy’s domain during their Lynchburg summers. It was to this accessible refuge that they decamped. Before their retreat to Lynchburg, Scully’s health had deteriorated so badly, and so rapidly, that Tappy feared he wouldn’t last a year. Yet, within months, expert medical care and an effective drug regime helped partially reverse his physical symptoms and slow the Parkinson’s progression. Scully’s health reached a stable plateau from which it would incrementally decline in the coming years. With Scully in his early 90s and Tappy her late 60s, they settled into a comfortable routine that involved summer dips in their swimming pool,

220

VINCENT SCULLY

adjacent to the classical pergola, a stepped serpentine rill fountain, and a temple-ruin garden folly; drives throughout every corner of Virginia (visits to Appomattox were Scully’s favorite); and social engagements with a close circle of friends, some of whom Tappy had known since elementary school. As always, Scully continued to read voraciously and across all genres. He reread everything from Evelyn Waugh’s fictional accounts of the Second World War (which had long resonated with Scully given his own war experiences), to Anthony Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, to the most recent releases by Alan Furst and Robert Caro. He began listening to Italian opera, having overcome in his last years of life the operatic aversion he had developed decades before when enduring his mother’s high-pitched arias. He would pedal on an exercise bike daily for up to an hour, accompanied by Puccini or Verdi and an opera-entranced Enzo. In August of 2015, Scully’s three sons, two of his grandchildren, and one great grandchild made their way to Lynchburg, as did a handful of Yale and University of Miami colleagues. It was Scully’s 95th birthday, and Tappy organized a big party, complete with a large garden tent, to celebrate the grand occasion. Shortly after their relocation to Lynchburg in 2011, Tappy had returned to New Haven to put the house on the market (it sold in June 2012) and bring two truckloads of belongings—including dozens of art works and hundreds of books—back to Virginia. As her parents’ only surviving child— Tappy’s brother had been killed decades before in a car accident—she had inherited the place and its contents. Amid the home’s existing decor she and Scully interwove artifacts from their life. Scalloped silver dessertspoons sat side by side with Pop Art. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves ran the perimeter of two rooms and framed images covered the remaining walls. A 1940s formal portrait of Tappy’s brother as a young boy; an eighteenth-century Piranesi etching of Campo Marzio; a 1960s Lichtenstein declaring “POW!”; twin portraits of Scully and Tappy by Miami-based Argentinian architect/artist Rosario Marquandt from the 1990s—these works and more sat within sight of a marble bust of Julius Caesar, which for decades had graced Scully’s Street Hall office. Scully was no longer able to row, as he had done almost daily in the Long Island Sound off the Connecticut coast, and then later, in the Coral Gable canals. Yet the boats, like Scully, made a final trip to Lynchburg. There in the front yard, in a small, open-sided shed they rested, gunnels down, bows peeking out of their simple shelter. The boats, which had for decades provided Scully with a means to exercise his body and mind, now provided him a different kind of solace; as Tappy noted, “The boats made him happy, even if he wasn’t rowing them.” With the exception of a brief visit to Yale to receive the Howard R. Lamar Faculty Award for service to alumni in April 2014, Scully would not return to his hometown, a locale that had shaped him and his interests repeatedly throughout his life. “It broke Vince’s heart to leave New Haven,” Tappy explained. “But at least we could bring the boats. He visited with them.”13

WE CAN’ T SAY IT ’S A CAREER CUT SHORT (1991–2017)

221

Scully’s health slowly declined as he passed the midpoint of his 90s. While the telltale tremors of Parkinson’s never arrived, his mobility did decrease to the extent that a wheelchair became a necessity for anything beyond a few steps. To facilitate his much-loved time outdoors, Tappy had a circular brick path constructed through their large garden so he could be easily pushed to his favorite spots by her or Patrice Royal, the in-home health aide who tended to Scully four hours a day, five days a week, beginning in the 2010s. In summer 2017, a blood vessel ruptured in Scully’s eye, destroying his ability to see detail such as text. When attempts to rehabilitate the vision in his other eye, rendered blurry in the late 1960s due to cataract surgery, failed, Scully found himself unable to read. This was an incredible blow to the man for whom, since age 4, reading had been a significant part of life. Through adulthood he would wake early and read in bed before rising for the day, and as he became physically limited in later years, reading became his primary pastime, sometimes occupying between eight and twelve hours a day. Robbed of this pleasure, television offered nominal entertainment; programs on the Second World War were of particular interest—“What would the History Channel have done without Hitler?” he mused to Tappy— and he rewatched series that he had previously enjoyed. Yet, Scully lamented his lost ability to read. “I didn’t mind being an old man who read all the time,” he told Tappy. “I don’t like being an old man who watches TV all the time.”14 The gilt TV antenna atop Venturi’s Guild House, an ironic nod toward the predilection of the building’s elderly inhabitants, had—at least in Scully’s mind—become indicative of his own reality. Despite his failing eyesight and overall decline, Scully managed a handful of social and physical engagements over the remaining summer months. On August 7 he took Tappy to dinner at Main Street Eatery for her birthday, where they sat at a table against the wall, so Scully’s wheelchair was out of the way. And he accompanied Tappy to their friend Don Giles’s Labor Day party on September 4, posing for a picture outside on the patio. Scully even continued his daily rides on the upright stationary bike, at least into the first week of September. Later that month, Scully suffered some form of catastrophic medical episode. Tappy would later suspect it had been a stroke. This watershed event signaled a turn for the worse and effectively put Scully to bed, where he remained through much of the fall.15 His friend and doctor Bob Brennan paid frequent visits. Toward the end of the November, it became evident to Tappy that Scully was fading away—“I didn’t know how clear it becomes when someone is very actively dying,” she would later remark, “but it was quite clear, even to me.”16 Scully passed away just before midnight on November 30, 2017, at the age of 97, with Tappy and Enzo by his side.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Legacy A few years before Scully’s death, former New York Times journalist Steven Weisman invited the historian to write a letter to Yale’s class of 1968 for inclusion in the fiftieth reunion yearbook. Scully readily agreed, and through the summer of 2017, the men regularly corresponded about the contribution. It was the last thing Scully would write, and it appeared in print the spring following his death under the title “Reflections from Vincent J. Scully Jr. (1920–2017).” It began, Dear Class of ’68, I miss you. I miss Yale. Writing to you a year before these words are published, and stunned in this summer of 2017 by unprecedented political tumult, I can’t help dreading what might happen in the months ahead. I’ve never before feared for our country: I never doubted that it would win the Second World War, never thought that the threat to the nation was mortal even after the tragic assassinations of the Sixties and the country’s entanglement in a brutalizing war. The nation seemed based on unshakable truths. But in 2016 it all fell apart at hardly more than the touch of a demagogue’s art, arousing hate and fear, and enhanced, as in Classic Athens, by the menace of a foreign power. Was worse to come? . . . . Now, in your spring of 2018, how has this all come out?1 Five years later, after American citizens stormed the US Capitol to overturn a democratic presidential election and as the country remains starkly divided on issues that threaten to erode hard-won advancements in the arenas of civil, gay, and women’s rights, many would concede: Scully was right to worry. Some might argue that threats to democracy, and political events as a whole, are beyond the scope of architecture. Scully would vehemently disagree. An educator, historian, and critic for more than sixty years, Scully forged an extensive body of work. He codified the Shingle Style, bringing legitimacy to a previously marginalized facet of nineteenth-century American 222

LEGACY

223

architecture. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, he examined ancient Greek sacred architecture and its placement in the landscape, drawing on archaeology, literature, and more to emphasize the relationship between a society’s beliefs and its built creations. Scully meanwhile probed the works of contemporary architects Wright and Kahn while writing an alternative history of modern architecture. Next came explorations of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, support for the nascent historic preservation movement, and the promotion of Venturi’s inclusive approach to architecture. While researching thirteenth-century Gothic cathedrals, sixteenth-century fortifications, and seventeenth-century French garden design, Scully then encountered a European analog to Venturi’s both/and notion in Rossi’s nonhierarchical use of stripped forms, drawn from memories both personal and cultural. During the preceding decades, Scully had concurrently focused his gaze on urbanism, and through his teaching inspired a return to traditional and vernacular patterns of town planning, which would become the foundation of the New Urbanism. While seemingly unrelated, spanning centuries and civilizations, these investigations 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. In Scully’s estimation, a well-conceived social contract through beneficent law made strong community possible, each person relinquishing “a little personal freedom in order to live in peace with everybody else.”2 Considering this breadth of scholarship, Scully exists in a class of his own as an architectural historian. No one preceding him in the field had published on such a broad range of topics, and with the increase in areas of specialization, likely no one will in coming years. In addition, Scully stands alone in terms of his professional and popular impact; he shaped generations of architectural historians, architects, and critics, and introduced the built environment to the public as an issue for mainstream consideration. Many of Scully’s former graduate students are now renowned scholars— for example, Mary Miller, Yale Sterling Professor Emeritus of Art and specialist in the art of the ancient New World; Neil Levine, former Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and expert on Frank Lloyd Wright; and Esther da Costa Meyer, professor emeritus at Princeton University, who focuses on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury architecture and urbanism. These and other Scully students have become more than just respected academics; they are admired teachers.3 For da Costa Meyer, Scully’s influence in this regard was absolutely formative. Scully “was a superb professor,” da Costa Meyer affirmed. “He taught us not just about our field; he also taught us how to teach,” critiquing his graduate students’ work and vetting their presentations with a dedication and thoughtfulness expended by few other professors. “He was such a careful reader of our papers, and I’ve never forgotten that with my students. You owe them that, and that’s what most people don’t do.”4 Furthermore, his critiques were humorous and kind, rather than harsh.

224

VINCENT SCULLY

Yet another thing that set Scully apart as an educator was his openmindedness; “he wanted no clones,” instead encouraging his students to work on topics of interest to them, not himself.5 As a testament to Scully’s impact on her, in 2022 da Costa Meyer dedicated Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870 to his memory. In the acknowledgments she declared that the book owed “it greatest debt to Vincent Scully, who once described the urban fabric as one of our most precious and fragile legacies . . . His passion and integrity, as a teacher and scholar, guided me through graduate studies and have served as continuing inspiration in my own career as a scholar and teacher.”6 For years now, Scully’s former graduate students have been cultivating subsequent generations of scholars, carrying forward their mentor’s passion and integrity. Another facet of Scully’s legacy involves shaping the architectural views of thousands of students. Shortly after the historian’s death, Stern wrote, “Thanks to [Scully], generations of architects, urbanists, and scholars learned to see the world around them through the lens of human tradition and experience.”7 Stern—who for twenty years presided as dean of Yale School of Architecture—falls into the designers’ cohort, as do Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, David Childs, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Andrés Duany, and hundreds more. In 1981, Maya Lin won the national competition for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. At that time she was a 21-year-old undergraduate student in Scully’s class, and would later be his head teaching assistant while earning her master of architecture degree at Yale. When Lin spoke at a university memorial service following Scully’s death, she described him as “simply the most inspiring and influential teacher that I had as an undergraduate.” His meticulously choreographed lectures would leave you in awe of the power of architecture—actually, in awe of the human spirit that could create those works . . . His was a belief that architecture can elevate the spirit and inspire us to help shape our world for the better . . . His was a voice that impressed upon us the deep responsibility we each would have in making our own works. And for so many others he inspired a sense of wonder, respect, and responsibility for the built environment.8 A number of Scully’s students went on to be academics and architects. A smaller percentage would be architecture critics, writing about the built environment for the profession and, perhaps more so, the general public. As critic Alexandra Lange noted after Scully’s passing, this faction “includes the architecture critics of the newspapers of America’s three largest cities”— New York (Michael Kimmelman), Los Angeles (Christopher Hawthorne), and Chicago (Blair Kamin).9 Paul Goldberger must also be counted among these architecture critics. Commenting on his mentor’s legacy in Architectural Record, Goldberger noted, “Scully taught more future bankers and lawyers

LEGACY

225

and doctors than future architects, and he probably made more of them into good clients, or at least into lovers of architecture, than anyone else who ever lived.”10 Likewise, Scully “probably did more than anyone else over the last 60 years to affect not just architecture but architecture culture.”11 Professors today do not widely assign Scully’s books as course reading, expect perhaps as registers of their specific moment. It may be that, due to their age and the appearance of more up-to-date publications, they have been reclassified as part of the history they explored. (The Shingle Style, which remains a standard text for late-nineteenth-century wooden domestic architecture, may be the exception.) An equally likely premise is that Scully’s enthusiastic writing style, has, for some, rendered his books insufficiently scholastic. For example, Yale associate professor of architecture Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen recently suggested that Scully’s “rhetorical skills and ability to trigger historical imagination often trump his historical acumen.”12 Then there is the high probability that the shift to a more global approach to history has disqualified many of Scully’s publications from inclusion in academic reading lists. While Scully’s work did encompass a broad range of geographies, it fell short of being truly global. Scully himself was aware of this and intentionally brought in guest lecturers to cover areas outside his expertise, such as India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia.13 Indeed, in Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, Scully acknowledged that he felt unable to comment on the architecture of these regions. “With the exception of America,” he wrote, “this book deals only with European architecture and its precursors around the Mediterranean. India and the Far East are not included. I am deeply sorry for this lack . . .”14 Thus, today Scully’s books have a shorter reach than they did earlier in their lives, even as stories of his legendary lectures still circulate among aging Yalies. Nevertheless, through those who research, design, teach, write about, commission, and experience the built environment, Scully’s legacy extends far beyond the classroom into the world at large. Scully believed that architecture, whether in classical Greece or contemporary America, shows us who we are and who we want to be, all at once. He detailed how a society, wittingly or not, manifests its values and aspirations in its built works, from its approach toward the natural environment—contrasting with the landscape, as did the Greeks, or echoing natural forms, as have the Pueblo people—to its attitude toward cities— razing the old and starting anew, as Le Corbusier and other modernists proposed, or working within an inherited situation to improve it on its own terms, as Venturi did and DPZ continue to do. For Scully, these extremes aligned with two opposing outlooks on life: confrontation, which he connected with an existentialist, idealist I-know-best attitude; and accommodation, which he associated with pragmatism, realism, and an acknowledgment that people have different experiences and outlooks are relative, rather than universal. Accommodation for Scully was always linked to context, be it geographic, cultural, political, or otherwise.

226

VINCENT SCULLY

Concerning his own shift in perspective from confrontation to accommodation, one might charge Scully with inconsistency: he was an advocate for modern architecture, then he wasn’t. True, as a product of his place and time, Scully initially assumed a more confrontational attitude, in architecture as well as in life. As he approached his forties, though, he came to view the world in less absolutist terms; previous social norms and the either/or mandates of postwar modernism lost power for him, and he found accommodation—what translated in architecture into a both/and mentality and attention to context—to be a more relevant framework for relating to the world around him. Indeed, the both/and more accurately described Scully’s life experience. An only child in an Irish Catholic family, a scholarshipfunded townie at prep-school-dominated Yale, a Marine sidelined in war— these realities were further compounded by Scully’s adoption of art history in general, and architecture in particular, as the focus of his career. He thus emerged as a figure straddling two sides of many divides: history and criticism; art and architecture; scholarly activity and public commentary; Yale University and the city of New Haven. When seen in this larger context, thoughts of Scully’s inconsistency evaporate. What at first may have appeared as a haphazard repositioning is revealed as a reasoned perspectival shift in keeping with Scully’s search for order and the evolution of late-twentiethcentury American society as it increasingly recognized the myriad forms of oppression faced by women, people of color, and the LBGTQ+ community. A white man born in 1920, Scully proved himself to be more open-minded than would be expected of many of his generation. Perhaps this impulse was cultivated in Scully at a young age—for example, when he witnessed his father’s determination to push through the first racially integrated housing project in New Haven, an accomplishment that Scully embraced with pride into his final years. Or perhaps his family’s identification as Irish Catholic during a time when the Irish and Catholics were often treated as inferior to their English and Protestant peers seeded in Scully an aversion to racial and religious intolerance. He would remark that to be called racial slurs—as he had been due to his own ethnicity as well as his father’s efforts on the behalf of Black constituents—was “salutary and instructive . . . at an early age.”15 Scully also experienced prejudice as a scholarship student amid his wealthy classmates, especially as he served them dinner in the Commons. And likely the lasting traumatic impact of the Second World War, which plagued Scully for more than seventy years after his discharge, inculcated in him an empathetic tendency toward those deemed outside the mainstream. Whatever the reasons, as Scully climbed the ranks at Yale he earned a reputation as a champion for the Davids of the world, as they faced off against the Goliaths. At the same time, Scully appeared to rest comfortably among the Goliaths: a white male Yale professor, highly regarded and wellfeted. Yet, such a view ignores the challenges that Scully experienced and precludes a more complicated understanding of him as a person. Indeed, in 1996 he offered an appraisal of the previous three decades, both “frightful,

LEGACY

227

full of war and horror” and also hopeful, marked by “the fact of liberation.” Scully continued, “Over those years we have seen things we never thought we would see ten years before: black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation. Every one of these movements has freed us from stereotypical ways of thinking and prepared us to think more fully and more intelligently about what the human community is, and what it is to be human.”16 While Scully may have been more open-minded than other members of his generation, he likewise had his flaws. Perhaps Scully’s most notable struggles involved his romantic relationships, as evidenced by his three marriages, the first of which ended in part due to his infidelity. In addition, there were unconfirmed rumors of affairs with female students. While such interactions are by no means excusable, it is worth bearing in mind that they were not uncommon throughout the twentieth century; in fact, Yale only banned student–faculty relationships in 2010. Regardless of whether Scully entertained such involvements, though, he was personally aware of his difficulties concerning women. He would comment in a draft of an autobiographical essay that, despite his mother’s ardent wish for him to become a priest, he “was mad for girls from the very beginning,” though not adventurous with women “until later in life—until too late, some might say . . . and there you have the syndrome of late, late blooming.”17 Such a comment, which didn’t make it into the final version of the memoirs, suggests that Scully understood that his relationships with women were periodically problematic. At the same time, Scully heavily relied on the women in his life, and he was quite mindful of this fact. Scully and Tappy had a standing joke between them that he’d had three women to care for him since his youngest years, beginning with his mother and two aunts.18 This would shift to be his wife— Nancy, then Marion, and finally Tappy—and two Yale administrative figures. The first was Helen Chillman, librarian from the late 1950s through 2010 for the Yale Slide and Photograph Collection. Chillman proved indispensable to Scully, as he repeated underscored in his books’ prefaces from 1961 on.19 For years she performed research and procured images for his lectures and publications; she even typed and edited his handwritten manuscripts. Scully’s famed pointer lived in the slide library near Chillman’s desk for safe keeping. The other supporting woman at Yale was Barbara Adams, the registrar in the Department of the History of Art from 1971 through 1991. Throughout this time Adams handled much of Scully’s correspondence, travel arrangements, and outside lecture invitations. She was preceded in these responsibilities by history of art departmental secretary Lila Calhoun; Tappy took over following Adams’s departure.20 The attention Scully received from this supporting cast of women may have suggested a level of sexism to members of a younger generation. Lange, who worked in the slide collection as an undergraduate in the early 1990s, recalled seeing “how the women who worked there scurried when [Scully] entered the premises.”21 This recollection, which locates Chillman’s deference to Scully as nervous veneration more than collegiality, reflects a contemporary

228

VINCENT SCULLY

understanding of power dynamics in academic environments that were far less attended to during the mid- to late twentieth century. To balance this interpretation, it seems prudent to consider the experiences of women who interacted with Scully during that era. Former students Esther da Costa Meyer and Elizabeth LaRocco Boyce stressed that Scully offered them unfailing support throughout their graduate careers. When asked if she noticed a difference in how Scully interacted with his female and male students, da Costa Meyer noted that Scully truly supported the women in the department. Better yet, “There was no difference [between the support he offered to the men and women]. He treated women the same way. That was the wonderful thing,” and she realized that it was not necessarily standard behavior in the 1980s and 1990s.22 Boyce, who worked with Scully in the mid-1990s and the again in the mid-2000s after taking time off to begin a family, recalled that Scully offered her unfailing encouragement. Women all too commonly face criticism, if not outright discrimination, when parenting roles are perceived as infringing on their professional lives; unlike other faculty members Boyce encountered, Scully was entirely supportive, and he worked to ensure her a position as his head teaching assistant upon her return from family leave.23

FIGURE 16.1 Memorial Tribute to Vincent Scully, Seaside, Florida, 2019, by Gaia. After Scully’s death, the Town of Seaside commissioned street-artist Gaia to create an attention-grabbing homage to the architectural historian. A ghostly rendition of a Greek temple serves as backdrop for Scully’s multistory portrait, while Yale and University of Miami insignias reference his life-long love of teaching. Andriy Blokhin / Alamy.

LEGACY

229

Another critique of Scully takes aim at his notion of the human community. As contemporary scholars dissect grand narratives and rewrite histories long suppressed, the positioning of humankind as one big community may suggest a universalization that becomes increasingly difficult to embrace. Such a one-big-community stance can all too easily flatten difference and threaten alternative voices. Jonathan Massey, dean and professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, has linked Scully’s reliance on empathy with this very concern, noting that it “leads Scully to homogenize disparate cultures.” Massey likewise remarked that “Scully’s tendency to universalize his own empathetic response dehistoricizes his objects of study.”24 True, Scully cast a wide net in terms of scholarship, eschewing geographical and temporal boundaries, highlighting elements that united civilizations and societies, regardless of place or time. Yet for Scully, this was not an exercise in erasing difference. Nor is it a mark of dehistoricization; instead, the approach speaks to his understanding of humankind as interconnected, continually impacted by what came before, and inevitably influencing what will come next. In terms of the human relationship to the natural and man-made environment, there are patterns that do repeatedly appear, with their own variations, of course. Returning from the war, in search of solid ground, Scully found his anchor in this repetition, the recurrent attitudes that people adopt to make sense of the world around them. In our fractious times, perhaps we would do well to keep this shared humanity in mind. Scully characterized architecture as a conversation across generations. As our present generation unpacks inherited architectural narratives and excavates the histories within these histories, attention has turned to the figures behind these constructions. We search for greater insight into their contributions, individual and collective, about building and living in the world. Scully embraced the both/and—the old and the new, architecture and urbanism, the natural and the man-made. It is this legacy he leaves behind; it appears everywhere we look.

230

NOTES

Introduction 1

Philip Johnson quoted in Richard Conniff, “The Patriarch,” in Yale Alumni Magazine (Mar./Apr. 2008), http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/ issues/2008_03/scully.html; Ada Louise Huxtable quoted in Herbert Muschamp, “Colin Rowe, Architecture Professor, Dies at 79,” New York Times, Nov. 9, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/08/arts/colin-rowearchitecture-professor-dies-at-79.html.

2

Vincent Scully quoted in William G. Bardel, “Vincent Scully: An Artistic Showman,” Yale Daily News, Nov. 13, 1959, 2.

3

David McCullough, “Architectural Spellbinder,” Architectural Forum 111 (Sept. 1959): 136–7, 191, 202. McCullough’s prediction is likewise noted by Neil Levine, another of Scully’s former students and emeritus professor in Harvard University’s history of art and architecture department, in Neil Levine “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch,” in Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, ed. Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 33.

4

“Gore Vidal: The Correctionist,” podcast, Bright Minds: From the John Adams Institute, Oct. 4, 2022, featuring a recording of Vidal’s lecture at the John Adams Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1992, https://www.johnadams.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Gore-Vidal-transcript.pdf .

5

Catherine Lynn, interview with author, Mar. 28, 2018. Lynn’s interviews with the author took place multiple times between Mar. 2018 and Jan. 2023, in person in Lynchburg, Virginia, as well as via phone and email (hereafter cited as Lynn interview).

6

I thank Jennifer Hock for these insights.

7

Norman Foster, tribute to Vincent Scully, quoted in Ella Braidwood, “Foster and Rogers pay tribute to Vincent Scully: ‘A force of nature’,” Architects’ Journal, Dec. 19, 2017, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/foster-androgers-pay-tribute-to-vincent-scully-a-force-of-nature.

8

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, tribute to Vincent Scully, Yale Memorial Service, Jan. 20, 2018, Battell Chapel, Yale University, New Haven.

9

Vincent Scully, “How Things Got To Be The Way They Are Now,” in Architecture 1980: The Presence of the Past, ed. Gabriella Borsano (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 15–20.

10 Paul Goldberger quoted in Richard B. Woodward, “Vincent Scully, 97, Influential Architectural Historian, Dies,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 2017, 231

232

NOTES

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/obituaries/vincent-scully-97-influentialarchitecture-historian-dies.html. 11 Marsha Cochran, draft for “Great Professors,” People (Oct. 1975), Vincent Scully papers, Lynchburg, Virginia (hereafter cited as Scully papers).

Chapter 1 1

Vincent Scully, “A Two-Family House,” unpublished manuscript, c. 1996, 1. Note that throughout his life Scully published under “Vincent J. Scully Jr.” (during his early career), “Vincent Scully Jr.,” and “Vincent Scully.” For consistency, the latter appears throughout this book.

2

Henry Ford quoted in Ford Times, June 6, 1913, https://www.thehenryford. org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-fordquotes/.

3

Scully, “Two-Family House,” 8.

4

Ibid., 1.

5

Ibid., 10. Batelli also taught young Scully piano lessons for a time.

6

Ibid., 14.

7

Lynn interview. John Ford would attend Yale on scholarship, like Scully, and graduate in 1941.

8

Scully, “Two-Family House,” 4.

9

Ibid., 11.

10 Vincent Scully Sr. and Mayor John W. Murphy, memo to Yale Corporation dated 1933, quoted in Gaddis Smith, “Life at Yale During the Great Depression,” Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov./Dec. 2009, https://yalealumnimagazine.com/ articles/2644-life-at-yale-during-the-great-depression?page=4. 11 The four buildings initially constructed with the donated funds were Sterling Hall of Medicine (1925), Sterling Memorial Library (1930), Sterling Law Building (1931), and the Hall of Graduate Studies (1932). Jay Dockendorf, “The Sterling Professors of Yale: Evolution of a Species,” Yale Daily News, Jan. 21, 2011, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/jan/21/fall-titans/. On Sterling’s instructions for the funds’ use, see “$15,000,000 Sterling Bequest to Yale,” New York Times, Archives, July 17, 1918, https://www.nytimes. com/1918/07/17/archives/15000000-sterling-bequest-to-yale-lawyer-graduatedin-1864-leaves.html. 12 Vincent Scully, interview with author, June 19, 2006, New Haven, Connecticut (hereafter cited as Scully interview, 2006). 13 Scully, “Two-Family House,” 6. 14 Marion C. Sheridan, “Rescuing Civilization through Motion Pictures,” Journal of Education Sociology II, no. 3 (1937): 166–73. For more on Sheridan, see Marion Campbell Sheridan Papers, 1852–1983, MSS-B45, New Haven Colony Historical Society Library, New Haven Museum, New Haven; and Sharon Hamilton-Wieler, “Marion Sheridan: Tapping the Imagination,”

NOTES

233

presented at the NCTE Annual Convention, Atlanta, 1990, https://files.eric.ed. gov/fulltext/ED325855.pdf. 15 Lynn interview. The interview in which Scully named Sheridan as his most influential professor occurred in 1959 in connection with McCullough, “Architectural Spellbinder.” 16 Scully, “Two-Family House,” 15. 17 Ibid., 15–16. 18 Scully quoted in Conniff, “The Patriarch.” 19 Lynn interview. 20 Scully interview, 2006. 21 Joseph T. Curtiss, recommendation for Vincent Scully, to Major General, Commandant Headquarters, US Marine Corps, Jan. 10, 1941. Curtiss would go on to found Yale’s humanities program. Scully’s service records were provided by National Personnel Records Center, National Archives, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as Scully military records). 22 Charles Seymour, recommendation for Vincent Scully, to Major General, Commandant Headquarters, US Marine Corps, Jan. 13, 1941, Scully military records. 23 Scully interview, 2006. 24 Vincent Scully, “Yale and After,” unpublished manuscript, c. 1996, 3. Scully’s decision to enroll in the introduction to art history course was also likely influenced by his girlfriend at the time, Susannah (Nancy) Keith, who was studying art history at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Chapter 2 1

Scully quoted in Conniff, “The Patriarch,” 2.

2

Major General Commandant L. Cronmiller Jr. to the Adjutant General, War Dept., response to “Request for statement of service in the Army Air Corps in the case of Second Lieutenant Vincent Joseph Scully Jr., Marine Corps Reserve”; dated June 20, 1941, showing Scully’s date of service as Nov. 25, 1940, to Jan. 7, 1941, with discharge cause listed as “Flying Def,” Scully military records.

3

Scully quoted in Conniff, “The Patriarch,” 2.

4

Vincent Scully to Catherine Lynn, transcribed as “Wartime Dictations,” Feb. 16, 2015 (hereafter cited as Scully, “Wartime Dictations”).

5

Kenneth W. Condit, Marine Corps Ground Training in World War II (Washington, DC: US Marine Corps, 1956), 72. For officer training, see chap. 3.

6

Scully was one of twelve men assigned to C Company, 1st Platoon, 2nd Squad, Scully military records.

7

Roster of members of 5th ROC recommended for probationary commissions in the regular Marine Corps, Sept. 5, 1941, and appended “Approved” note signed by T. Holcomb, Scully military records.

234

NOTES

8

“History of Camp Lejeune,” United State Marine Corps, https://www.lejeune. marines.mil/Offices-Staff/Environmental-Mgmt/Cultural-Resources/HistoryLive/History-of-Camp-Lejeune/.

9

Weston Dean Eastman, Strictly Scuttlebutt: From Ivy Halls to Duty Calls (self-published, 2017). Eastman served as a Marine in the Second World War, after completing training at Parris Island and then New River, North Carolina. His account serves as representative of the training instruction for Marines in the early 1940s, during the years Scully was at New River.

10 The Wellesley Agenda 1943, Wellesley College yearbook, https://repository. wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=legenda; see 74, 75, 95, 132. 11 See “Camp Hood Welcome Book,” Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, c. 1943, https://www.tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/Camp_ Hood_Welcome_Book_2.pdf; and “Camp Hood, Killeen, Texas,” author unknown, 1949, https://www.tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/ Camp_Hood_History-unk_source.pdf. 12 Comparison of physicals dated May 5, 1941, and Feb. 15, 1943, Scully military records. 13 Commanding Officer L. R. Jones, 23rd Marines, to Commandant, US Marine Corps, “Request for Parachute Training,” Feb. 16, 1943, Scully military records. Scully resubmitted his request for paratrooper consideration on Apr. 23. His military file contains no paperwork on the outcome of this request; it, too, was likely denied or perhaps withdrawn. 14 John B. Dwyer, Seaborne Deception: The History of US Navy Beach Jumpers (New York: Praeger, 1992), 7. This posting, which appeared at the Midshipmen’s School hosted at the University of Notre Dame, is representative of the memo Scully saw at Camp Lejeune. 15 Division of Plans and Policies, Headquarters US Marine Corps, Washington, “Memorandum to the Director, Personnel Department (Detail Branch),” May 27, 1943, signed K. E. Rockey, Scully military records. 16 The following information comes from Dwyer, Seaborne Deception, 26–33; and Scully, “Wartime Dictations.” 17 Ray Flood to John Dwyer, Sept. 12, 1988. Cited in Dwyer, Seaborne Deception, 28n10. Some forty years later, Dwyer interviewed participants in the Beach Jumper units and incorporated their experience into his book. Flood was reportedly present with Beach Jumper Unit 1. 18 By early Sept. the Beach Jumpers had worked out whatever kinks the commanding officer initially found objectionable, and the unit staged a successful diversionary demonstration off the coast of Salerno that helped the Allied invaders come ashore. Likely for this reason, in available accounts today, the Beach Jumper operations in the Mediterranean are assessed in a positive light. 19 Report on Fitness of Officers of the United States Marine Corps, covering Apr. 1 to Sept. 30, 1944, completed by Colonel Thomas A. Wornham; and Report on Fitness of Officers of the United States Marine Corps, covering Oct. 1 to Dec. 15, 1944, completed by Colonel Thomas A. Wornham, Scully military

NOTES

235

records. The only significant change is with the “physical fitness” assessment, which dropped from “excellent” to “unsatisfactory.” 20 Scully, “Wartime Dictations.”

Chapter 3 1

Scully quoted in McCullough, “Architectural Spellbinder,” 137.

2

Scully, “Yale and After,” 3.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid., 4.

5

Molly Nesbit, The Pragmatism in the History of Art (Los Angeles: Inventory Press, 2020), 59–60. For more on Focillon, see pp. 55–66.

6

Ibid., 56.

7

“International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters,” History, UNESCO Archives AtoM Catalogue, https:// atom.archives.unesco.org/commission-internationale-de-cooperationintellectuelle-comite-permanent-des-lettres-et-des-arts.

8

Henri Focillon and Paul Valéry in Nesbit, Pragmatism in the History of Art, 57.

9

Scully interview, 2006.

10 Through the second half of the 1930s, Focillon worked with Everett Meeks (no relation to Carroll Meeks) to shape Yale’s Department of the History of Art, established in 1940. An architect and an educator, Everett Meeks served as dean of the Yale University School of Fine Arts from 1922 through 1947; he was also the director of the Yale Art Museum from 1929 through 1940. 11 The following decade Carroll Meeks’s dissertation would be refined and published as The Railroad Station: An Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956). In the book’s preface, Meeks thanked Kenneth John Conant, Harvard University historian who specialized in medieval architecture; and Turpin C. Bannister, an architectural historian who at the time of The Railroad Station’s publication was dean at the University of Illinois at Urbana. These two men and Meeks were very involved with the early years of what would become the Society of Architectural Historians. 12 Undergraduate Courses of Study, Fall and Spring Terms, 1947–1948, Bulletin of Yale University (New Haven, Apr. 15, 1947), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 13 Scully, “Yale and After,” 5. 14 Ibid. 15 Scully interview, 2006. 16 On Barr’s life, see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

236

NOTES

17 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, “Five Points Towards a New Architecture,” manifesto, 1926, reprinted in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestos on 20th-Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 99–101, 99. 18 Hitchcock and Johnson outlined three characteristics of International Style architecture in the show’s exhibition catalogue as well as in a book they published the same year: Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1932). 19 The term International Style was initially used by Barr, and then adopted by Hitchcock and Johnson. See Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, 277, quoting Johnson in Martin Filler, “Philip Johnson, Deconstruction Worker,” Interview 18 (May 1988): 104. 20 Dean E. Meeks, cited in Robert A. M. Stern and Jimmy Stamp, Pedagogy and Place: 100 Years of Architectural Education at Yale (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 75. 21 Scully, “Yale and After,” 5–6. 22 Ibid. For more on Nalle and the conflict with Scully, see Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 123–9. 23 Scully interview, 2006. 24 Scully quoted in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 113. Originally from Vincent Scully, interview with Geoff Kabaservice, May 6, 1991, GriswoldBrewster Oral History Project, RU-217, box 10, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. 25 Vincent Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” in Peter Katz, ed., The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 225. Scully was fond of the “marinated in modernism” phrase; he also employed it in an interview with the author on Jan. 31, 1997.

Chapter 4 1

Scully would be associated with this lecture course for the rest of his teaching career. In 1966, this course would shift from a team-teaching format to Scully’s course alone. It would become HA 112a: Introduction to History of Art: Prehistory to Renaissance in 1977/78 and run as a one-semester course.

2

Scully, “Yale and After,”8.

3

For a detailed and engaging account of the difficult relationship between Wright and Johnson, including their contentious back-and-forth disputes concerning the 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition, see Hugh Howard, Architecture’s Odd Couple: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

4

Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr., “Frank Lloyd Wright,” in Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (New York: MoMA, 1932), 37.

5

“Greatest Living Architect Comes to Museum of Modern Art,” MoMA, Nov. 11, 1940, 1–4, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_pressrelease_325196.pdf.

NOTES

237

6

Helen Searing, “Henry-Russell Hitchcock: Architectura et Amicitia,” in In Search of Modern Architecture: A Tribute to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ed. Searing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 6.

7

Vincent Scully, “Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the New Tradition,” in Searing, ed., In Search of Modern Architecture, 10–13, 12.

8

Lewis Mumford, “Skyline: Status Quo,” New Yorker, Oct. 11, 1947, 110.

9

See “What is Happening to Modern Architecture? A Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art,” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 15, no. 3 (Spring 1948). To preserve space, Scully’s remarks as well as those of other commentators were excluded from MoMA’s published account of the symposium.

10 See the speakers’ comments published in “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”: 4–20, 4. 11 Jennifer Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series, 1938–1969” (PhD diss., Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2012), 49. See pp. 48–51 for Tobias’s assessment of the symposium. 12 Alfred Barr in “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”: 5–8, 8. 13 Henry-Russell Hitchcock in “What is Happening to Modern Architecture?”: 8–10, 10. 14 Levine, “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch,” 13. 15 Scully interview, 2006. 16 Scully, interview with author, Jan. 31, 1997, Coral Gables, Florida (hereafter cited as Scully interview, 1997). 17 Levine, introduction to “American Villas,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 34. 18 Scully, “Yale and After,” 8–9. 19 Daniel Scully, interview with author, Apr. 12, 2018, Keene, New Hampshire (hereafter cited as Daniel Scully interview). 20 “More Reflections on the Glass House,” interview with Vincent Scully, Metropolis, Nov. 30, 2006, https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/morereflections-on-the-glass-house/. 21 McCullough, “Architectural Spellbinder,” 136; and Bardel, “Profile: Vincent Scully,” 1. 22 Lynn interview. Kennedy Onassis asked to sit beside Scully, whom she had heard about from her daughter Caroline, who had worked on a film Scully made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American collection in 1985. 23 Levine, “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch,” 13.

Chapter 5 1

Scully, “Two-Family House,” 4.

2

Vincent Scully quoted in James Stevenson, “Profiles: What Seas What Shores,” New Yorker, Feb. 18, 1980, 57. The quote concludes, “That’s what

238

NOTES

dissertations should do: bring back great areas of human experience that have been jettisoned.” 3

Vincent Scully, “Romantic Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood: Downing, Wheeler, Gardner, and the ‘Stick Style,’ 1840–1876,” Art Bulletin XXXV, no. 2 (June 1953):121–42, 134. As Scully described in a footnote, “this article formed Part I of ‘The Cottage Style,’ [his] doctoral dissertation presented in Yale University, June 1949.”

4

Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 4.

5

Ibid., 3.

6

Ibid., 6.

7

Ibid., 5–9.

8

McKim, Mead & White emerged as one of the most prominent architectural practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In terms of domestic work, while the firm began in the Shingle Style tradition, it quickly adopted a key position within the academic colonial and classical revivals.

9

Scully, Shingle Style, 91–112.

10 Ibid., 159. 11 Ibid., 130–64. 12 See the preface to Scully, Shingle Style, in which Scully thanked these men for their assistance with his dissertation, which was the basis for the book. 13 Scully interview, 2006. Scully’s name does not appear in the Yale undergraduate course catalog for the 1948/49 academic year; he was still a graduate student and not yet a faculty member in the history of art department. Yet, with a group of the established professors—Crosby, Kubler, Meeks, Tobey, and Davidson—he team-taught History of Art 12: Introduction to the History of Art. He had begun teaching part of that course the previous year after being invited by Crosby and Kubler to join them. 14 Scully, preface to Shingle Style. 15 Paul F. Norton, review of The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640–1915, by Antoinette F. Downing and Vincent Scully, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 12 (May 1953): 30. 16 Scully, “Romantic-Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood”; Vincent Scully, “American Villas: Inventiveness in the American Suburb from Downing to Wright,” Architectural Review 115 (Mar. 1954): 168–79; Scully, Shingle Style (1955); and Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style and the Stick Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Downing to the Origins of Wright, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). 17 “Charles Rufus Morey Book Award,” Programs, College Art Association, https://www.collegeart.org/programs/awards/morey. The text pertaining to Scully’s book was cited by Levine, “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch,” 16. 18 William H. Jordy, review of The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright, by Vincent Scully, New England Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Sept. 1955): 401, 403.

NOTES

239

19 Thomas J. McCormick, review of The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright, by Vincent Scully, Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (Dec. 1957): 321. 20 George Erlich, review of The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright, by Vincent Scully, College Art Journal 15, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 177. 21 McCormick, review of The Shingle Style, 320. 22 Erlich, review of The Shingle Style, 176–7. 23 In 1913, Gropius wrote that “in America, the motherland of industry, there are great industrial structures which, in their unconscious majesty, are superior to even our best German buildings of that type,” specifically calling out grain elevators, coal conveyors, and industrial plants. See Walter Gropius, “Die Kunst in Industrie und Handel,” Jarbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes (Jena, 1913), 21–2, cited and translated in Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 343. In Vers un architecture of 1923, Le Corbusier referred to “American grain elevators and factories” as “the magnificent FIRST-FRUITS of the new age.” Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. F. Etchells (1923; New York: Dover Inc., 1986), 31. 24 This point was underscored by Levine in his introduction to “Wright vs. the International Style” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 55. 25 Scully, Shingle Style, 159. 26 Ibid., 163–4.

Chapter 6 1

Scully interview, 2006.

2

Ibid.

3

In 2017, Carver Court was added to the National Register of Historic Places, http://www.calntownship.org/news/carvercourt.

4

Scully interview, 2006.

5

Vincent Scully, “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” MoMA: The Members Quarterly of the Museum of Modern Art, no. 12 (Summer 1992): 1–13, 3.

6

Kahn quoted in Wendy Lesser, You Say To Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 134.

7

Lesser, You Say To Brick, 134.

8

Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1962), 18.

9

Ibid., 20.

10 Ibid., 21. 11 For Fuller’s visit to Yale in 1952, see ibid., 20–1. For Anne Tyng’s involvement with the Yale Art Gallery design and her relationship with Kahn, see Lesser, You Say To Brick. 12 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, 23–4.

240

NOTES

13 Scully, “Yale and After,” 11. 14 Daniel Scully interview. 15 Levine, “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch,” 16. 16 Scully, “Yale and After,” 10. 17 Ibid., 11. 18 Vincent Scully to Dick Cavett on The Dick Cavett Show, July 1979, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdkKesw4tp8. 19 Undergraduate Courses of Study, Fall and Spring Terms, 1956–1957, Bulletin of Yale University (New Haven, Apr. 15, 1956), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University. 20 Scully’s name appears in a list of Bollingen Fellows with an initial appointment date of 1957; his project description reads: “A study of the meaning embodied in the planning of archaic and classic Greek temples.” William McGuire, Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 325. 21 Scully, “Yale and After,” 12. 22 Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), ix. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 1–2. 25 Ibid., 6. “Therefore, no study of Greek temples can be purely morphological [related to form or structure], of form without theme, nor purely iconological [cultural, social, historical themes], of theme regardless of form, since in Greek art the two are one. The form is the meaning, and indeed the classic Greek mind, with an integrity of perception lost by later cultures which separated the two, firmly identified them.” 26 Homeric Hymn XXX “To Earth the Mother of All,” 1–17, originally written c. seventh century BCE; Loeb edition, translated by H. G. Evelyn-White (Heinemann, London, and the Macmillan Co., New York, 1914), 456. Cited in Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 8n26. 27 Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 10–11. 28 Robert Scranton, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, by Vincent Scully, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 22, no. 2 (July 1963): 213–15, 213. 29 Paul Zucker, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, by Vincent Scully, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 353–4. 30 Peter Collins, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, by Vincent Scully, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 1 (Mar. 1963): 45–6. 31 Zucker, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 354; Collins, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 46; Michael H. Jameson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, by Vincent Scully, Classical Philology 60, no. 3 (July 1965): 210–14, 213. 32 Jameson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 213–14.

NOTES

241

33 Scranton, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 213–15. Scully may have provoked Scranton’s ire; on p. 3 of the first chapter of the book, Scully used Scranton’s work as an example of a “highly competent historian” who nonetheless failed to acknowledge the relationship between Greek sacred architecture and the landscape. See Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 3n8. 34 Seymour Howard, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, by Vincent Scully, Art Journal 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1964): 92. 35 Homer A. Thompson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, by Vincent Scully, Art Bulletin 45, no. 3 (Sept. 1963): 278. 36 Jameson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 212. 37 See Scranton, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 213–15; Howard, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 90, 92; and Jameson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 212–14. 38 Thompson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 280. 39 Jameson, review of The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 212n3. 40 Douglas Martin, “Homer Thompson Dies at 93; Led Excavations of the Agora,” New York Times, May 13, 2000, sec. A, 14. 41 Vincent Scully, “Letter to the Editor,” Art Bulletin 46, no. 1 (Mar. 1964): 119–20. 42 Scully, “Yale and After,” 9–10. 43 Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914), 213. Scully was certainly familiar with Scott’s book by the time he published The Shingle Style in 1955, as he directly referenced Scott when discussing nineteenthcentury American architects attaching ethical attributes to building details— for example, aligning beauty with democracy. 44 Scully noted that his awareness of empathy as theorized by German philosopher Theodor Lipps and others, on which Scott built his argument, dated “right from the beginning” of his graduate school years. Scully interview, 2006. 45 Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (1961; New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1977), 44–8; Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 66n38; Vincent Scully, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960), 31–2. 46 Scully, “Letter to the Editor,” 119–20. 47 Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, 6.

Chapter 7 1

Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series,” 52n180. Scully’s papers contained an undated title page and preface for this essay, likely an earlier iteration before he submitted the text to Drexler, entitled “A View of Modern Architecture: Its Development and Meaning.”

242

NOTES

2

See Levine, introduction to “Modern Architecture: Toward a Definition of Style,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 74–5; and Tobias, “The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What Is Modern?’ Series,” 49. See pp. 51–6 for Tobias’s assessment of the unpublished manuscript.

3

Scully presented as part of the session, chaired by Richard Krautheimer, called Redefinitions of Style. Other presenters included Frank Brown, Bates Lowry, and Wolfgang Lotz. See Levine, introduction to “Modern Architecture: Toward a Definition of Style,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 74.

4

Levine, “Vincent Scully: A Biographical Sketch,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 13.

5

The initial CIAM meeting was organized by Giedion, Le Corbusier, and Hélène de Mandrot. Giedion served as secretary-general of CIAM from its creation in 1928 until 1956, when a schism occurred among members preceding the final meeting in 1959. Gropius missed the initial meeting but joined the group for its second conference held the next year. Fiona MacCarthy, Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2019), 225.

6

Eduard F. Sekler “Sigfried Giedion at Harvard University,” Studies in the History of Art 35 (1990): 265–73.

7

Gropius to Giedion, Dec. 23, 1937, Giedion Archive of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich; cited in Sekler, “Giedion at Harvard,” 266n8.

8

Giedion to Gropius, Mar. 21, 1938, Giedion Archive; cited by Sekler, “Giedion at Harvard,” 268n23. The quote concludes: “The overcoming of specialization and the preparation for a universalism that solves even individual problems with consideration of the whole, surely is the altogether essential point concerning us today. I.E., culture or disintegration.”

9

Sekler, “Giedion at Harvard,” 268.

10 Gropius to Giedion, May 18, 1941, Giedion Archive; cited in Selker, “Giedion at Harvard,” 269n25. 11 This point was highlighted by Zeynep Ceylanli, “Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture: An Analysis of Modern Architectural Historiography” (MA thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, 2008), 98. Ceylanli cited Hitchcock’s review of the book, co-authored with H. W. Janson in Parnassus 13, no. 5 (May 1941): 179. 12 Over the years, Giedion’s book continued to expand as he updated the text and issued new editions. “Since the first edition, 359 pages and 210 illustrations were added, including 76 new headings and ten new chapters.” Ceylanli, “Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture,” 43. 13 For the number of books sold, see Sekler, “Giedion at Harvard,” 268. For “bible for generation of architects,” see Arthur P. Molella, “Review Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 2 (2002): 374–89, 375.

NOTES

243

14 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th ed. (1941; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967; 1997), 122. 15 Vincent Scully, “Architecture as a Science: Is the Scientific Method Applicable to Architectural Design?” Yale Scientific Magazine 22 (May 1948): 4–6, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 4. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Ibid., 20. 18 Vincent Scully, “Modern Architecture: Toward a Redefinition of Style,” College Art Journal 17, no. 2 (Winter 1958): 140–1. 19 In 1939, Wright had coined the phrase architecture of democracy to describe his own work; in “Modern Architecture,” Scully qualified that he aimed for a “more historically based and objective use of the term.” Scully, “Modern Architecture,” 141. See also Levine, introduction to “Modern Architecture,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 75. 20 See Perspecta: Yale Architectural Journal 4 (1957): 4–10; College Architectural Journal 17, no. 2 (1958): 140–59; and Susanne K. Langer, ed., Reflections on Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), 342–56. 21 Scully, Modern Architecture, viii. 22 Ibid., 10. 23 Ibid., 10–11. 24 Ibid., 11. 25 Ibid., 11–12. 26 Ibid., 14. 27 Ibid., 15–16n13. Scully drew here on the work of his professor, Carroll Meeks. 28 Ibid., 17. 29 Ibid., 23–4. 30 Ibid., 28–32. 31 Ibid., 32–7. 32 Ibid., 37–8. 33 Ibid., 38–9. 34 Ibid., 40. 35 See Joan Ockman, introduction to J.-L. Sert, F. Leger, and S. Giedion, “Nine Points on Monumentality” (1943) in Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 27–8. As Ockman explained, “The chief difficulty, in [Sert, Leger, and Giedion’s] view, was to invent forms of large-scale expression free of association with oppressive ideologies of the past and historicist bombast (pseudomonumentality),” 27. 36 Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 213. 37 Scully, Modern Architecture, 44–5.

244

NOTES

38 Ibid., 45, citing Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 239. 39 Scully, Modern Architecture, 45–6. The full quote references Le Corbusier’s Modulor (a modern man) in comparison to Vitruvian Man (the Renaissance ideal). 40 Ibid., 48. 41 Ibid., 10. 42 Ibid., 48. Scully here quoted, but did not cite, Albert Camus, The Rebel (1951): “At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.” He referred to Camus earlier in Modern Architecture, 138n13. 43 Peter Collins, review of Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy, by Vincent Scully, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 2 (May 1963): 108. 44 Walter L. Creese, review of The Great Ages of Architecture Series, Art Journal 22, no. 3 (1963): 192–4. 45 Collins, review of Modern Architecture, 108. 46 Creese, review of The Great Ages of Architecture Series, 194. 47 Scully, Frank Lloyd Wright, 11–12. 48 Grant C. Mason, review of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Vincent Scully, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 19, no. 4 (1960): 182–3, 182. 49 David Gebhard, review of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Vincent Scully, Art Journal 20, no. 2 (Winter 1960–61): 118 and 120, 118. 50 James R. Kerr, review of The Masters of World Architecture, American Scholar 29, no. 3 (1960): 434–36, 436. 51 John Jacobus, review of Eero Saarinen on His Work, by Aline B. Saarinen and Eero Saarinen; Eero Saarinen, by Allan Temko; Louis I. Kahn, by Vincent Scully; The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn, by Richard Wurman and Eugene Feldman; Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 4 (1963): 237–9. 52 It should also be noted that Jacobus was in Scully’s direct orbit; Jacobus received his PhD at Yale in 1956, and he authored the book on Philip Johnson in the same Braziller series. That said, Jacobus’s review reads as rather balanced, not overly partial toward Scully. 53 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, 10. The research to which Scully referred was that of British architectural critic and writer Reyner Banham, and that of Robert Stern, an architect who studied with Scully at Yale in the first half of the 1960s. 54 Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 213.

Chapter 8 1

Scully, Modern Architecture, viii.

2

Ibid., ix.

NOTES

245

3

Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., 1969), 7. The quote begins: “It is the environment as a whole— how to see it, how it got that way, what to do about it—which we must learn to write about at the present time.”

4

“Population of Connecticut Towns 1900–1960,” CT.gov, https://portal.ct.gov/ SOTS/Register-Manual/Section-VII/Population-1900-1960.

5

See Lizabeth Cohen, “Part 1. New Haven in the 1950s: Creating a Laboratory for Urban Renewal,” in Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban American in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); and Brian Goldstein, “Planning’s End? Urban Renewal in New Haven, the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and the Fall of the New Deal Spatial Order,” Journal of Urban History 37 (2011): 400–23.

6

Le Corbusier in The City of Tomorrow (1929), quoted in “Le Corbusier Arrives in New York for Exhibition,” MoMA, Oct. 18, 1935, https://www. moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/247/releases/ MOMA_1934-35_0062_1935-10-18_351018-35.pdf.

7

Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Éditions G. Gres & Cie., 1924); trans. by F. Etchells as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (New York: Payson and Clarke, Ltd., n.d.); and Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse, Éléments d’une doctrine d’urbanisme pour 1’équipement de la civilisation machiniste (“Collection de l’équipement de la civilisation machiniste”) (Boulogne [Seine]: Éditions de 1’architecture d’aujourd’hui, 1935).

8

Cohen, Saving America’s Cities, 52.

9

Goldstein, “Planning’s End?” 403.

10 Rob Gurwitt, “Death of a Neighborhood,” Mother Jones (Sept.–Oct. 2000), https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/09/death-neighborhood/. 11 Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 12 Gurwitt, “Death of a Neighborhood”; and Goldstein, “Planning’s End?” 403. 13 The Oak Street neighborhood sat to the south of the Church Street redevelopment project. 14 Goldstein, “Planning’s End?” 403; and “Richard Lee’s Urban Renewal in New Haven,” Connecticut History, https://connecticuthistory.org/richard-leesurban-renewal-in-new-haven/. 15 “Richard Lee’s Urban Renewal.” For the figure of 140 acres cleared, see Jackson, Model City Blues, 14, citing Harris Stone, Workbook of an Unsuccessful Architect (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 21. 16 Vincent Scully, “The Threat and the Promise of Urban Redevelopment in New Haven,” lecture, Yale Law School auditorium, Oct. 19, 1966. 17 Poster advertising “The Threat and the Promise of Urban Redevelopment in New Haven,” lecture, Oct. 19, 1966, Scully papers. Scully’s use of the fallacy trope echoed Scott’s five architectural fallacies in The Architecture of Humanism. 18 Scully, “The Threat and the Promise of Urban Redevelopment in New Haven,” quoted in William Parham, “ ‘Cataclysmic’ Planning: Scully Hits Dated

246

NOTES

Renewal Aims,” New Haven Register, Oct. 20, 1966; and Edward J. Leavitt, “Save Historic Buildings: Architect Blasts Renewal Plans,” New Haven Journal-Courier, Oct. 20, 1966, 1, 17. 19 Scully, “Yale and After,” 12. 20 Ibid., 12–14. 21 Vincent Scully, “The Athens Hilton: A Study in Vandalism,” Architectural Forum 119 (July 1963): 100–3. 22 Ibid., 101–2. 23 Ibid., 102 24 Vincent Scully, “The Death of the Street,” Perspecta: Yale Architectural Journal 8 (1963): 91–6. In Levine’s words, “ ‘The Death of the Street’ broadened the focus from the specific concern for a street to a general one for the fate of the street.” Levine, introduction to “The Death of the Street” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 121. 25 Scully, “Death of the Street,” 96. 26 Ibid., 95–6. 27 Ibid., 96. 28 Ibid. 29 This is perhaps one of Scully’s most oft-quoted lines, which regularly appears without clear attribution. Some sources vaguely assert that Scully said this to a reporter from the New York Times in 2012. Chances are that he did; yet he said it decades prior as well. The earliest mention in print of him uttering this line is found in Harmon H. Goldstone and Martha Dalrymple, History Preserved: A Guide to New York City Landmarks and Historic Districts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 223. Perhaps this was a phrase that Scully coined during one of his university courses; he was known to silently weep while lecturing on the station’s demise, showing images of its sculptural exterior scattered like rubble among the marshes of the New Jersey Meadowlands. 30 Norman Mailer in “Mailer vs. Scully,” Architectural Forum 120 (April 1964): 96–7. 31 Peter Blake to Vincent Scully, July 25, 1963, Scully papers. 32 The term “re-rebuttal” appears in Blake to Scully, Jan. 13, 1964, Scully papers. 33 Scully in “Mailer vs. Scully,” 96–7. 34 Ibid. 35 Mailer in “Mailer vs. Scully,” 97. 36 Scully, Modern Architecture, 32. 37 Mailer in “Mailer vs. Scully,” 97. 38 “Architects: Blindness is the Fruit of Your Design,” Village Voice, June 18, 1964, 5. On the front page of its issue dated Apr. 16, 1964, the Village Voice published a summary of the Mailer/Scully debate as its appeared in Architectural Forum earlier that month. Across the ocean, the British journal Architectural Review (no. 136 [July 1964]: 2–3) likewise printed a recap of the

NOTES

247

Forum debate. Levine recounted this Mailer/Scully debate in his biographical essay on Scully in Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 21–2. 39 Scully to Blake, Jan. 10, 13, and 17, 1964, Scully papers. 40 Mailer in “Mailer vs. Scully,” 97. 41 Mailer reportedly later quipped, “Vincent Scully is a better writer, but I know more about architecture.” Scully interview, 2006.

Chapter 9 1

Yale College, Programs of Study, 1966–1967, Bulletin of Yale University (New Haven, Apr. 15, 1966), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

2

Scully papers; and Scully’s expired passports, collection of C. W. Lynn.

3

Stanley Hart, associate editor at Little, Brown & Company, to Vincent Scully, Dec. 21, 1964, Scully papers. See also correspondence between Scully and Edmund L. Epstein of Farrar, Straus & Company, Aug. through Nov. 1964; and correspondence between Scully and Henry Robbins of Farrar, Straus & Company, June 24 and Sept. 25, 1964; Scully papers.

4

After his marriage to Marion, Scully maintained a close connection with his sons, a situation that was at times a source of tension with his new wife. Lynn interview.

5

Scully quoted in Cochran, draft for Oct. 1975 People feature, “Great Professors,” Scully papers.

6

Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin Books, 1936). Pevsner’s book, one of the earliest on the topic following Hitchcock’s Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration of 1929, was enlarged and reissued by MoMA in 1949 before running through additional revised and reprinted editions.

7

Scully interview, 2006.

8

Vincent Scully, Request for Biographical Information for Viking Press, completed Nov. 5. 1973, Scully papers.

9

In Feb. 1968, less than two months into his trip, Scully called New Haven to check on his father, age 85, who had been living on his own in the Derby Avenue house since Lil’s passing in 1964. Perhaps aware that his time was nearing its end, Vincent Sr. asked his son to come home. Scully returned to New Haven and spent time with his father, telling him about the Buffalo Dances he had experienced out west. His father died in the hospital on Feb. 28, 1968.

10 Vincent Scully, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 11 Ibid., xiii–xiv. 12 J. C. H. King, review of Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, by Vincent Scully, RAIN no. 17 (1976): 8–9, 8. 13 Jonathan E. Reyman, review of Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, by Vincent Scully, American Anthropologist 80, no. 2 (1978): 433.

248

NOTES

14 Ibid. 15 J. N. Spuhler, review of Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, by Vincent Scully, Journal of Anthropological Research 32, no. 1 (1976): 106. 16 Catherine M. Howett, “Review: Living and Dying with Nature’s Laws,” works by Ralph L. Knowles, Vincent Scully, and John Norris Dixon, Landscape Architecture 69, no. 5 (1979): 524–6; and John W. Ragsdale, review of Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, by Vincent Scully, Urban Lawyer 13, no. 1 (1981): 125–7. 17 Scully interview, 2006. 18 Scully, “Yale and After,” 10. 19 Vincent Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991), 27. 20 Scully, preface to Shingle Style. 21 Robert Venturi, interview with author, Jan. 19, 1997 Manayunk, PA. 22 Scully interview, 1997. 23 “New Talent USA, Architecture,” by Vincent Scully, Art in America no.1 (1961): 62–7. The work accompanying Venturi’s is by architects Ulrich Franzen, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Paolo Solieri, John M. Johansen, and Romaldo Giurgola. 24 Scully recalled this visit to the Guild House as taking place in early 1964. Stern believed Scully’s visit to the Guild House to have occurred in late 1963. Neither of these dates works with the timeline of Guild House’s construction, which—according to construction documents—began in late 1964. The date 1965, used here, seems most likely. 25 By the mid-1970s, many of the row houses along Spring Garden Street and in the blocks extending east toward the river had been demolished, after the area was rezoned for commercial warehouses. Ironically, today the Guild House reads more as a standalone building deprived of the company of its former neighbors. The unique context to which it originally responded no longer exists. 26 Scully, Modern Architecture, 53. 27 Scully interview, 2006. 28 Scully interview, 1997. 29 Scully expressed his support for Venturi as chairman in letters to Yale president King Brewster in Jan. and Feb. 1965. See Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 237–40. 30 Ibid., 239–41. 31 See Arthur Drexler, foreword to Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: MoMA, 1966), 8. While the publication date is 1966, the book wasn’t issued until 1967. As editor of Perspecta: Yale Architectural Journal 9/10, Stern published a portion of Venturi’s book in 1965 prior to the MoMA publication. 32 Mary McLeod, “Venturi’s Acknowledgments: The Complexities of Influence,” in Martino Stierli and David B. Brownlee, eds., Complexity and Contradiction

NOTES

249

at Fifty: On Robert Venturi’s “Gentle Manifesto,” vol. 2 (New York: MoMA, 2019), 50–75, 55–6. McLeod noted that Marion edited Scully’s The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods (1962), and Scully recommended Marion to Drexler for Venturi’s manuscript, which was deemed “unpublishable” in its original form. See McLeod, “Venturi’s Acknowledgments,” 55n30. 33 McLeod, “Venturi’s Acknowledgments,” 54. 34 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 23. 35 Ibid., 102. 36 Drexler, foreword to Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 9. 37 Vincent Scully, introduction to Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: MoMA, 1966), 11–16, 11. 38 Scully, introduction to Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 11. 39 Alan Colquhoun, review of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, by Robert Venturi, Architectural Design 37 (Aug. 1967): 362. 40 Review of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, by Robert Venturi, American Institute of Architects’ Journal 47 (June 1967): 94. 41 Colin Rowe, “Waiting for Utopia,” New York Times Book Review, Sept. 10, 1967, 18, 20, 22. 42 Peter Blake, review of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, by Robert Venturi, Architectural Forum 126 (June 1967): 56–7, 98. 43 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 102. 44 Blake, review of Complexity and Contradiction,” 56. 45 Ibid., 98. 46 Colin Rowe, “Robert Venturi and the Yale Mathematics Building,” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976), 1–19, 11; for “Pro-Venturi literature,” see 19n1. 47 Scully interview, 2006; Vincent Scully, interview with Yehuda Safran and Daniel Sherer, Potlatch 4 (Spring 2016): 25–6; and Denise Scott Brown, “A Worm’s Eye View of Recent Architectural History,” Architectural Record (Feb. 1984): 69–81, 71–3. 48 Scully interview, 2006; and Scully, “Yale and After,” 8. 49 Scully, interview with Safran and Sherer, 23. 50 Scully interview, 2006. Scully said the same thing in slightly different wording in the interview with Safran and Sherer in 2016; Stirling reportedly told his biographer, “If he wants to write about Venturi, I’ve had enough of him,” 27. 51 Vincent Scully, “Note to the Second Edition” in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 2nd ed. (New York: MoMA, 1977). 52 Scully interview, 1997. 53 Copy on the box collection, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty (New York: MoMA, 2019). 54 Stierli and Brownlee, introduction to Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty, 7.

250

NOTES

Chapter 10 1

Scully quoted in Cochran, draft for Oct. 1975 People feature, “Great Professors,” Scully papers.

2

See Stern and Stamp, “A Time of Heroics, 1958–1965,” in Pedagogy and Place, 163–241.

3

Stuart Wrede, interview with the author, Oct. 7, 2021, phone, with additional information shared via email during fall 2022 (hereafter cited as Wrede interview).

4

See Richard W. Hayes, The Yale Building Project: The First 40 Years (New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2007); and Allegra Brogard, “Making Models Matter,” Yale Herald, Oct. 26, 2018, https://yaleherald.com/makingmodels-matter-3f62284bd330.

5

See Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 245–76.

6

Wrede interview.

7

Stuart Wrede, “Revisiting 1968–69: On Novum Organum and Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” Perspecta: Yale Architectural Journal 44 (2011): 128–201, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41662953.

8

Herbert Marcuse, as published in Perspecta: Yale Architectural Journal 12 (1969): 75. See also Wrede, “Revisiting 1968–69,” 129n3.

9

Wrede interview.

10 Ibid.; and Wrede, “Revisiting 1968–69,” 129–30. 11 Ibid. 12 Johnson was a fan of Pop Art, but “hardly a revolutionary,” in Wrede’s words. In later years Wrede told Johnson “that he had helped fund the revolution, which got [Johnson] quite upset.” Wrede interview. 13 Wrede interview. 14 Gordon Thorne quoted in Susan P. Casteras, “The Lipstick Comes Back,” in The Lipstick Comes Back, catalog for exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery, Oct. 17, 1974 to Nov. 30, 1974, 9. 15 Vincent Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale: A Memoir,” in Scully, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger, Yale and New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 328; Wrede interview; and Scully interview, 2006. 16 Wrede interview. 17 Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 305–7. Also see Tom Warren, “A&A Protesters Hold Mock Burial,” Yale Daily News, May 9, 1969; and Tom Warren, “Brewster to Face A&A Demands,” Yale Daily News, May 12, 1969. 18 Vincent Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 329. 19 Wrede interview. 20 Ibid. 21 The students who spearheaded the monument were never comfortable with Lipstick’s new siting in Morse College; they feared that, removed from the

NOTES

251

central location for which it was designed, Lipstick’s significance as a protest monument would fade. Their fear seems to have come to fruition, with the monument largely having lost its status as a symbol of dissent. Indeed, on campus Lipstick is often colloquially called the Morse College Lipstick, and has been characterized as a “Morse resource.” See Judith Ann Schiff, “The Lipstick: From Anti-War to ‘Morse Resource’,” Yale Alumni Magazine, Feb. 2000, http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/00_02/oldyale.html. As of late 2022, a movement is afoot to relocate Lipstick to its original site in Beinecke Plaza. Wrede interview. 22 Wilbur (Bil) Johnson, interview with author, Dec. 14, 2021, phone. See also “Confusion Surrounds Morse Master Plan,” Yale Daily News, Feb. 18, 1969; and Paul Taylor and Gideon Gordon, “Students Circulate Petition in Morse,” Yale Daily News, Feb. 20, 1969. 23 Scully interview, 2006. 24 Wilbur (Bil) Johnson interview; and Jim Moyer (a student in Morse College when Scully was master), interview with author, Dec. 12, 2021, phone. 25 James L. Ricks Sr. to Vincent Scully, May 3, 1970, Scully papers. 26 Lynn interview. 27 Scully was on sabbatical for the 1972/73 academic year and not active as master during this time. 28 Scully quoted in Warren, “A&A Protesters Hold Mock Burial,” cited in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 306n246. 29 Lynn interview. 30 Scully quoted in Warren, “Brewster to Face A&A Demands,” cited in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 306n248. 31 Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 329–30. 32 Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 302. 33 Vincent Scully, “Transcript of Remarks Delivered 25 November 1968,” Novum Organum 2 (Dec. 3, 1968); cited in Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 302n237. 34 Wrede interview; and Wrede, “Revisiting 1968–69.” Wrede credited fellow student Herbert Short with adopting the name Novum Organum (meaning new instrument) from a treatise by philosopher Francis Bacon in the 1620s on Aristotle’s Organon. See Wrede, “Revisiting 1968–69,” 129n1. 35 It was surely no coincidence that May 15, 1969, the day chosen by the CKC to install Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was that year designated by the Catholic Church as Ascension Day, the fortieth day following Jesus’s resurrection (on Easter Sunday) and the day he ascends into heaven. 36 See the transcript of a speech by Marcuse given in Paris, May 1968, published with accompanying commentary as “Herbert Marcuse and the Student Revolts of 1968: An Unpublished Lecture,” Jacobin Magazine, Mar. 31, 2021, https:// jacobinmag.com/2021/03/herbert-marcuse-student-revolts-of-1968-ucsdlecture. 37 Thorne quoted in Casteras, “The Lipstick Comes Back,” 21. 38 Wrede interview.

252

NOTES

39 Vincent Scully to Richard Lee, June 16, 1966—letter from Scully accompanying a petition from the Yale Alumni Seminar on Urban Design concerned with protecting the library and post office from urban redevelopment plans, Scully papers. See also wired messages to Senators Abraham Ribicoff and Thomas Dodd, Mar. 2, 1967, and to Lawson B. Knott Jr., administrator of the GSA, Mar. 3, 1967, warning that the federal government’s plans to demolish the New Haven Post Office will engender “a severe public reaction . . . unless the threat to that building and to New Haven’s historic Green as a whole is eliminated for good”; Scully papers. 40 Hugh Spitzer, “600 Protest Vietnam on Buddha’s Birthday,” Yale Daily News, May 24, 1967, 1. 41 “May 23—Vietnam Truce,” flyer circulated in New Haven in advance of the peace gathering and march, signed by the organizing Yale professors K. W. Deutsch, J. Hersey, J. M. Blum, R. Triffin, C. V. Woodward, V. J. Scully, and L. H. Pollak; Scully papers. 42 Vincent Scully, speech for protest in Battell Chapel, May 23, 1967, Scully papers. 43 Ibid. 44 Photograph of Scully with his stepdaughters at May 23, 1967, peace march passing through a Yale courtyard, Scully papers. 45 Charles Reich would publish The Greening of America (1970). 46 Alan Bold, “Scully, Reich to Circulate Faculty Anti-War Petition,” Yale Daily News, Oct. 5, 1967. The petition came on the heels of William Coffin’s Oct. 2, 1967, speech in New York City that offered sanctuary to all draft resisters. See Chris Hayes, “God and the Left at Yale,” Yale Daily News, Nov. 12, 2017, http://features.yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/11/12/god-the-left-at-yale/. 47 John G. Fuchs, “Anti-LBJ Group to Plot Strategy,” Yale Daily News, Nov. 8, 1967. 48 Vincent Scully, speech delivered at a Meeting of the National Fast for Peace, Oct. 21, 1969, 3, Scully papers. 49 Despite the deployment of the National Guard and a few isolated incidents of violence, the protesters and Yale escaped unscathed as the weekend remained largely peaceful, with only twenty-one people arrested, thanks in part to Kingston Brewster’s decision to offer food, lodging, and support to the protestors instead of closing the campus to them. 50 Wilbur (Bil) Johnson interview. Scully entrusted Johnson with the keys to the college while he and his family left for the weekend. 51 Vincent Scully, “Morgan’s Point,” unpublished manuscript, 1980s, 4. 52 Ibid., 6. 53 Ibid., 7. 54 Vincent Scully, lecture to the graduating class (likely Parsons School of Design), spring 1969, unpublished, Scully papers. 55 Scully, speech for protest in Battell Chapel. 56 Vincent Scully, “They Bombed in New Haven,” review of Model City, by Fred Powledge, New York Times, Jan. 24, 1971, section BR, 8, 10.

NOTES

253

57 Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism. Those issuing favorable reviews of the book included Donald N. Koster, review of American Architecture and Urbanism, by Vincent Scully, American Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1970): 315; William Sener Rusk, review of American Architecture and Urbanism, by Vincent Scully, and The Rise of an American Architecture, by Edgar Kaufmann, Art Journal 31, no. 1 (1971): 106–10; and Albert Fein, review of American Architecture and Urbanism, by Vincent Scully, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 31, no. 1 (Mar. 1972): 71–3. For less-than-flattering albeit not entirely critical reviews, see Walter Creese, review of American Architecture and Urbanism, by Vincent Scully, Art Bulletin 55, no. 3 (Sept. 1973): 470–1; and Robert C. Twombly, review of American Architecture and Urbanism, by Vincent Scully, Wisconsin Magazine of History 54, no. 2 (Winter, 1970/71): 150–1. 58 Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, 252–5.

Chapter 11 1

Levine, introduction to “RIBA Discourse 1969,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 142. See Vincent Scully, “RIBA Discourse 1969: A Search for Principle Between Two Wars,” RIBA Journal: Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 76 (June 1969): 240–7.

2

Scully, “RIBA Discourse,” 240.

3

Ibid., 242.

4

Ibid., 244. The sentence finishes, “in which a number of other distinguished architects, such as Charles Moore, also function.”

5

Vincent Scully, “Doldrums in the Suburbs,” Perspecta: Yale Architecture Journal 9/10 (1965): 281–90, 287; Scully in “RIBA Discourse,” 243, quoting Mailer in 1963.

6

Scully, “RIBA Discourse,” 246.

7

Ibid.

8

Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, 198–200.

9

Ibid., 200.

10 Scully, “RIBA Discourse,” 240, 246–7. 11 See Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 357–60. 12 Ibid., 360n463. 13 See David B. Brownlee, David G. DeLong, and Kathryn B. Hiesinger, Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates (Philadelphia and New Haven: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2001), 52–5. Scully likely developed an acquaintance with Trubek and Wislocki through Marion. 14 See also Paul Goldberger, “Siblings by the Seaside,” New York Times Magazine, May 21, 1978, 73, 84. 15 Brownlee et al., Out of the Ordinary, 55. 16 Vincent Scully, The Shingle Style Today, or the Historian’s Revenge (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1974), 34–6.

254

NOTES

17 Ibid., 36. 18 Ibid., 35. 19 For more on the Yale Mathematics Building competition, see Stern and Stamp, Pedagogy and Place, 360–5. 20 Charles Moore in “Venturi-Rauch Design Wins in Math Building Competition,” Yale Daily News, Sept. 14, 1970, 6. 21 “Five Firms Chosen in Building Contest,” Yale Daily News, Feb. 17, 1970, 1. 22 “Venturi-Rauch Design Wins in Math Building Competition,” 6. In addition to Venturi and Rauch, the finalists included Verman, Lepere, Petit of Philadelphia; John Fowler of New Haven; John Paul McGowan of New Haven; and Van Slyck, Callision, Nelson of Seattle. 23 See “Mathematics at Yale,” Architectural Forum (July/Aug. 1970): 62–7; and “Mathematics at Yale: Readers Respond,” Architectural Forum (Oct. 1970): 64–6. 24 John Geesman, “University Accused of Fraud in Architectural Competition for Proposed Math Building,” Yale Daily News, Sept. 27, 1971, 1. 25 See John Geesman, “Scully Blasts Math Building Critics as ‘Despicable Scum,’ ” Yale Daily News, Sept. 29, 1971, 1, 3; and John Geesman, “Further Explanation of Scully Interview,” Yale Daily News, Sept. 29, 1971, 2. 26 Moore collected twenty-five competition entries and published them alongside Venturi’s with commentary in The Yale Mathematics Building Competition: Architecture for a Time of Questioning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 27 Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 327.

Chapter 12 1

“Architecture Without Architects,” MoMA, Nov. 10, 1964, https://assets. moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326362.pdf?_ ga=2.91357597.608103981.1643301418-1594688998.1643130155.

2

See Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1964).

3

Arthur Drexler, preface to The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts exhibition catalog (New York: MoMA, 1975), 3–4.

4

Michael Graves, interview with author, Mar. 10, 1997, Princeton, NJ.

5

P. Eisenman, M. Graves, and T. Vreeland to Stanford Anderson, Oct. 15, 1964, reprinted in Stanford Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” in Arindam Dutta, A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (Cambridge, MA: SA+P Press and MIT Press, 2013), 586. See Anderson’s entire article for a thorough history of the CASE group’s formation.

6

Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” 589. The “opportunistic realism” of Robertson and Pasanella refers to their work in the late 1960s and early

NOTES

255

1970s, when the men worked on shaping public policy and planning efforts in New York City under Mayor John Lindsay. 7

Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” 589–91.

8

Vincent Scully to Stanford Anderson, June 22, 1965, Scully papers.

9

See Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” esp. 648–9.

10 Drexler also listed Guiseppe Terragni, an Italian architect of the fascist era, as a precursor of the New York Five. Eisenman was particularly fond of Terragni, which is likely how the Italian architect found his way onto this list. Arthur Drexler, preface to Peter Eisenman et al., Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (1972; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1. 11 Drexler, preface to Eisenman et al., Five Architects, 1. 12 Colin Rowe, introduction to Eisenman et al., Five Architects, 7. 13 Rowe, introduction to Eisenman et al., Five Architects, 7. 14 Scully, “RIBA Discourse,” 240. 15 Peter Eisenman, “Cardboard Architecture: House I,” in Eisenman et al., Five Architects, 15–17. 16 In an interview that took place during The Pleasures of Architecture conference in Sydney, Australia, in 1980, Graves suggested that “Five on Five” was an exercise to gain publicity. See Transition 1, no. 4 (1980): 7. Cited in Anderson, “CASE and MIT,” 644n138. 17 “Five on Five,” Architectural Forum 138, no. 4 (May 1973): 46. 18 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 16. 19 Peter D. Eisenman and Robert A. M. Stern, eds., “Special Feature: White and Gray,” A+U: Architecture and Urbanism 75, no. 4 (Apr. 1975): 25–180, 3. 20 Robert Stern, “Stompin’ at the Savoye,” Architectural Forum 138, no. 4 (May 1973): 46. 21 Scully, Shingle Style Today, 1–2. 22 By the early 1970s, Scully and Bloom had developed a close friendship, frequenting the movies together and even hatching a plan, unexecuted, to purchase motorcycles and go touring. Lynn interview. Scully’s interpretation of Bloom’s theory of influence appears to only partially consider Bloom’s proposal. Bloom’s theory of influence, as developed in three additional texts from 1973 through 1976, comes to encompass more than the examination and identification of sources of inspiration. 23 Scully, Shingle Style Today, 2–3. 24 Ibid., 5, 26. 25 Ibid., 30–1. 26 Ibid., 15. 27 Ibid., 30–1. 28 Ibid., 34–6. 29 Scully, Frank Lloyd Wright, 7; and Scully, Shingle Style Today, 34–6. 30 Scully, Shingle Style Today, 39–40.

256

NOTES

31 Ibid., 23–4. 32 Ibid., 24 33 Ibid., 28–9. 34 Ibid., 38–9. 35 Stern, “Stompin’ at the Savoye,” 46–8; and Scully, Shingle Style Today, 39. 36 Scully, Shingle Style Today, 39. 37 Ibid., 39–40. 38 Charles W. Moore, review of The Shingle Style Today, or the Historian’s Revenge, by Vincent Scully, Progressive Architecture (Apr. 1975): 112–14. 39 James Marston Fitch, “Architectural Criticism: Trapped in Its Own Metaphysics,” Journal of Architectural Education 29, no. 4 (Apr. 1976): 2–3. 40 Regarding the lecture at IAUS, an itemization of Scully’s finances for 1974 listed “$300” for “IAUS lecture, NY,” Scully papers. For the Four Days in May conference, see “News Report: White, Gray, Silver, Crimson,” Progressive Architecture (July 1974): 26, 30. 41 “News Report: White, Gray, Silver, Crimson,” 30. 42 Scully interview, 1997. 43 Venturi interview. Fellow jury members included the writer Tom Wolfe and architect Morris Lapidus. 44 Scully interview, 1997. 45 Vincent Scully to Louis de Moll, May 5, 1976, Scully papers. 46 Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, 258.

Chapter 13 1

Completed in 1954, Pruitt-Igoe was an award-winning complex of thirty-three high-rise towers that was touted as a corrective to inner-city poverty and crime. For many reasons, the project failed to live up the unrealistic expectations assigned to it, and less than two decades after its completion, the city decided that the entire complex was not worth saving. Thus, in an apocalyptic display of dynamite and dust, the towers were imploded and crumbled in on themselves, sending plumes of debris into the air.

2

“Vincent Scully and Robert Venturi in Conversation,” video recording, Oct. 8, 2009, Vanna Venturi House, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, as footage for documentary, Checkerboard Films, Vincent Scully: An Art Historian Among Architects, 2010, producer and director Edgar B. Howard, director and editor Tom Piper. Conversation footage can be found at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9wqaAgWOfKQ.

3

Paolo Portoghesi, “The End of Prohibitionism,” in Architecture 1980: The Presence of the Past, Architectural Biennale, ed. Gabriella Borsano (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 9. For a comprehensive account of the personalities and issues involved in the creation of the Biennale, see Esin Komez-Daglioglu, “Reclaiming Context: Architectural Theory, Pedagogy and Practice since

NOTES

257

1950” (PhD diss., TU Delft, 2017), esp. 25–64, http://resolver.tudelft.nl/ uuid:832bb754-82f9-4558-b5fe-1b3bc9ec8358. 4

Frampton anticipated this outcome during the Biennale’s planning stages and withdrew his participation. Komez-Daglioglu, “Reclaiming Context,” 29–31.

5

Ibid., 29.

6

Ibid., 65–7.

7

Scully, interview with Safran and Sherer, 20–2. Rossi’s periodic teaching position at Cooper Union likely came about through connections with Eisenman and the IAUS; John Hejduk, member of the New York Five, was then dean of Cooper Union, and Eisenman also taught at Cooper Union throughout the years.

8

Ibid., 22. Note that the published version of Safran and Sherer’s interview inadvertently omits the “not” before “haunting.” A rough draft of the interview, which dates from 2014, can be found at https://www.academia. edu/18613208/Interview_with_Vincent_Scully_November_2014_by_Daniel_ Sherer_and_Yehuda_Safran_In_Potlatch_4_Spring_2016_.

9

Vincent Scully, “Postscript: Ideology in Form,” in Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (New York: IAUS and MIT, 1981), 111–16.

10 Ibid., 114. 11 Ibid., 114–16. 12 Ibid., 112, 116. 13 In 1980/81, “Darkness at Noon” ran from 11:30 to 12:20 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. Aside from these twice-weekly lectures, students also participated in a one-hour session per week led by a teaching assistant. In addition to the official number of enrolled students, more would audit the class or simply stop in to listen, even after taking the class in previous years. 14 Paul Katz, “Courses Vary in Size and Scope, Scully’s Class Most Popular Again,” Yale Daily News, Oct. 28, 1981, 1. 15 “History of Art 112: Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to the Renaissance,” Yale Course Critique for the Fall Term (New Haven: Yale Daily News, 1981). 16 From 1976 through 1992, undergraduate seniors declared as history of art majors fluctuated from a low of twenty-two to a high of forty-one students. See “Yale University Undergraduate Majors (Seniors Only) by Department, 1976–1998,” 52–53, in Beverly Waters, A Yale Book of Numbers, 1976–2000, Aug. 2001, https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pierson_update_1976-2000. pdf. 17 Esther da Costa Meyer, interview with author, June 14, 2022, phone. 18 Lynn interview; and Scully papers. James L. Ricks Sr. to Vincent Scully, May 3, 1970. 19 Lynn interview. 20 Vincent Scully, “News Release,” Apr. 29, 1970, about BSAY teach-in to be held during Scully’s HA 53b: Modern Architecture class in the Law School auditorium during the week of May 4.

258

NOTES

21 Dick Cavett, The Dick Cavett Show, guest Vincent Scully, July 6, 1979, PBS, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdkKesw4tp8. 22 James Stevenson, “What Seas, What Shores,” New Yorker, Feb. 18, 1980, 43–69. This chapter’s title comes from the article’s title, which borrows from the poem Marina by T.S. Eliot. 23 Mary Vernon, interview with author, Jan. 5, 2022, phone; and The Architecture of Nature and the Architecture of Man: A Series with Vincent Scully, publicity and fundraising brochure (St. Ruby Productions, Inc., Dallas, Texas, early 1980s). 24 As an interesting side note, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of former US President John Kennedy and then in her mid-20s, was involved with the production in her role as a research assistant in the Met’s film and television department. 25 See The Shock of the New, air date Sept. 21, 1980, BBC 100, https://www.bbc. com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/september/the-shock-of-the-new. 26 Lynn interview. Also reported in William Zimmer, “A Passionate Scholar Hopes to Mix Art and TV,” New York Times, Mar. 24, 1985, sec. 2, 29. 27 Zimmer, “A Passionate Scholar.” The first half of New World Visions aired on Mar. 24, 1985, at 10 p.m.; the second half aired at the same time on Apr. 12. 28 John J. O’Connor, “T.V. Weekend: New World Visions,” New York Times, Apr. 12. 1985, sec. C, 26. 29 Zimmer, “A Passionate Scholar.” 30 Vincent Scully, “Architecture in Context—America’s Eminent Architectural Historian Begins a New Column with the Intriguing Question: Does MoMA Always Know Best?” Architectural Digest 41 (Aug. 1984): 52, 58–9, 64. 31 Scully wasn’t responsible for alimony for Marion. 32 Edward Gunts, “Paige Rense, who expanded Architectural Digest internationally, dies at 91,” Architect’s Newspaper, Jan. 11, 2021, www. archpaper.com/2021/01/paige-rense-who-expanded-architectural-digestinternationally-dies-at-91/; Lynn interview; and Scully papers. 33 Vincent Scully, “Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson at Yale,” Architectural Digest 43 (Nov. 1986): 90, 94; and Vincent Scully, “Louis I. Kahn in the Soviet Union,” Architectural Digest 43 (May 1986): 62, 66, 71. 34 Vincent Scully, “The Seal: An Existential Odyssey at Branford Harbor,” Architectural Digest 42 (Oct. 1985): 30, 34–5, 38. 35 Lynn interview. 36 Scully, “The Seal,” 38. 37 “A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts,” National Gallery of Art, https:// www.nga.gov/research/casva/meetings/mellon-lectures-in-the-fine-arts.html. 38 The DeVane Lectures have since been reformatted as a semester-long class, which remains open to the public. 39 Nancy E. Furman, “Professor Vincent Scully Named DeVane Lecturer,” Yale Daily News, Feb. 10, 1988, 3. 40 “Notable Books of the Year,” New York Times Book Review, as quoted on the book’s front and back covers. Published in a slightly modified version in the New York Times, Dec. 6, 1992, sec. 7, 57.

NOTES

259

41 Chapter titles for Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade are: 1.

America: The Sacred Mountain

2.

The Sacred Mountain in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean

3.

The Greek Temple

4.

Olympia and the Acropolis of Athens

5.

Hellenistic and Roman: The Ideal World of Interior Space

6.

The Gothic Cathedral: Structure

7.

The Gothic Cathedral: Experience

8.

Italian Urbanism: The Town and the Garden

9.

The French Classic Garden: The Art of Pourtraiture

10. The Shape of France: Gardens, Fortifications, and Modern Urbanism 11. Palladio, the English Garden, and the Modern Age 42 Despite having covered much of this research in the Mellon and DeVane Lectures, Scully had yet to publish his French investigations in a standalone book, as he had with ancient Greek and Pueblo architecture. He initially planned on doing so in a book tentatively called The Shape of France, yet he ended up working the material into Architecture instead. Tappy recalled that the intended publisher was hesitant to publish the French material in a self-contained book because the material had received enough circulation as the subject of his lecture. Lynn interview. 43 See Scully, Shingle Style Today,; and Vincent Scully, “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Stuff of Dreams,” Perspecta: Yale Architectural Journal 16 (1980): 9–31. 44 Scully interview, 2006. 45 Ibid. 46 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 47 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 89, and chap. 4 as a whole. 48 Ibid., 91. 49 The event accompanying Scully’s last lecture had been organized by Stern and Barbara Adams, registrar at the history of art department. 50 John Tierney, “Mr. Scully’s Class Is Dismissed,” New York Times, Apr. 28, 1991, sec. 1, 1, 30.

Chapter 14 1

Jeremy Weinberg, “Retired Scully Returns to Lecture,” Yale Daily News, Sept. 5, 1991, 3.

2

Stephen Lee, “Scully Returns as Emeritus,” Yale Daily News, Sept. 24, 1992, 1, 6.

3

Vincent Scully, “Back to the Future, With a Detour Through Miami,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1991, sec. 2, 32.

260

NOTES

4

Scully, “Athens Hilton,” 102. In “Death of the Street,” Scully wrote: “There should be no reason why the decisions taken by elected authority cannot be larger ones, disciplining anarchy in order to make the city what it has always been, the ultimate work of human art: making possible the effective action not only of the group but of the individual citizen, so liberating what Sophocles called ‘the feelings that make the town’.” Scully, “Death of the Street,” 96.

5

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, “The Neighborhood, the District and the Corridor,” in Peter Katz, ed., The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), xvii.

6

Ibid.

7

“Form-Based Codes Defined,” Form-Based Codes Institute, Smart Growth America, https://formbasedcodes.org/definition/.

8

“Seaside,” in Katz, The New Urbanism, 3.

9

“Design: Best of the Decade,” Time, Jan. 1, 1990, https://content.time.com/ time/subscriber/article/0,33009,969072,00.html. Davis and planners Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Time noted, “have laid down thoughtful rules derived from Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, with their narrow streets, porches, alleys, wood siding, pitched roofs and absence of picture windows. On this master plan they let individual owners (148 so far) execute their own versions of the Seaside housing code with personal architects. The heterogeneity is real; the harmony is deep. Seaside could be the most astounding design achievement of its era and, one might hope, the most influential.”

10 John Morris Dixon, “1984 P/A Awards Citation: How Seaside Helped Revive Urban Design,” Architect, Nov. 1, 2013, https://www.architectmagazine.com/ design/urbanism-planning/how-seaside-helped-revive-urban-design_o. The 1984 P/A Awards citation was also given to Battery City Park, which used a traditional layout for a high-density mixed-use development on the southern end of Manhattan. 11 On Kentlands, see Andrés Duany, “Coding America,” ANY: Architecture New York, no. 1 (1993): 14–19, 15. 12 “HUD HOPE VI,” Congress for the New Urbanism, https://www.cnu.org/ our-projects/hud-hope-vi. 13 See ANY: Architecture New York, no. 1 (1993), http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41845580. 14 Fred A. Bernstein, “Seaside at 25: Troubles in Paradise,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/travel/escapes/seaside-at-25troubles-in-paradise.html. 15 Robert Davis, in Bernstein, “Seaside at 25.” 16 Jeremy E. Sharp discussed the establishment of a form-based overlay district specific to each project, coupled with incentives to encourage development in line with the form-based code, a combination employed in revitalization projects in South Miami, Florida, and Arlington, Virginia. See Jeremy E. Sharp, “An Examination of the Form-Based Code and Its Application to the Town of Blacksburg” (master’s thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, 2004), https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do wnload?doi=10.1.1.552.1358&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

NOTES

261

17 For example, Duany lectured at the Harvard GSD in 2003; he received a rather aggressive reaction—which he perhaps waggishly provoked—and took it all in stride. Duany has often proved himself game for a good debate—much as have Stern (Duany’s former employer) and Eisenman before him. With this in mind, see Andrés Duany, “Andrés Duany vs. the Harvard GSD,” Metropolis, Nov. 3, 2010, https://metropolismag.com/projects/duany-vs-harvard-gsd/. 18 Scully interview, 2006. 19 Andrés Duany in Meghan Drueding, “2009 Leadership Awards, Hall of Fame: Andrés Duany, FAIA, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, FAIA, LEED AP,” Architect, Aug. 25, 2009, https://www.architectmagazine.com/awards/residentialarchitect-design-awards/hall-of-fame-andres-duany-faia-and-elizabeth-platerzyberk-faia-leed-ap_o?o=1. 20 In the early 1970s, Plater-Zyberk worked with Scott Brown and Venturi, who placed heavy emphasis on research, community charrettes, and participatory planning as foundations of the design process. Focusing on what people want was thus already a familiar notion for her. 21 Vincent Scully, “Back to the Future, With a Detour Through Miami,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1991, sec. 2, 32. 22 “CNU History,” Congress for the New Urbanism, https://www.cnu.org/ movement/cnu-history. 23 The Charter of the New Urbanism was ratified by CNU members at the fourth Congress in 1996. “CNU History,” Congress for the New Urbanism, https:// www.cnu.org/movement/cnu-history. 24 Levine, introduction to “The Architecture of Community,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 340–3. 25 Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” in Katz, New Urbanism, 221–30, 221. 26 Levine, introduction to “The Architecture of Community,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 342. 27 Scully, “Architecture of Community,” 227–8. 28 Levine, introduction to “Architecture at the Millennium: Architecture and Community,” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 358. 29 Scully, lecture delivered at the Pritzker Prize ceremony at the White House in 1998, in The Pritzker Architecture Prize (Los Angeles: Hyatt Foundation, 1998), n.p. This lecture would later be illustrated and entitled “Architecture at the Millennium: Architecture and Community,” and reprinted in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 358–61. On the request for Scully to speak on New Urbanism not Piano, see Levine, introduction to “Architecture at the Millennium: Architecture and Community” in Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 359. 30 Scully, lecture at Pritzker Prize ceremony. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

262

NOTES

34 This interpretation comes from the classic Babylonian version of The Epic of Gilgamesh. See Ira Spar, “Gilgamesh,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Apr. 2009, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/gilg/hd_gilg.htm. 35 Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” 227–8. 36 Scully, lecture at Pritzker Prize ceremony. The emphasis on and is original to Scully’s essay. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Henry Cisneros to Vincent Scully, Oct. 31, 1995, Scully papers.

Chapter 15 1

The courses alternated by year between the Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistory to Renaissance; and Modern Architecture.

2

They maintained this tradition for years, even after Tappy’s mother passed away, in 2001.

3

Scully interview, 2006.

4

Scully, “Modern Architecture at Yale,” 352.

5

Ibid., 353.

6

Lauren Motzkin, “Preservationists Honor Scully,” Yale Daily News, Oct. 16, 2009, https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2009/10/16/preservationists-honorscully/.

7

“Awards: Vincent Scully Prize,” National Building Museum, https://www.nbm. org/about/awards/. Subsequent winners include Jane Jacobs, Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Venturi and Scott Brown, Stern, Goldberger, King Charles III (then Prince of Wales), and the Aga Khan.

8

Lynn interview.

9

Vincent Scully quoted in Divya Subrahmanyam, “Scully’s Teaching Days Over,” Yale Daily News, Aug. 28, 2009, https://yaledailynews.com/ blog/2009/08/28/scullys-teaching-days-over/.

10 Paul Goldberger quoted in Subrahmanyam, “Scully’s Teaching Days Over.” The title for this chapter is adapted from Goldberger’s quote. 11 Elizabeth LaRocco Boyce, interview with author, Mar. 8, 2022, phone. 12 Lynn interview. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Confined to bed, Scully occupied himself by rewatching The Sopranos in its entirety. 16 Lynn interview.

NOTES

263

Chapter 16 1

Vincent Scully, “Reflections from Vincent J. Scully Jr. (1920–2017),” Yale Class of 1968, 50th Reunion Yearbook (New Haven, 2018), 7–9.

2

Scully, lecture at Pritzker Prize ceremony.

3

Former graduate students of Scully who became academics include Mirka Beneš, Eve Blau, Isabelle Gournay, George Hersey, Spiro Kostof, Molly Nesbit, Leland Roth, Helen Searing, Ellen Shapiro, and Jonathan Weinberg.

4

Da Costa Meyer interview.

5

Ibid.

6

Esther da Costa Meyer, Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), viii.

7

Robert A. M. Stern, “How Vincent Scully Changed Architecture,” New York Times, May 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/opinion/vincentscully-architecture.html.

8

Maya Lin, tribute to Vincent Scully, Yale Memorial Service, Jan. 20, 2018, Battell Chapel, Yale University, New Haven.

9

Alexandra Lange, “Postscript: The Slide-Show Epiphanies of the Architectural Historian Vincent Scully,” New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2017, https://www.newyorker. com/culture/postscript/the-slide-show-epiphanies-of-the-architecturalhistorian-vincent-scully. Kimmelman has been the chief architecture critic at the New York Times since 2011; Hawthrone presided as architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to Mar. 2018; Kamin served as architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune from 1992 to early 2021.

10 Paul Goldberger, “Paul Goldberger Reflects on Vincent Scully’s Legacy,” Architectural Record, Dec. 1, 2017, https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ articles/13149-paul-goldberger-reflects-on-vincent-scullys-legacy. 11 Paul Goldberger in Richard B. Woodward, “Vincent Scully, 97, Influential Architectural Historian, Dies,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 2017, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/12/01/obituaries/vincent-scully-97-influential-architecturehistorian-dies.html. 12 Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, “Vincent Scully Detonates the Past,” JOELHO: Journal of Architecture Culture, no. 13, Memory, Memorabilia, and the Making (2022): 67–82, 82, https://impactum-journals.uc.pt/joelho/article/view/9640/8169. 13 Boyce interview. 14 Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, xiii n. 1. He concluded the sentence: “but cannot remedy it at present, since this topic precludes writing about sites not visited in person.” Scully refused to write about buildings that he hadn’t visited. His visceral experience of a building was of the utmost importance to his interpretation of it. 15 Scully, “Two Family House,” 11. 16 Vincent Scully, “The Architecture of Community,” 1996 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture (University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 1996), 7.

264

NOTES

17 Vincent Scully, notes for autobiographical essay, unlabeled and undated, Scully papers. 18 Lynn interview. 19 See Scully, Modern Architecture, viii; Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, 7; Scully, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, 2nd ed., xvi; and Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, xiii. For more on Helen Chillman, see “Helen Chillman,” Teaching with Art: The History of the Visual Resources Collection at Yale, https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/ vrchistory/page/helen. 20 Lynn interview. 21 Lange, “Slide-Show Epiphanies.” 22 Da Costa Meyer interview. 23 Boyce interview. 24 Jonathan Massey, review of Scully, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, ed. Levine, Reviews, College Art Association, July 8, 2004, http://caareviews.org/ reviews/660#.YqjAuvPMJQM.

INDEX

Note: References in italic refer to figures. References followed by “n” refer to endnotes. A&A, see School of Art and Architecture Aalto, Alvar 68, 92–3, 93, 155 AATB, see Advanced Amphibious Training Base AD, see Architectural Digest Adams, Barbara 227 Advanced Amphibious Training Base (AATB) 30 AIA, see American Institute of Architects Air-Sea Rescue Boats (ARBs) 27–8 Alaska State Office Building, Anchorage 195 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians 60 Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government painting (by Lorenzetti) 71–2, 71–2, 201, 212–13, 213 American architecture; see also Greek and Roman art and architecture; Italian art and architecture; modern architecture architectural programs 41 Guild House 129, 130–4 Scully’s Shingle Style investigations 127–30 Seagram Building 130–1, 132 Vanna Venturi House 132, 134, 134 Yale Art and Architecture Building 130–1, 133, 133 American Architecture and Urbanism (Scully) 102, 154, 158, 169, 196 American Institute of Architects (AIA) 182

American Psychiatric Association 31 “American Sublime, The” poem (by Stevens) 175–6 Anderson, Stanford 166 Antoinette, Marie 89 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom) 174 Architectural Digest (AD ) 193–5 Architectural Forum 2, 3, 51, 112, 114, 118–19, 136, 162, 169, 172, 246n38 Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island 1640–1915 (Downing and Scully) 60 Architectural Record 224 Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (Scully) 195–6, 197, 225, 259n41, 263n14 Architecture in Context series 193 Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times, The (Hitchcock) 44 Architecture of Humanism, The: A Study in the History of Taste (Scott) 79, 101 Architecture of Nature and The Architecture of Man, The series 191 Architecture Without Architects (Rudofsky) 63, 165 Armour Institute of Technology, see Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) art historical studies of Scully 33–4 admiration for Focillon’s philosophy 34–5 discomfort with art historical approaches 36–7 265

266

INDEX

Meeks, relationship with 35–6 AT&T Building, New York City 185, 186, 205 “Athens Hilton, The: A Study in Vandalism” article (Scully) 112, 114 Atlantic Monthly 203 A+U: Architecture and Urbanism magazine 172 “automotive” fallacy of New Haven urban renewal program 109 A. W. Mellon Lecture, Washington, DC 195 Baker Dormitory, Cambridge, Massachusetts 68 Balzac, Honoré de 35 Banham, Reyner 5, 137, 244n53 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 90, 90–1 Barnes, Edward Larrabee 141, 143, 161 Barr, Alfred H. 37, 46, 48, 81, 236n19 Baths of Caracalla 118 Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany 39, 39–40 Bay Region Style 47, 48 Beach House project 128, 128–9 Beach Jumper Unit 27–30 Berke, Deborah 203 Betz, Paul 13 Black Student Association of Yale (BSAY) 190 Blake, Peter 112, 118–19, 121, 136, 137–8 Bloom, Harold 6, 174–5, 178, 255n22 Boswell, James 19 Boyce, Elizabeth LaRocco 219, 228 Braziller, George 86, 181 Brennan, Bob 221 Breuer, Marcel 47, 48, 49, 81 Brewer, Charles 144 Brewster, Kingman 144, 147 Brown, Frank E. 67, 68, 71, 73, 98, 138 BSAY, see Black Student Association of Yale Building Project at Yale A&A 142 Burnham, Daniel 103 Bush, George W. 218

Bush, Laura 218 Calhoun, Lila 227 Callaway, Sam 144 Calthorpe, Peter 207 Camp Lejeune, see Marine Barracks New River Caro, Robert 220 Carver Court 66, 239n3 CASE, see Committee of Architects on the Study of the Environment “cataclysmic” fallacy of New Haven urban renewal program 109, 110 Cavett, Dick 73, 190 Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, Italy 188 Cezanne, Paul 37 Charles Elliot Norton Professorship 82 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, College Art Association 61 Charter of the New Urbanism 207, 261n23 Cheramayoff, Serge 141 Childs, David 6, 224 Chillman, Helen 227 Christiansen, John 161 Church, Frederic 43 CIAM, see Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne Cisneros, Henry 203, 204, 214–15 Citrohan House, Stuttgart, Germany 95, 178, 179 City Beautiful movement 103 City of Tomorrow, The (Le Corbusier) 104 CKC, see Colossal Keepsake Corporation of Connecticut classicism 5, 187; see also Romantic Classicism Beaux-Arts 66, 101 pared-down 66 stripped-down 90, 95 Clinton, Bill 203, 209 Clinton, Hillary 209 CNU, see Congress for the New Urbanism Cobb, Henry 141 Cochran, Marsha 8–9

INDEX

Codman House 54, 56 Coffin, William 147, 150 cognitive mapping 197 College Art Association 61 Collins, Peter 76, 77, 98 Colossal Keepsake Corporation of Connecticut (CKC) 144 Colquhoun, Alan 137 combat stress reaction 31 Committee of Architects on the Study of the Environment (CASE) 167 community-level resistance to urban renewal 210 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (Venturi) 135–40, 158, 163–4, 167, 169 and postmodernism 186 White vs. Gray discussion 170–1, 170–3 Conant, Kenneth John 235n11 Conference for Concerned Democrats movement 151 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) 82, 207, 242n5 Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) 207 conservatism, accusations of 205–6 corridor 201 Creese, Walter L. 98–9 Cret, Paul Philippe 66 Critics’ Show, Venice Architecture Biennale 184 Crosby, Sumner McKnight 43, 59, 60, 70, 238n13 Curtis, Lewis 59, 60 Curtiss, Joseph T. 17, 233n21 cylindrical stairwell 68–9 da Costa Meyer, Esther 190, 223–4, 228 Dalrymple, Martha 246n29 Dance to the Music of Time, A (Powell) 220 “Darkness at Noon” class 189, 198, 257n13 Davidson 238n13 Da Vinci, Leonardo 172

267

Davis, Robert 200, 203, 204 Dawn Patrol, The (film) 20 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs) 4 “Death of a Street, The” lecture by Scully 114, 116–17 Department of Architecture at Yale University Kahn’s role in 65–7 Moore’s role in 142 rise of activism in 142–3 Rudolph’s role in 130, 135, 139, 141–2 DeVane Lectures at Yale by Scully 195, 258n38 Dinkeloo, John 158 district 201 Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality 1852–1870 (da Costa Meyer) 224 Downing, Andrew Jackson 54 “Italian Style Villa” 55 Downing, Antoinette, F. 60, 110 DPZ, see Duany and Plater-Zyberk Drexler, Arthur 81, 135, 255n10 Five Architects, introduction to 167–8 MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design under 165–6 Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) 201, 212, 225 New Urbanism 201–2, 208 Seaside design, Florida 199–201, 200, 202–6 Duany, Andrés 6, 199, 200, 206, 207, 224, 261n17 Dunn, Edward 161 Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, The (Scully) 76–9, 95, 101, 111–12, 209 Eastman, Weston Dean 234n9 École des Beaux-Arts architecture 41, 62, 66, 165–6 Eisenman, Peter 6, 166, 167, 169–72, 179–80, 181, 196, 255n10 Elisofon, Eliot 123, 191 Epic of Gilgamesh, The 211, 262n34

268

INDEX

Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania 45, 46 Fitch, James Marsh 181 Five Architects (Eisenman et al.) 167–9; see also The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge (Scully) Flint, Margaret (Peggy) 110 Flynn, Errol 20 Focillon, Henri 3, 33, 37, 75, 235n10 philosophy of art 34 role in ICIC 34–5 Vie des Formes 34 Ford Foundation Building, New York City 158 Ford, John 13 form-based codes 202, 204 Foster, Norman 6, 224 Four Days in May conference 181–2 Fox, Michael J. 207 Frampton, Kenneth 166, 184, 257n4 Frank Lloyd Wright (Scully) 99–100, 101, 111 Franzen, Ulrich 141 Fredrick A. Praeger, Inc. 79 French architecture 89, 173, 223; see also American architecture; Greek and Roman art and architecture; Italian art and architecture Fuller, Buckminster 155 Furness, Frank 132 Furst, Alan 220 Futurist Revival 168 Gebhard, David 100 Gehry, Frank 212 German Pavilion, see Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain Giedion, Sigfried 4–5, 242n5 idea of modern movement 81–2 Space, Time and Architecture 5, 83 Gilbert, Cass 103, 210–11 Gilgamesh (king of Uruk) 217 Giurgola, Romaldo 161 Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut 47, 47 God’s Own Junkyard (Blake) 136, 137

Goldberger, Paul 7, 198, 216, 218–19, 224–5 Goldstone, Harmon H. 246n29 Graduate School of Design (GSD) 41, 82 Graves, Michael 166, 167, 169, 171, 178–9 and Venice Architecture Biennale 187 Greek and Roman art and architecture 73; see also American architecture; Italian art and architecture cultural, social, and geographical context of 75–7 Scully’s historic studies of 74–5, 78–80, 124–7 Greenburg, Allan 187 Gropius, Walter 5, 39–41, 46–9, 83, 239n23, 242n5, 242n12 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 91, 92 homage to industrial structures 63 idea of modern movement 81–2 GSD; see Graduate School of Design Guggenheim Museum, New York City 91, 91, 120 Guild House 129, 130–4, 156, 176, 248n24 Gwathmey, Charles 167, 171, 178 Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli 67 Hagmann, John 169 Hall, Steven 203 Hamilton, George Heard 18, 33, 43, 60 Harold Washington Public Library, Chicago 195 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 91, 92 Hawthorne, Christopher 7 Hedjuk’s House 10, 178 Hejduk, John 167 Hendrix, Jimi 190 Hepburn, Katharine 190 Hewitt Quadrangle, Beinecke Plaza 143–4

INDEX

High Court, Chandigarh, India 88, 89, 157 Hillhouse High School 147 Hillhouse, James 10 Hilton Hotel, Athens, Greece 112 History Preserved: A Guide to New York City Landmarks and Historic Districts (Goldstone and Dalrymple) 246n29 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 6, 40, 43, 48, 63, 81, 89, 236n19 Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times, The 44 In the Nature of Materials 44–5 investigation of American architecture’s evolution 44 Rhode Island Architecture 43, 58 thoughts about Wright 48–9 and Vincent Scully 45–6, 50 Holden, Ben 145, 146, 148 Holiday magazine 3 Holl, Steven 203 Homer 75 HOPE VI program 203–4, 214 Howard R. Lamar Faculty Award 220 Howard, Seymour 77, 78 Howe, George 66–8 Hudnut, Joseph 82 Hughes, Robert 192 Hunt, Richard Morris 61 Huxtable, Ada Louise 1 IAUS, see Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies ICIC, see International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation Ideal Republican City in Its Landscape, see Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government painting (by Lorenzetti) IIT, see Illinois Institute of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) 41 Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) 167 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) 34–5 International Cottage Style 48

269

International Style: Modern Architecture Since 1922 (Hitchcock and Johnson) 40, 46 International Style architecture 41, 48, 66, 236n19 European modernism 45 In the Nature of Materials: The Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, 1887–1941 (Hitchcock) 44–5, 48–9 Italian art and architecture 71–2; see also American architecture; Greek and Roman art and architecture; Italian art and architecture First Temple of Hera at Paestum 76, 79–80 Second Temple of Hera at Paestum 74, 76, 79–80, 112 “Italian Style Villa” by Downing 55 Izenour, Steven 161, 173 Jacobs, Jane 4 Jacobus, John 100, 244n52 Jameson, Fredric 197 Jameson, Michael H. 77–8 Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard, see Le Corbusier Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 209 Jefferson, Thomas 63, 89–90, 209–10 Jencks, Charles 184, 196 Johansen, John 141 Johnson, Lyndon B. 151–2 Johnson, Philip 1, 6, 40, 45, 46, 48, 81, 193, 198, 217, 236n3, 236n19 AT&T Building, New York City 185, 186, 205 Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut 47, 47 role in building Lipstick sculpture 144 Seagram Building 130–1, 132, 185 and Vincent Scully 51–2 Johnson, Samuel 19 Johnson, Wilbur (Bil) 147 Jones, Owen 63 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 99–100

270

INDEX

Kahn, Louis I. 3, 6, 65, 123, 127, 132, 165, 196, 217, 223 architectural experiences in Rome 67–8 Carver Court design 66 early life 65–6 Louis I. Kahn (Scully) 99, 100–101 pared-down classicism 66 Richards Medical Research Laboratories, Philadelphia 93–4, 94 role in publishing Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction 138–9 ruins’ devoid of glass 188 Scully’s views on work of 155, 156–7 teaching architecture at Yale University 66–70, 69 Yale Center for British Art design 143 Kamin, Blair 7 Katz, Peter 208 Kauffman, Emil 89 Keith, Susannah (Nancy) 25, 26, 33, 52, 65, 70, 73, 110–11, 227, 233n24 Kennard, David 191 Kennedy, Caroline 258n24 Kennedy, John 258n24 Kent House, Tuxedo Park, New York 175 Kentlands, Maryland 203–4 Kerr, James R. 100 Kimmelman, Michael 7 King Gilgamesh of Uruk 211 Kliment, Robert 166 Knights of Columbus Building, New Haven, Connecticut 157, 158 Krier, Leon 198, 203, 206 Kubler, George 34, 43, 59, 60, 238n13 LaFollette, Marion 111, 118, 123, 124, 135, 147, 159, 173, 193, 227, 248n32 Lange, Alexandra 7, 224, 227 Langer, Susanne K. 89 Language of Post-Modern Architecture, The (Jencks) 184

La Scala Movie Theater 176 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour) 161 Le Corbusier 38, 83, 89, 132, 165, 210, 225, 242n5 Capitol Complex plan, Chandigarh, India 96, 97 Citrohan House, Stuttgart, Germany 95 Five Points of Architecture 38–9 High Court in Chandigarh, India 88, 89, 157 homage to industrial structures 63 La Scala Movie Theater 176 Maison La Roche, Auteuil, France 177, 178 moderating White vs. Gray debate 170–1, 171 Notre-Dame du Haut chapel, Ronchamp, France 96–7, 97 Plan Voisin for Paris 104–5, 106 Scully’s views about work of 94–5 Swiss Pavilion, Paris 95 Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, France 67, 68, 95 urbanism 103–4 Vers une architecture 136–7, 138, 140 Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland 176, 178 Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) plan 105, 106–7, 107 Lee, Richard (Dick) 102, 107, 142, 154 Leet Oliver Memorial Hall 161 Lescaze, William 66 Lesser, Wendy 68 Levine, Neil 6, 49, 155, 209, 223 Life magazine 3, 191 Life of Forms in Art, The (Focillon, trans. Kubler) 34 Lindsay, John 118 Lin, Maya 6, 198, 203, 224 Lipps, Theodor 241n44 Lipstick (Ascending) On Caterpillar Tracks sculpture 143–7, 250– 1n21, 251n35 Little, Arthur 177, 178 Logue, Edward 103, 107–8 Loos, Adolf 90

INDEX

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio 71–2, 212 Louis I. Kahn (Scully) 99, 100–1, 111 Low House 174–5 Lynch, Kevin 197 Lynn, Catherine (Tappy) 7, 8, 17, 21, 24–5, 187 193, 198, 216, 217, 218–21, 227, 259n42 Machado and Silvetti Associates 203 Mailer, Norman 3, 118–21, 124, 147, 157 Maison La Roche, Auteuil, France 177, 178 Mandrot, Hélène de 242n5 mannerism 127–8 Marcuse, Herbert 143, 149, 251n36 Marine Barracks New River 23–5, 26, 27 Marine Corps 209 Marquandt, Rosario 220 Mason, Grant C. 99–100 masonry ruins in Rome 67 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 62 Massey, Jonathan 229 McCormick, Lil 11–12, 14, 16 McCormick, Mary Catherine 11–12, 16 McCormick, Peg 11–12, 14, 16 McCullough, David 2, 6, 231n3 McKim, Charles Follen 56 McKim, Mead & White 238n8 Osborn House 178 Penn Station 49, 110, 117–18 W. H. Low House, Bristol, Rhode Island 43–5, 44, 56, 58, 128–9, 134, 161 McKinnell, Michael 166 McLaughlin, John 21 McNair, Fort 215 Meeks, Carroll L. V. 18, 35–6, 43, 60, 84, 198, 235n11, 238n13 Meeks, Everett 235n10 Meier, Richard 166, 167, 178, 179 Meiss House project 175 Mellon Bruce, Aisla 195 Mellon, Paul 159, 195 Michelangelo 127, 132

271

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 40, 47, 52, 83, 136, 165 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 90, 90–1 Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois 92, 92 Seagram Building 130–1, 132, 185 Miller, Mary 223 Millon, Henry A. 98, 166 MIT, see Massachusetts Institute of Technology Modern Architecture: International Exhibition 40 Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (Scully) 86, 102, 111, 196 Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona, Spain 90, 90–1 Capitol Complex plan for Chandigarh, India 96, 97 Edith Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois 92, 92 Guggenheim Museum, New York City 91, 91 Harvard Graduate Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 91, 92 High Court, Chandigarh, India 88, 89 about Le Corbusier’s architectural work 94–5 Notre-Dame du Haut chapel, Ronchamp, France 96–7, 97 reviews for 98–9 Richards Medical Research Laboratories, Philadelphia 93–4, 94 about Romantic Classicism 89–90 about Romantic Naturalism 89–90 Säynätsalo Town Hall, Finland 92–3, 93 about Scott’s notion of empathy 95–6 sociological, psychological and architectural context 86–7 Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy in 87, 88 Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (Hitchcock) 45

272

INDEX

modern architecture 37–8, 124; see also American architecture; Greek and Roman art and architecture; Italian art and architecture arguments between Scully and Mailer 118–21 Giedion’s role in 81–3, 101 International Style 41 Johnson’s work in 46–7 Mumford’s Bay Region style 47, 48 Wright’s influence on European architecture 63 modern architecture, Scully’s work in 41–2, 81, 84 discussions on “Architecture as a Science” article 84 Frank Lloyd Wright 99–100 Hitchcock, relationship with 45–6, 50 involvement in MoMA’s symposium 49–50 Johnson, relationship with 51–2 Louis I. Kahn 99, 100–1 Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy 86–99 “Modern Architecture: Towards a Redefinition of Style” article 85–6 Vincent J. Scully House, Woodbridge, Connecticut 51 Moll, Louis de 182 MoMA, see Museum of Modern Art Moore, Charles W. 6, 135, 141, 142, 161, 163, 172, 217 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, Louisiana 184–5, 185, 205 review of Scully’s The Shingle Style Today 181 and Venice Architecture Biennale 187 Morse College 147–8, 250–1n21 Moses, Robert 210 Moule, Elizabeth 207 Mount Hymettos 112, 113, 114 Mumford, Lewis 47, 48 Murphy, John W. 15, 21

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 37 American architectural programs 41 Building Boom, The—Architecture in Decline symposium 114 “The Death of a Street” lecture by Scully 114 École des Beaux-Arts architecture 165–6 Gropius’s Bauhaus 39–40 Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture 38–9 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition 40 New City, The: Architecture and Urban Renewal 167 Wright’s Fallingwater exhibition 45 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer) 118 Nalle, Eugene 41 National Historic Preservation Act (1966) 110 Navy Patrol Torpedo boats (PT boats) 28–9 neighborhood 201–2 Nelson, George 174–5 neotraditionalism 206 Nesbit, Molly 34 New Brutalism 168 New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?, The (Banham) 137 New City, The: Architecture and Urban Renewal 167 New Criticism 19, 75 New Empiricism 48 New Haven, Connecticut 10, 13; see also urban renewal of New Haven early integrated housing project in 214–15 Gilbert and Olmsted's plan for 210–11 neighborhoods 108, 142, 200 New Haven Free Public Library 14, 109, 150 New Haven Green 10, 14, 123, 151, 211 New Haven Redevelopment Authority (NHRA) 103, 107

INDEX

New Haven urban renewal program City Beautiful movement 103 Civic Improvement Plan 104 Le Corbusier’s urbanism approach 103–7 Oak Street project 108–9, 109 Scully’s involvement in protest movements 109–10 New Urbanism 199; see also Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) CNU 207–8 movement 6 Seaside, Florida 199–201, 200, 202–6 urban development projects 200–1 urban elements of 201–2 The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (Katz) 208 New World Visions: American Art and the Metropolitan Museum (1650–1914) 192–3 New Yorker magazine 3, 7, 47, 190–1 New York Five 169, 171, 174, 178, 180, 181 New York Times 3 NHRA, see New Haven Redevelopment Authority Nicholas Negroponte 168 Nolan, John 205, 210 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 184 Notre-Dame du Haut chapel, Ronchamp, France 96–7, 97 Novum Organum (NO ) 149 OCC, see Officer Candidates Class Officer Candidates Class (OCC) 21–3 Officer Candidates Program, see Officer Candidates Class (OCC) Oldenburg, Claes 6, 143–6, 146, 149, 159; see also Lipstick (Ascending) On Caterpillar Tracks sculpture Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr. 103, 210–11 Onassis, Jackie Kennedy 52 Operation HUSKY 28–9 Osborn House 178 Otto, Frei 141

273

P/A Awards, see Progressive Architecture Awards Paestum 73 First Temple of Hera at 76, 79–80 Second Temple of Hera at 74, 76, 79–80 Palatine Hill 67 Panofsky, Erwin 34 paramarine 26–7 pared-down classicism 66 Park Avenue, New York City 115, 116–17 Parthenon, Athens 95, 111–12, 113, 191, 210 Pasanella, Giovanni 166 Pegram, Lorna 192 Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa 225 Pelli, Cesar 198, 217 Pennsylvania Station, New York City 49, 110, 117–18 People magazine 190 Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters, see International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 86, 115 Pevsner, Nikolaus 63, 124 Peyre, Henri 18 Philadelphia Savings and Fund Society Building (PSFS Building) 66 Philips, John Marshall 60 Piano, Renzo 209, 211, 212 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, Louisiana 184–5, 185, 205 Plan Voisin for Paris 104–5, 106 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 6, 199, 200, 206, 207, 224, 261n20 Polyzoides, Stefanos 207 Portoghesi, Paolo 187 postmodern architecture 184–5 postmodernism 182, 186–7 Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) 197 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 31–2 Powell, Anthony 220 Price, Bruce 59, 59

274

INDEX

Progressive Architecture Awards (P/A Awards) 203 Pruitt-Igoe 184, 256n1 PSFS Building, see Philadelphia Savings and Fund Society Building psychoneurosis 31, 32 Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance (Scully) 173, 209 Pueblo architecture 196 Railroad Station, The: An Architectural History (Meeks) 235 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture 209 Rauch, John 158 Yale Mathematics Building 159, 161–4, 162 Reflections on Art (Langer) 89 Reich, Charles 151 reinforced-concrete structural support system 38–9 Reserve Officers Class (ROC) 23 Revett, Nicholas 89 Rhode Island Architecture (Hitchcock) 43, 58 Rhode Island School of Design 43 RIBA Annual Discourse, see Royal British Institute of Architects Annual Discourse RIBA Journal 155 Richards Medical Laboratory at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 69, 93–4, 94 Richardson, Henry Hobson 44, 128 Stick and Shingle Style wooden architecture 54, 56 Watts Sherman House, Newport, Rhode Island 56–7 Rickart, Charles E. 161 Robertson, Jacquelin 166, 171 Roche, Kevin 158, 161, 198 Rogers, James Gamble 42 Rogers, Richard 6, 224 Romantic Classicism 89–90 Romantic Naturalism 89–90 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 21 Rossi, Aldo 6, 182 comparison with Venturi 188 Gallaratese Housing project 187

San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy 188, 189 Scientific Autobiography, A 188 Teatro del Mondo 187, 188 Venice Architecture Biennale 187 Rotival, Maurice 103, 106, 107 Rowe, Colin 5, 137, 138, 166 Scully’s revenge on 180 views on Drexler’s Five Architects 168, 169 Royal British Institute of Architects Annual Discourse (RIBA Annual Discourse) 155–6 Royal, Patrice 221 Rudolfsky, Bernard 63, 141, 165 Rudolph, Paul 6, 130, 139, 217 resignation from Department of Architecture 135 role as chair of Yale’s architecture department 141–2 Yale Art and Architecture Building 130–1, 133 Ruskin, John 76 Saarinen, Eero 48, 49, 127, 147, 158, 165, 217 San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy 188, 189 Sanctis, Francesco de 87, 88 Säynätsalo Town Hall, Finland 92–3, 93 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. 4 School of Architecture University of Miami 199, 216 Yale 51–2, 163, 187, 224 School of Art and Architecture (A&A) 141 Scientific Autobiography, A (Rossi) 188 Scott Brown, Denise 6, 161, 163, 173, 182, 261n20 Scott, Geoffrey 79–80, 95–6 Scranton, Robert 77, 78, 98, 241n33 Scully, Daniel 33, 60, 70, 111 Scully, John 60, 70, 111 Scully, Marion LaFollette, see Marion LaFollette Scully, Stephen 60, 70, 111 Scully, Susannah (Nancy), see Susannah (Nancy) Keith

INDEX

Scully, Vincent 10, 48, 216, 217 academic career 2–3, 15–18, 17 antiwar and antiviolence sentiments 150–4 approach toward architecture 5–7 architect selection for Yale projects 158–64 architectural experiences in Italy and Greece 70–3 architectural lectures in various institutions 122–3 Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade 195–6, 197 art historical studies 33–7 avoidance of theory 196–7 A. W. Mellon Lecture, Washington, DC 195 contributions to Architectural Digest 193–5 criticism of 61–2 criticism from classicists 76–80 critiques of 228–9 debate with Mailer 118–21 DeVane Lectures at Yale 195 disillusionment with American brutality 155 dissertation 53–65 as faculty member in CKC 144 family history 11–14, 123–4 final lecture and initial retirement 197–8 friendship with Kahn 65–70 Greek architecture, research on 124–7 honors and awards 195, 218, 220 and influential personalities 6–7 interpretation of Bloom’s theory 197, 255n22 involvement in New Haven protest movements 109–10 involvement with film projects 191–2 lecture at White House 209–13 legacy of 222–7 letter to Richard Lee 252n39 letter to Yale’s class 222 Lipstick sculpture, role in 143–7 Memorial Tribute to 228

275

Morse College, role as master of 147–8 objection to New Urbanism 208–9 and Park Avenue 114–17 and Pennsylvania Station demolition 117–18 Peter Blake, relationship with 137 physical disability and death of 7–8, 220–1 popularity at Yale 189–90 publication and reviews of 60–1 public intellectuals, comparison with 3–5 Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance 173 responses to CASE meeting 166–7 retirement from teaching 218–19 RIBA Annual Discourse 155–6 service as flying cadet in US Army Air Corps 19–21 service in US Marine Corps 21–31 Shingle Style architecture 53–4, 56, 58–9, 62–4 Shingle Style investigations 127–30 Shingle Style, The 225 Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge, The 173–80 Stick Style architecture 53–4, 56, 58, 61 study of historic Greek architecture 73–6 suffering with PTSD 31–2 support for DPZ’s urban development projects 206–7 teaching architecture at Yale University 70, 122 “The Cottage Style: An Organic Development in Later 19th Century Wooden Domestic Architecture in the Eastern United States,” dissertation (Scully) Venice Architecture Biennale 184, 187 Venturi, relationship with 182–3 Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, response to introduction 138–40

276

INDEX

versatility of 1 views about Kahn’s and Venturi’s architectural work 156–7 views about new generation of American architects 157–8 views about Rossi’s architecture 187–9 views on postmodern architecture 184–7 Watts Sherman House plan 57 “What Seas, What Shores” article 190 and White vs. Gray discussion 170–1, 170–3 women who offered him support 227–8 Yale in New Haven: Architecture & Urbanism 216–17 Scully, Vincent Joseph Sr. 11–12, 14–15, 103, 214, 247n9 Seagram Building 130–1, 132 “The Seal” article (Scully) 194 Seaside, Florida 199–201, 200 codes 202 lot types of master plan 202–3 media attention 203 political attention 203–6 using New Urbanism concepts 201–2, 204–5 Sekler, Eduard F. 82 Seymour, Charles 18, 21, 70 Sharp, Jeremy E. 260n16 Shaw, Richard Norman 54, 128 Sheridan, Marion C. 15–16 Shingleside, Swampscott, Massachusetts 177, 178 Shingle Style and the Stick Style, The: Architectural Theory and Design from Downing to the Origins of Wright (Scully) 61 Shingle Style architecture 53–4, 56, 58–9, 62–5, 196, 238n8 Low House 161 Scully’s investigations of 127–30 The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright (Scully) 61, 77, 111, 62 64, 127–8, 225, 238n12

The Shingle Style Today, or The Historian’s Revenge (Scully) 173–80; see also Five Architects (Eisenman et al.) about Le Corbusier’s possible debt to Shingle Style architecture 176–8 portrayal of Venturi as Le Corbusier’s heir 174, 180 reviews 180–2 Shock of the New, The series 192 Sizer, Theodore 60 Smith House, Darien, Connecticut 178, 179 Smithson, Alison 141 Smithson, Peter 141 social activism at Yale University 142–3 Lipstick sculpture formation 143–7 Scully’s antiwar and antiviolence sentiments 150–4 Scully’s revolutionary activity 148–50 solipsism 181 Solomon, Daniel 207 Sophocles 117 Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Giedion) 5, 83 Spaeth House 174–5 Spanish Steps, Rome, Italy 87, 88 State Capitol, Richmond, Virginia 210 Steinem, Gloria 190 Sterling, John William 15 Stern, Robert A. M. 6, 129, 169–72, 178-80, 187, 198, 203, 217, 224, 244n53, 248n24 Stevenson, James 190 Stevens, Wallace 175 Stick Style architecture 53–4, 56, 58, 61 Stirling, James (Jim) 6, 138, 139, 141, 217 Stones, of Venice, The (Ruskin) 76 Stonorov, Oscar 66, 127, 141 St. Peter’s Square 118 Strada Novissima 187 stripped-down classicism 90 Stroube, Jack 191

INDEX

structural rationalism 90 Stuart, James 89 suburbia 201–2 Sullivan, Louis 44 Swiss Pavilion, Paris 95 Teatro del Mondo 187, 188 Temples of Hera at Paestum First Temple 76, 79–80 Second Temple 74, 76, 79–80, 112 Terragni, Guiseppe 255n10 tetrahedral ceiling 68–9 Thompson, Homer 77–8, 80 Thorne, Gordon 144, 146 Tigerman, Stanley 187 Time magazine 203 Tinker, Chauncey Brewster 18, 19, 33 Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier) 38 Trenton Bath House for Jewish Community Center, Trenton, New Jersey 69 Trubek and Wislocki Houses, Nantucket, Massachusetts 175, 182, 188 Trubek, David 159–61 Tyng, Anne 69 Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, France 67, 68, 95 United States Army Air Corps, Scully’s service in 19–21 United States Marine Corps, Scully’s service in 21, 22 in Beach Jumper Unit 27–9 at Camp Hood 26 “General Value to the Service” 30–1 at Marine Barracks New River 23–5, 26, 27 in OCC 21–3 in ROC 23 University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) 166 Urbanisme (Le Corbusier) 103–4 urban renewal in New Haven 4, 108–9, 207 cataclysmic impacts of 118 destruction of neighborhoods and city fabric 155

277

racial implications of 190 Scully’s opposition to 110, 122–3 threat of 109–10 US News & World Report 203 Valéry, Paul 35 Vanderpool, Eugene 73–4 Van Gogh, Vincent 37 Vanna Venturi House 132, 134, 134 Venturi, Robert 3, 6, 127, 154, 166, 184, 211, 217, 225, 261n20 Beach House project 128, 128–9 comparison with Rossi 188 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture 135–40, 173 Guild House 129, 130–4, 156, 176, 248n24 and postmodernism 186–7 relationship with Scully 181–2 Scully’s views on work of 156–7 Trubek and Wislocki Houses 159–61, 160, 188 Vanna Venturi House 132, 134, 134 views on postmodern architecture 186 views on Scully’s The Shingle Style 127–8 Yale Mathematics Building 161–3, 162 Vernon, Mary 191, 192 Vers une architecture (Le Corbusier) 38, 136–7, 138, 140 Vidal, Gore 4, 190 Vie des Formes (Focillon) 34 Vietnam War 150–1, 153–4 Village Voice 121 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France 38, 39, 178 Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland 176, 176, 178 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 63, 90 Vogt, Erik 104, 216 Vreeland, Thomas (Tim) 166, 181 Washington, DC, L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for 210 Watts Sherman House, Newport, Rhode Island 56, 57 Waugh, Evelyn 220

278

INDEX

Weisman, Steven 222 What Is Happening to Modern Architecture? symposium 48, 49, 64, 81 “What is Modern Architecture?” book manuscript (Scully) 81 White, Stanford 56, 57 White vs. Gray discussion 170–1, 170–3, 181–2 W. H. Low House in Bristol, Rhode Island 43–5, 44, 56, 58, 128–9, 134, 161 Wilde, Oscar 36–7 Wilson, Colin St. John 141 Wings (film) 20 Wislocki, George 159–61 Wohl, Hellmut 111 Wohl, Marion LaFollette, see Marion LaFollette Wrede, Stuart 142, 143–4, 146, 149–50 Wright, Frank Lloyd 6, 44–5, 165, 175, 193, 196, 223, 236n3 Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania 45, 46 Frank Lloyd Wright (Scully) 99–100 Guggenheim Museum, New York City 91, 91, 120 Hitchcock’s thoughts about 48–9

Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois 58 influence on modern European architecture 63 proposed Vincent J. Scully House 50, 50–1 Shingle Style architecture 59 Yale Art and Architecture Building 130–1, 133, 133 Yale College, New Haven 10 Yale Daily News 189, 218 Yale in New Haven: Architecture & Urbanism (Scully, Lynn, Vogt and Goldberger) 216–17 Yale Mathematics Building competition 161–4, 162 Yale University, New Haven 10; see also Department of Architecture in Yale University; social activism in Yale University School of Architecture of 51–2, 163, 187, 224 University Art Gallery by Kahn 68–70, 69 Yale Art and Architecture Building 130–1, 133, 133 Zucker, Paul 76, 77

279

280