Vincent Scully, 1920-2017
Vince Scully wasn’t a member of our class, but I’m going to treat his death as one of ours because so many members of our class took his courses and counted him as one of their most influential Yale professors. This post will be a brief In Memoriam post summarizing some of his life, but, most importantly, offering a canvas at the end where everyone who has a thought, a memory, a story or some other comment can share it with their classmates.
On November 30th, I had just finished adding some of Scully’s YouTube lectures on a new Archives page when I heard of that Professor Scully died in Lynchburg, VA of complications from Parkinson’s. For those of you who miss the magic of his lectures, you can view some of his lectures on that page.
He was a star, of course, appearing on the cover of Time Magazine, May 6, 1966, as one of 10 “great teachers” in the USA.
The New Yorker did a profile of him in early 1980, with the usual in-depth coverage.
There are wonderful obituaries in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. For understanding his books, awards and a sense of his importance, especially to Architecture, I recommend those obits, especially the one in the Post. Wikipedia has an excellent summary, too, along with warnings not to confuse Professor Scully with sportscaster Vin Scully or hip-hop artist Vin Skully!
A Townie or a Tweedy Professor?
I didn’t realize that Professor Scully grew up in middle-class New Haven. His dad sold cars and his mom was allegedly an opera singer before she became a housewife, but details are missing. He graduated from Hillhouse High School in 1936 at the age of 16, graduating from Yale in 1940 with a degree in English Literature. He then began graduate study in art history before dropping out in the first year and entering the Marine Corps.
He saw action in the Pacific and in the Mediterranean in World War II and was especially inspired by Greek ruins/architecture. He returned to Yale for graduate work after the war, starting his teaching in 1947 — the year many of us were born — and getting his PhD in 1949.
Professor Scully influenced tens of thousands of students over the years and was instrumental in the careers of Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi, to name just two.
David McCullough, the best-selling historian and biographer, who went to Yale in the 1950s, said Dr. Scully encouraged him to see the Brooklyn Bridge as a work of art, rather than as a utilitarian structure. That insight led to one of McCullough’s first books, “The Great Bridge” (1972).
Maya Lin, the Yalie famous for designing the Vietnam Memorial, reportedly was partly inspired by Scully’s lecture about monuments to fallen soldiers in World War I — where all the names were listed. (Remember all the names on the walls in that rotunda between Woolsey Hall and Commons?)
Teaching AND Scholarship
Yale was (and still is) renowned for having professors advance human knowledge by teaching and by engaging in scholarship, research and writing. Dr. Scully did both, excellently. In 2014, several people, including Paul Goldberger, a former student and long time architecture critic for the New York Times, created a documentary entitled “Vincent Scully: An Art Historian Among Architects.” It is available for purchase on Amazon. Those of you with access to Kanopy can see it there for free.
Time For Your Comment
This website has a powerful commenting function at the very bottom of every post. For those of you with a thought, a memory, a story or some other comment you’d like to share, please add it now. Did you take a course with Scully? Audit one? What did you think?
Also, click the “Follow Comments” button so that you’ll be notified whenever anyone leaves a comment on this post. Professor Scully cared very deeply about community, and he’d find it fitting and proper, I think, that his obituary would offer an opportunity for us to speak to each other about art, or architecture or simply about a recollection you get when thinking of him.
Because of Scully, in December 1970 I went to Greece to see the temples that he had taught to us. He had not mentioned that several were in remote locations, with no public transportation, and in one case only sheep in the vicinity. It was a divine experience to be there absolutely alone, in the cold, as the centuries disappeared and the eternal harmony between building and site became manifest, just as he said it would.
My most vivid Scully memory is a bit traumatic. On the advice of my older brother Walt (Yale ’66), I took Scully’s course in the Fall of ’65. For me as for so many others, the course changed the way I looked at the built environment. My part-time freshman job with the university was “AV assistant,” and they trained me to put up screens and run projectors. In the Spring semester of 1966, I was assigned to assist with projecting the slides for Scully’s History of Architecture class. This was a plum assignment. As noted in the obituary in the Washington Post, Scully’s lectures were really a form of performance art. He would go through 120 to 150 slides in a lecture, projected on the huge screen in the Law School auditorium. It took two guys to run the projectors and keep the slides straight. There were six projectors in the booth, 3 for the large format, older glass slides and 3 for the smaller 35mm slides. In each set, two were used for paired comparisons, one for the large solo shots. Scully would set the slides in the slide boxes in sequence, alternating sets horizontally or vertically to indicate which were to be solo, which were to be paired, or which were to be compared in a running sequence. As directed by the buzzer, we threw switches, slid the hand slide changers, and loaded and re-stacked sequences of slides to keep it all going.
So one day, the senior projectionist on the team was sick and didn’t show up. I was left to handle the whole lecture on my own. Everything was going OK until about half way through, when I projected a huge image of the Great Sphynx of Giza . . . upside down. The darkened hall filled with the laughter and jeers of 400 Yalies. Panicking, I lost track of the slide order and messed up the next few slides, too. But Scully’s voice, through the squawkbox, calmly talked me down and eventually we got the lecture back on track. After the class, I gave him back his slides and apologized profusely. The expression on his face fell something short of complete forgiveness. My error had interrupted the flow and marred his performance.
I’ve been lecturing in college classes now for over 40 years, and with every semester I more completely understand how amazing his lectures really were, and how much work, and how much artistry, he put in to each one.
I remember Vincent Scully’s lectures in Art History vividly, as much for his sensitive humanity as for his often mesmerizing erudition.
One moment stands out. In the midst of a lecture devoted primarily to the architecture of classical Greece and Rome, Scully made reference to the Pueblo structures of the Native Americans.
When a student rose to ask a question about the value of “primitive art,” Scully corrected him vigorously but not unkindly. “Please do not refer to any art as primitive,” he said. “The Neolithic cave paintings are as beautiful and subtle as anything we moderns have produced.”
On a less elevated note, I remember a custom in those female-deprived days of inviting dates to brilliant lectures. The Saturday lectures of Bartlett Giamatti and Erich Segal were favorites. I once persuaded a Smith student who was briefly the object of my attentions to skip her classes and attend one of Professor Scully’s–on a weekday!
I never enrolled in one of Vince Scully’s courses. Now I see that as a mistake. My focus was elsewhere. I knew little about architecture or art history. Trying to remember hundreds of images seemed like a daunting task. Years later I saw that I was a member of the target audience.
My biggest regret about my four years at Yale is that I did not take a course with Vince Scully.
If you’ll pardon a comment from a non-class member, I was a fool not to take Scully’s course in the late ’70’s, and I was an art history major! The AYA was very pleased to have Professor Scully return to campus to receive one of the inaugural Howard R. Lamar Faculty awards in 2014. As far as I know, it was the last time visited New Haven. To see a photo of him on that special day, go to http://www.aya.yale.edu/content/howard-r-lamar-faculty-award. Here is the citation:
Vincent J. Scully ’40, ’49 Ph.D.
Architect Philip Johnson once described you as the “most influential architectural teacher ever,” and there is no one in this Commons or beyond who would dispute that. Brilliant architectural historian, author of such landmarks as The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods, recipient of the National Medal of Arts, citizen of your beloved New Haven since birth, you have helped shape the architecture of a nation. Architects have been inspired by your views on urban design and its effect on the community. And generations of Yalies have had the way they look at the world changed by you and in turn have changed the way others across America view, plan, and build it. Stories about you have linked decades of alumni, and people from Maine to California and Austria to Australia can tell the story of how your profound engagement in your subject and your passion with the pointer led you to fall off the stage in the middle of making a point.
Legions of alumni groups have sought you out for club and class events, and you accepted as many of those engagements as you could. You have graced Yale educational travel programs to the delight of alumni, enjoying their company as they treasured yours. One particularly memorable talk to a Yale College class was not about art or architecture but about Yale football. A class was celebrating its contributions to the renovation of the Yale Bowl, and you spoke about specific games and even specific plays you had seen fifty years earlier as if they had been the day before.
You are a world-renowned critic, an admirer and devotee of the city of your birth, and a generous alumnus who has given back tenfold to your alma mater, and the Association of Yale Alumni takes pride in presenting to you this award for outstanding service to alumni.
Jennifer, as the AYA officer supporting our Class, you are an “honorary member” of the Class and welcome, welcome, welcome to comment on any of the posts!
As a measure of his impact, the Washington Post carried a full-page obituary on him shortly after his death.
Biggest mistake of my time at Yale was not taking Scully’s class. As in life after Yale, the opportunities not seized often engender the most wistful regrets.
See also Robert Stern’s article in The Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/opinion/vincent-scully-architecture.html
I don’t recall taking Scully’s complete class (maybe got some of it courtesy of Directed Studies?) – but I treasure the lectures I did see, especially the dramatic side-by-sides.
I audited his main survey course along with, it seemed, about half the campus. Among other things, it opened my eyes to the seminal modern buildings I had been walking obliviously past all my life in my hometown of Chicago, some of the greatest of which (e.g., the Louis Sullivan Stock Exchange) Chicago was busily tearing down. On return after graduation, working in the Loop within easy walking distance of the survivors, I became quite an addict of the work of Sullivan, Jenney, the early Frank Lloyd Wright, and their modern heirs, especially Mies, who spent his final and most productive years in the Windy City. I was saddened to learn some years later that Sculley seemed to have turned against the very International School whose work he had taught me to appreciate. I wonder how much of his change was aesthetic and how much sociological – the fact that the “tower in the park” concept that looked so good on paper became co-opted by public housing to create filing cabinets for the poor in many big citites. Certainly he was prophetic in his early opposition to “urban renewal” – of which Chicago was also a prime example, as they gutted historic neighborhoods in the ’50s and early ’60s using “federal money” to de-house the poor and deliver mass-produced sterility to the remaining Mayor Daley voters. Anyway, looking back, Vincent Sculley probably did as much as anybody to enrich my aesthetic mind in a way that’s affected me for the past 50 years. RIP
I (foolishly) took no art history classes at Yale. On a visit to New Haven about 15 years ago to see my daughter, Averill Harrington Conn, TD’03, I sat in on her History of Art course with Scully. Although he was an octogenarian, Scully lectured with the enthusiasm of youth. The longer the class persisted, the more I kicked my butt mentally for missing out on Scully during my own undergrad days. At least I had the sense to encourage my daughter not to replicate my mistake and to sign up for Scully’s course.
Wow, what a turn out on this post. I was one of the lucky ones that took Vincent Scully’s class. Along with Karsten Harries’ “The Meaning of Modern Art,” Scully’s course was one of the many gifts Yale bestowed on me.
Recall that Penn Station in New York had been razed in 1963, and that the urban renewal policies of Robert Moses (YC 1909, and also born in New Haven) as carried out by Mayor Richard Lee, had contributed to the killing of New Haven. And then the two interstate highways, and the Oak Street Connector, finished the job.
I think Vincent Scully regretted his indifference to those two cataclysms as they were occurring, one of which was destroying his own city. Alas, he had come too late to their defense, unlike Jane Jacobs.
I’ll never forget one of his remarks concerning the line of characterless faux-modernist skyscrapers along Sixth Avenue, as those “jackbooted sentinels of corporate power.” What a guy.
Vincent Scully changed my life. Really. I arrived at Yale knowing nothing of architecture. I left with a deep respect for the role that the built environment plays in our everyday lives. This mattered in subsequent years. The first date with my wife of 38 years was a tour of two historic landmarks in Pittsburgh. She later became an architectural historian of some note and an expert in the same span of decades of American architecture that were Scully’s specialty, the late 19th and early 20th century period. For years, we have both been active in historic preservation efforts, and I now sit on the board of Historic New England which owns dozens of house museums. Thank you, Scully.
I just learned of Vincent Scully’s passing. He was a great teacher, an inspiration, and as Master of Morse College, a friend. Who could ever forget his dynamism? After taking his course Freshman Year, I followed in the second semester taking Charles Seymour’s course on the Renaissance. One course led to another until it was my major. Years later I returned to Yale to audit one of his courses. He had reluctantly converted to Power Point. Time and Change. R.I.P.
https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/13149-paul-goldberger-reflects-on-vincent-scullys-legacy
Like so many of Scully’s students I was in thrall to his ability to teach us how to see. His radiant vision is with me still; he was a poet who made the history of art a living entity and the cadence of his voice and certain phrases and ideas come back to me whenever I see or think of individual works of art. I am grateful to him for his passion and insistence that art and architecture deserve serious study if we are to understand ourselves or bear witness to our time on earth. As an artist he influenced me as the voice of conscience about searching within the forms I paint. He never shrank from grand utterances, something that ran counter to what was considered cool among undergraduates. There was nothing small about his vision or his respect for the inner forms that link us to our unconscious or to the past. i went back to his lectures obsessively all four years, delighting in his lecture on Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamps, which he declared in his emphatic baritone, as “Ringing out like a bell” across the landscape. Yale is so generous to undergraduates that, in addition to all those opportunities to hear his lectures repeatedly, I was able to take a seminar on the Trecento with eleven other students. Suddenly the relationship changed. We had to present our papers to him, testing his patience. I remember practicing in front of the mirror, gesturing broadly over Saint Peters in Rome, comparing it to the sheltering arms of a late Rembrandt. It fell flat. A friend said much later “You were trying to be Scully.” Of course. He was an original, generous in his magnificence. I was still learning…
Vince Scully, the legend: His introductory course to architecture is forever imprinted on my brain. I can remember as if it were yesterday the dark lecture hall, the excitement in his voice, and the slide show that brought it all to life. And what an interesting topic and what interesting architects he talked about. I can recall a handful of courses that immediately come to mind and Vince’s is one of them. May his memory and fame at Yale last forever.
I had Modern Architecture with Scully, and he had a profound influence on me.
Two stories.
Around 1989, living in LA, I read that Scully was going to speak at LA County Museum. I dragged Constance along, as well as the architect who designed our house that we built (back in the day when we had $$$). We were in line, waiting to be admitted, and I looked down the alley next to the Bing Auditorium at LACMA. At the end of the building, near the stage door, I saw a nervously pacing figure. It was Scully, rehearsing, and psyching himself up for an amazing presentation. He never failed to entertain.
In 1998, shortly after we moved to Boston, a couple we knew invited us to the Boston Public Library Literary Lights event, a black tie fund raiser that featured a renowned author seated at every table. Scully was one of the writers. I decided to go up to his table, to tell him that he had made such a huge impression on my limited (and drunken) undergraduate point of view. When I reached his table, there were at least 10 other Yale alumni, all equally intent on speaking with him, lined up, patiently waiting. He was focused and charming with each one. I told him that my term paper for him was on Mies Van Der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue, and how I had fallen in love with it. I went on to explain that, at great expense, I had chosen to shoot a scene from The Out of Towners, with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn walking by the building. On the location scout I had insisted on telling everyone in the van how the Seagram Building engaged in a “conversation” (as Scully put it) with McKim, Meade and White’s Racquet Club building across the street. Scully smiled, and thanked me for coming over. What an amazing teacher.