Mental constructs

Modern Architecture and Other Essays, by Vincent Scully, selected and with an introduction by Neil Levine, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2003; 416 pages, $60 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Architectural Theory, Volume 1: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870, edited by Harry Francis Mallgrave, Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publishers, 2005; 590 pages, $49.95.

Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1968, by Harry Francis Mallgrave, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005; 522 pages, $110.

Toward the close of his 1965 article "Doldrums in the Suburbs," architectural historian and critic Vincent Scully (b. 1920) recounts a lecture of 1949 by Philip Johnson at Yale University, where Scully had just begun to teach. At the very moment of the triumph of an Americanized midcentury modernism, Johnson stood before a shocked audience and announced that he "would rather sleep in the nave of Chartres Cathedral with the nearest john two blocks down the street" than "in a Harvard house with back-to-back bathrooms!" Scully remembers it as a "terrible and even rather frightening pronouncement," its open admiration for the monumental, symbolic architecture of the past clashing with contemporary functionalist dogma. He concludes the anecdote by quoting members of the audience exclaiming afterward that Johnson was "talking about architecture as an art!" Scully then remarks, "And suddenly I realized that that is what it was all the time." This statement, reprinted in Neil Levine's definitive compilation of Scully's scattered essays, articles and lectures, Modern Architecture and Other Essays (newly issued in paperback), could stand as something of a summation of Scully's more than half-century of thought on the architectural heritage of the West. For that perception, even revelation, of architecture as a fine art had two powerful and intertwined implications for his thought: first, it gave him permission to seek a comprehensive vision of Western architecture, whereby the tumultuous developments of the 20th century could be integrated within a longue duree rather than understood as the product of radical historical rupture; and second, it provided him an esthetic vocabulary with which to repudiate European modernism in its most politicized and functionalist forms. Indeed we might conceptualize the story of his career as one of the gradual ascendance of this view of architecture as an art, an ascendance Scully fostered through his teaching and research, until it became dominant within the field of modern architectural history as well as within architectural practice itself in the so-called postmodernism of the 1970s and '80s. Levine's edited volume tracks this trajectory in a most exemplary fashion.

While Scully's several synoptic texts, from his Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (1961, revised 1974) to American Architecture and Urbanism (1969) and Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991), were long in print and are familiar to a wide audience, much of his prolific writing has been scattered throughout professional journals, the art press, edited volumes and the like. Levine has assembled a representative selection of 20 of the most significant of these publications, providing each with a brief introduction, and framing the collection with a biographical sketch of Scully and a complete bibliography. In it we find Scully continually returning to his great heroes of 20th-century architecture, the Americans Frank Lloyd Wright (in, notably, "Frank Lloyd Wright and the Stuff of Dreams," 1980), Louis I. Kahn (repeatedly, but see in particular "Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome," 1992) and of course Robert Venturi (most especially in "Everybody Needs Everything," 1992). We also find his early revisionist account of American domestic architecture of the late 19th century ("American Villas," 1954), an essay that helped establish his reputation as one of the leading lights in postwar cultural history; his criticism of the sterility and anti-urbanism of much orthodox modernist planning ("The Death of the Street," 1963) and his embrace of New Urbanist schemes for a return to the "traditional" city ("The Architecture of Community," 1994); and his late work on the conjunction of built form and natural environment ("Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade," 1991).

This rich output of scholarship all took place over a long tenure of teaching generations of students at Yale University, where he studied as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and where he began teaching immediately upon receiving his doctorate in 1949. In fact, with the exception of his wartime service in the Army, Scully could be said to have spent his entire professional life within a few blocks of the intersection of Chapel and York Streets in New Haven. Yet this writing bears little of the characteristic features of the ivory tower: it is not hermetic, self-referential or burdened by jargon. Reading it, one sees quickly why Scully (now emeritus) was such a popular lecturer, a charismatic professor whose influence extended broadly throughout the architectural profession and the academy. Levine was himself a student of Scully's, and his writings on French 19th-century Beaux-Arts architecture owe much to his mentor's rehabilitation of those aspects of architectural history (such as academic practice and its dedication to historical styles) once denigrated by modernist architects and their critical apologists. (One could usefully contrast Scully's work, for example, with that of Sigfried Giedion, the "official" chronicler of the modern movement.) And that influence was perhaps even more pervasive among architects themselves, particularly those, such as Venturi and Robert A.M. Stern, who were termed the "Grays," advocates of a contextual, eclectic esthetic in the architectural debates of the early 1970s. Scully's position at Yale was something of a pulpit from which he could preach this new gospel of what would soon be called postmodernism to a sophisticated, elite audience.