Scully, Vincent Joseph, Jr.

Scully, Vincent Joseph, Jr., 1920–2018, American architectural historian, b. New Haven, Conn., grad. Yale (B.A., 1940; Ph.D., 1949). As a professor of art history at Yale (1947–91, though he taught his introduction to art history until 2009) and as an author, he exerted an important influence on the course of contemporary architecture and on the relationship between architecture and society. Early on Scully promoted modernist architecture, but he later denounced the constant repetition of its clichés and the destruction of urban neighborhoods in the name of renewal. American Architecture and Urbanism (1969, rev. ed. 2003) enunciated these views, which were expanded in Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991). Scully particularly championed Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi. Other books include The Shingle Style (1955), Frank Lloyd Wright (1960), The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture (1961), Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (1961), and The Shingle Style Today (1974).

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