Yale scholar Vincent Scully dies at 97

For Vincent Scully, architecture wasn’t just about buildings. In more than six decades as a Yale University professor, he became known as the foremost architectural historian of his time and exerted a profound influence on how the wider public understands the purpose of architecture.

Even though Scully was not a trained architect, dozens of renowned architects studied with him, prompting one of the field’s elder statesmen, Philip Johnson, to call him “the most influential architecture teacher ever.”

In more than a dozen books and thousands of lectures that were an aweinspiring form of performance art, Scully sought to impart several central ideas: that buildings help define a culture, that architecture should be a humanizing force and that a wellbuilt community can foster a well-lived life.

Scully died Thursday at his home in Lynchburg, Va. He was 97.

Scully helped popularize the historic preservation movement and was the spiritual father of New Urbanism, a school of design that promotes architecture on a human scale by, in effect, looking toward the past to build the future.

“Scully was as much critic and activist as historian, a public intellectual interested in the present as much as the past,” Keith Eggener, a University of Oregon historian of architecture, wrote in the online Places Journal in 2015. “He played a seminal role in defining the character of architectural history during the second half of the 20th century, and ultimately had as much impact on designers as on scholars.”

Scully began teaching at Yale in 1947. Before long, his introductory course in art history was so popular that it had to be moved to the law school, which had the only lecture hall large enough to accommodate as many as 400 students at a time. He included architecture as a component of art history, along with painting and sculpture.