Vincent Scully has long been one of our leading architectural historians, and easily the most confident and audacious. Yet lately his status has shifted. ... Left behind in the Internet era is a rich store of material in print which has limited cultural presence because it has limited digital presence. Here we present the third installment of the series Future Archive, consisting of the online republication of significant 20th-century writings on design, with each text selected and introduced by a prominent scholar. The series is funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Vincent Scully often and unabashedly used such terms: the most, the best, the worst. But in recent decades we architectural historians have become a more cautious tribe, at least when it comes to separating personal opinion from universal truth. So the audacity of his pronouncements both repels and fascinates. Our declarations today, by contrast, are often as not painstakingly qualified, apologetically swaddled in our subjective positioning, held at arm’s length like someone else’s disagreeable baby. Such is not the stuff of spellbinding prose, but that was never Scully’s problem. Even when wrong he was stirringly, scintillatingly wrong.

...

“An architecture which is whole”: Art & Architecture Building, Yale University (1964)

by Vincent Scully

This furiously ambitious building is the first of its architect’s full maturity. It is surely the most historically significant of the many buildings constructed at Yale since Louis I. Kahn’s Art Gallery of 1951–58, and it demands and rewards extended critical attention. Though completed only barely in time for its dedication on November 9, 1963, it has already attracted extravagant dislike and no less fulsome admiration. The hysterical twittering of the ninety-four painters who are caged in what can only be regarded as its entablature, and the heavier, troglodytic resentments of the seventeen sculptors who have been driven down into its second basement, are more than matched by the euphoric beatitude of the one hundred and seventy-three architects and planners who, under the white-painted eyes of Minerva, are now expanding grandly through its airy middle floors.

It might be argued that such distribution of space is iconographically appropriate for the various arts involved: sculpture primitive and fundamental as old bones and so lodged in a cavern, painting occupying the traditional garret and roof-terrace (les toits de Paris) with a fine view across the stone-, land-, and seascape that New Haven is, architecture engaged in its usual mass operation in the middle of the road. True enough, the functional requirements involved might have suggested other spatial solutions. The painters insist, perhaps rather unreasonably, that they have not enough usable volume for their present numbers and will not have enough when they take over the area now assigned to city-planning offices on the sixth floor. In most of their area the ceilings are too low for proper lighting from above. Everywhere the building tends to elbow in at the corners of their vision, coming insistently between their canvases and them.

Down below, the sculptors have a restricted volume of air in which to set solid forms. Their ceilings are generally too low. A few feet under the floor lies water. The building could dig no deeper, and, for urbanistic reasons best considered later, Rudolph decided it should go no higher. The sculptors feel that the three ingenious monitors which rise another full floor-height from their level are not themselves wide enough to do other than to admit light and to emphasize the oppressive horizontality of most of the space. They do afford staggering views up the sides of the building, however, and there may in fact be more spatial release in them than has yet been appreciated. The sculptors have also been given a small but high studio once intended for Graphics. That department is housed in the first basement and has a better distribution of areas for its twenty-eight students, although the ceilings are still inordinately restrictive.

...