Randall Beach: Remembering a ‘visionary’ who taught us how to ‘see’ art and architecture

Vincent Scully, a native New Havener who became “a national treasure” for his passionate teaching and writing about art and architecture, was honored Saturday in Battell Chapel at Yale, where he taught for more than 60 years.

Those of us who admired him and appreciated his strong efforts to preserve New Haven architecture were saddened to hear of his death Nov. 30 at age 97.

Hundreds of people filled the old church for the memorial service, including a past and the present Yale University president, Scully’s family and many of his long-ago students — such as Maya Lin — who were inspired by him to seek a career in architecture.

“I’m quite confident that there is no single person in all of Yale’s 317 years who did as well for as long a time period as Vincent Scully,” said Yale President Peter Salovey. “He may be unique in the annals of Yale.”

Salovey described Scully as “extraordinary, visionary, galvanizing and remarkable.”

Richard C. Levin, Salovey’s predecessor, also praised Scully for his powerful impact on Yale students. Levin added with a smile, “But that did not always make life easy for a Yale president.”

Levin said Scully’s passionate appreciation of Yale’s buildings “compelled him to hold Yale to an extremely high standard” for preserving them.

“We work hard to be good stewards of our buildings,” Levin noted. “But we didn’t always meet Vincent’s test. And when we failed that test, he let us know!”

Levin recalled the public battle in 1999 when Yale officials were planning to demolish four historic buildings at the Yale Divinity School. During a crowded forum held to discuss the plan, Scully went up to the podium and told Levin it would be such a “crime” to take down the buildings that he would resign from the university if Yale went ahead with the scheme.

“I surrendered,” Levin noted. “Those skirmishes with him were my education in urban planning. He helped me learn to honor the built environment.”

Levin also credited Scully with helping convince Yale officials not to tear down the historic Davies Mansion on Prospect Street. Instead, Yale renovated it; the building is now a center for international studies.

“Vince cared,” Levin said. “He cared about Yale, its students, its football team and its buildings.”

Levin noted Scully also cared deeply about New Haven’s many historic buildings and parks that weren’t part of Yale. (Scully successfully fought alongside other New Haven residents to stop a plan to build a highway through parts of East Rock Park.)

Robert A.M. Stern, who was the dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998-2016, recounted how Scully joined Yale students in the 1960s when they opposed “the destructive slash and burn of urban renewal” in New Haven.

“Vincent Scully embraced their cause and helped shape their argument,” Stern said.

“I was privileged to study under him more than 50 years ago,” Stern noted. “He inspired thousands of students.” Stern said they learned “that they too had a responsibility to shape the physical world.”

Thanks to Scully, Stern added, generations of those students “have pursued architecture rooted in memory rather than amnesia. Vince taught us how to see.”

Paul Goldberger, who went on from Yale to be an architecture critic for the New York Times and the New Yorker, was one of several speakers at Battell who fondly remembered Scully’s lectures on art history.

“For four years, I sat in that lecture hall, only one of those years for academic credit,” Goldberger said. “His lectures were not unlike a favorite piece of music.”

Goldberger noted Scully’s philosophy on architecture evolved through the years; he became an ardent preservationist after the original, majestic Pennsylvania Station in New York City was demolished in 1963. Scully regretted he had not raised his voice to try to stop that from happening.

Goldberger repeatd Scully’s famous words about the first and the replacement train station: “One entered the city like a god. Now you scuttle in underground, like a rat.”

Goldberger concluded, “That is his true legacy: his belief that words can change the world.”

Lin called Scully her most inspiring teacher at Yale. She said she once got the chance to watch him put together the material for one of his famed lectures. She recalled his “incredible concentration” as he pored over hundreds of images he would use to accompany his presentation.

“It was a rare opportunity to see a master at work,” Lin said.

She said the Scully lecture “would take your breath away and leave you in awe of the power of architecture , the power of the human spirit.”

While she was studying at Yale and absorbing a Scully analysis of a World War I monument, she realized one of her own projects might have the same effect on the public. “His description was instrumental in making me understand that my design worked on a similar psychological level.”

This led to her finishing her design and winning the competition for the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., which has profoundly moved the many people who see it.

Another of Scully’s former students, the writer and historian David McCullough, also recalled Scully’s “theatrical” lectures, always delivered without notes. Scully held a long pointer which he rapped to signal the image on the screen needed to be changed.

“There was a story that one time he got so excited that he fell off the stage but continued to lecture,” McCullough said. “I certainly do believe it.”

McCullough concluded: “And how wonderful that of all the time he spent in Greece and New Mexico and elsewhere, there was no place he so loved as New Haven, Connecticut, his home ground. What an uplifting story: the scholarship boy who became a national treasure.” (Scully went from Hillhouse High School to Yale on a full scholarship at age 16.)

Scully’s New Haven upbringing was cited by Penelope Laurans, who taught English at Yale for 43 years and became a good friend of Scully and his wife, Catherine Lynn.

Laurans recalled that when she offered prime seats for Yale Bowl football games for Scully and Lynn rather than letting them continue to be in the cheap seats, he scornfully told her he was the son of a New Haven alderman and the idea of sitting with the Yale establishment offended him. “But he took those seats,” she added.

“Those football games connected him to his New Haven childhood,” Laurans said. “He and his father walked or rode the trolley to the Bowl. That was their ritual.”