LAUSR

Although Vincent Scully's subjects as an architectural historian ranged from Greek temples to the pueblos of the American Southwest, from Park Avenue towers to French classical gardens, it is impossible to think of him without talking first about New Haven, Connecticut, the small northeastern city where he was born on 21 August 1920, the only child of a father who sold Chevrolet automobiles and a mother who was an aspiring opera singer. It was in New Haven that Scully received his formal education, first at Hillhouse High School and then at Yale University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees and would teach for almost all of his career; it was also in New Haven where he formed his notion of what a city was. The city's famous “nine squares” plan led Scully to think about grids as shapers of cities, as its Victorian Gothic city hall by Henry Austin and its classical post office by James Gamble Rogers led him to think about architecture as civic symbol; similarly, its neighborhood parks and central green led him to think about public space, and its enormous rock outcroppings made him aware of the relationship of landscape to urbanism. New Haven was also the place that shaped his views, increasingly vocal as he grew older, about the failings of urban renewal, modern architecture, and autocratic planning; the incursion of highways into the city's central core (which he would always call “connectors,” using the local parlance) became his model of how not to treat a city. Vincent Scully (photo, Michael Marsland/Yale University). Scully spent almost all of his academic career at Yale, retiring as Sterling Professor of the History of Art in 1991 and continuing to teach as an emeritus professor until 2009, when he was eighty-nine years old. While he …