my two students

I found the following essay by Vincent Scully floating, untitled, on the WWW:

Reflections on My Work

As I look back over my life, I find that it has taken me a long time to come
to what I now regard as a fairly solid, useful, and true view of
architecture. I think that this has been the case for my entire generation.
These past forty years, however grim, have been beyond everything else a
time of liberation: black liberation, women's liberation, gay liberation.
Each of these movements has liberated all of us from various kinds of
stereotypical thinking and, during the same period, we have been liberated
from some profoundly restrictive ideas about architecture as well.

What I believe now is almost exactly the opposite of what I believed when I
first began to think about these questions in the 1940s. I now believe in
the primacy of context, not of theories about a single, jealous, reductive
modern style, in determining how we would build. I am more interested in the
larger architecture of places shaped by many buildings, streets, and nature
herself than in any building as an isolated object.

I believe that architects should no longer regard themselves as epic heroes
who reinvent the wheel in every project - which is more or less the way the
Late Modernists of my generation had come to think of themselves - but
rather more as physicians, trying to make things a little better in each
specific place. They should, most of all, be doing their best to heal the
wounds that have been inflicted by the modern age upon the subtle, fragile,
precious fabric of our cities: that urban order, traditional but hard-won,
which the International Style most willfully and disastrously despised. I
believe, therefore, that the revival of the vernacular and classical
traditions, and their reintegration into the mainstream of modern
architecture, along with the concomitant rise of interest in preservation
and restoration and the building of new towns, have been the most important
developments in architecture and urbanism during my lifetime.

I also think, in consequence, that the concept of the avant-garde , as
applied to architecture, is no longer a useful one, and indeed was derived,
like all too much of modern architecture itself, from concepts more
appropriate to other modern arts, such as painting, where the theme of
continual, personal, anarchic invention can be more legitimately explored
and encouraged.

I find that my published works, as well as my teaching, have been concerned
with those issues for some 40 years. My books, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis
I. Kahn were preoccupied with the hero architect and his relation to
history, as was Modern Architecture, while my introduction to Venturi's
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture helped identify the new
architecture and urbanism of the anti-hero and of contextuality. The Shingle
Style had something to do with initiating the vernacular and classical
revivals, as did The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods , which, like Pueblo:
Mountain, Village, Dance , was a contextual book, having to do with the
relation of buildings to each other and to the landscape in terms of human
ritual. My outrage at Redevelopment in the 1960s, as evidenced in American
Architecture and Urbanism, gave such concerns a political as well as social
and visual focus, and my Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, of 1991,
not only tried to trace the relationship between architecture and the
natural world through history, but also dealt with the modern nation state,
its settings, wars and memorials. My research and teaching as a whole have
become increasingly involved with the architecture of community and the
creation of new communities in the United States and abroad. Here the work
of students of mine like Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk has become
of central importance. Since my retirement from Yale in 1991, I have been
teaching one term each year at the school of architecture they were so
instrumental in shaping at the University of Miami.

It is impossible for me to name all the students I have taught whose own
work has made me especially proud: architects, art historians, and laymen
alike over the years. It is true that all of us involved with architecture
have learned a good deal during the past generation, but my own greatest
satisfaction has been in my students, from whom I have learned the most.

-- Vincent Scully


===================================
Michael Kaplan
Associate Professor of Architecture
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
mkaplan@xxxxxxx