“Exultation,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the going of an inland soul to sea; past the houses, past the headlands, into deep infinity.” Exultation is what I and many others felt when we sat down for the first time in the Law School Auditorium and the lights dimmed and the first pair of slides—an Arapahoe camp tepee compared to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House—leapt onto the gigantic screen, and Vincent Scully began discussing American architecture.
You could say time began there on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:00 p.m., which, after a late night, a full morning, and a hurried lunch, was a risky time for anything to begin that required some concentration. But we stayed awake for these lectures. It wasn’t just the announcement discouraging the taking of notes that captured our attention—though refreshing and novel to me, it seemed merely to puzzle the pre-med students—it was the reasoning behind the requirement.
Naturally, the reason was to spend the time studying the buildings and following Scully’s analyses of architectural intent and social effect as closely as possible. The point was to think about what he was saying. Now, that was the real novelty. He was teaching us to look. The facts we assimilated, they did not change much, and they could be memorized. But architectural form, from the ordinary or vernacular to the monumental or heroic, took on a life of its own in the hands of the sorcerer-historian.
He has said: “It is always a mistake to forsake the art for its makers. It is in their art, not in themselves, that artists are at their most human. In it they transcend the littleness of humanity and magnify its grandeur. It is therefore only through art of one kind or another, and perhaps through architecture most of all, that the shape of a larger humanity can be suggested, imagined, or perceived.” He showed us a larger picture and gave us architectural judgment.
Occasionally, Scully became so intent on the process of visual analysis that crazy things happened. He favored an incredibly long, but apparently lightweight bamboo staff as a pointer. I think a rug had originally been wrapped around it. One day he banged so forcefully on the screen while emphasizing a point that the rod shattered with a mighty crack—Prospero launching his Tempest—thoroughly terrifying the back-benchers.
Another time he lingered a little too long on a particularly suggestive slide comparison, forgetting that some slide projectors—at least the ancient dreadnoughts that Yale had in those days—can overheat. He was discussing the dynamism of the two designs, punctuating his remarks with great diagonal arm-thrusts, saying “Look at the feeling of movement evident here,” when all of a sudden the two slides really did move, as first one and then the other blurred and then burst into a smear of melting and smoking Kodachrome. It was a wonderfully Dada moment; a sort of mad over-dramatization of exactly what he had been talking about.
You couldn’t help but get caught up in the exuberance and passion that he showed for his subject. Indeed, Scully’s lectures changed forever the way his students viewed the world. He opened our eyes to the life of forms in art and architecture and showed us how the simple and complex act of shaping space for human use can articulate our sense of value, influence our view of the past, and embody our ideals and aspirations. And he made me want to find a career in writing about the built environment.
Author Daniel Gregory, PhD, Assoc. AIA, is home editor for Sunset magazine.
Originally published 1st quarter 2003, in arcCA 03.1, “Common Knowledge.”
