Falling Down

...This is a useless recipe, and perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that the architect who enthralls Scully at this time—and for years to come—is the utterly idiosyncratic Le Corbusier, whom Scully all but apotheosizes in the essays "Modern Architecture" and "The Nature of the Classical in Art...

...Ronchamp is "pure gesture...

...And so on...

...It should be remembered that Scully has inspired thousands of educated people to look at the architectural world they inhabit more closely than they otherwise would have...

...In 1998 he gave a lecture at the White House...

...The change came gradually because the apocalyptic reveries of heroic, 1950s-vintage modernism sank very deep into Scully's psyche, and along with them any number of fallacies...

...the American suburb started to turn "palatial, and rather snobbish," thereby losing "the general cultural creativity which it had previously possessed...

...Scully's essay becomes a morality play...

...And when he compares a pair of insignificant Venturi cottages on Nan-tucket to two Greek temples on a Sicilian plain, one's jaw drops in disbelief...

...The primitive sculptural gesture might be sublime, but it was too recondite, too far removed from the commonplace...

...The best essays in this book come toward the end...

...the muralist Diego Rivera's primitive figures "boil out of the walls" of Mexico's National Palace...

...The resulting fagade, Scully observes in the 1969 lecture, turns into "cardboard, like an ironic commentary . . . on the whole American reve a deux millions itself, surely on everything that is conjured up when real-estate operators refer to a house as a 'home.'" Irony's prominent role in Venturi's architecture, Scully avers, "connects him with reality, with things as they really are," but Scully has been won over by a realism with minimal artistic potential...

...The 1950s essays in this collection thus introduce the hyperbolic, pyrotechnic quality in Scully's mode of discourse—not least in his divinations of art-historical influences and refer-ences—and certainly in his literary style...

...a chimney in a Robert Venturi drawing "thins out and leaps much higher, as if in the paroxysm of approaching death...

...During the late 1970s more people started talking about reverting to a classically oriented eclecticism, based on the "academic" unity of the arts...

...Open, spatially innovative interiors fell by the wayside with the advent of a more formal, conventional, and stately architecture during the Gilded Age...

...Scully's student, Neil Levine, who selected the essays and provided introductions, renders a service in giving a detailed account of an exchange between Scully and Norman Mailer after Mailer denounced "the plague of modern architecture" in Esquire in 1963...

...The truth is that Scully has led his retinue along a circuitous path which we might call Recovering Modernist Syndrome...

...Ben Shahn painted as a "pure Social Democrat...

...Modern Architecture and Other Essays collects twenty Scully essays spanning five decades...

...But Scully began to lose his faith in heroic modernism during the 1960s...

...He quotes Scott's observation that the human body lies at the core of classical architecture, whose "method" it is "to transcribe in stone the body's favorable states...

...In this first essay, then, spatial invention is an indicator of cultural health, and the classical retreat into "separate rooms" an indicator of pathology...

...He could not help noticing that the poor—not least the displaced blacks of New Haven—were redevelopment's principal victims, as Jane Jacobs had made clear in her devastating indictment of the cataclysmic Corbusian blueprint for "urban renewal," The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961...

...Levine observes that it was only a decade or so after this "extremely unusual and prescient" recourse to Freud that architecture historians started talking about "gendered spaces" and "sexual symbolism," as if Scully had done us a favor...

...He might have mentioned the nihilistic Freudian dreamscapes the New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp started crowing about, back in the mid-1990s, in connection with his favorite dysfunctional designers...

...In many cases, words give the architecture that has seized Scully's fancy a vitality it doesn't intrinsically possess...

...Professors" ten years later...

...More questionably, Scully portrays this "vernacular" tradition— influenced by American colonial architecture, Norman Shaw's "Old English" houses, and even the Japanese abodes displayed at Philadelphia's 1876 centennial exposition—as an expression of Jacksonian egalitarianism and an agrarian idealism rooted in Jefferson...

...Scully often plays the role of handicapper—spotting and advocating architectural trends as "breaking news"—and so a number of them read like dated editorials...

...a triangular form looming over a stairway in Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery addition is "pure silence, pure light...

...Needless to say, architectural practice conceived in terms of the discovery of the modern self is not for the average Joe...

...The former offers an insightful critique of Duany and Plater-Zyberk's Florida panhandle town of Seaside...

...The Renaissance splendor of the Vanderbilts' Breakers at Newport, Scully avers, shows the mansion's architect, the great Richard Morris Hunt, to have grown "pillowy, sickly rich, and flatulent...

...The "sense of identity which is style," Scully writes in "Modern Architecture: Toward a Redefinition of Style" (1957), "can only come when the nature and objectives of the self— with its present, its hopes, and its memory—are truly identified and humanly defined...

...The solution Scully settled on, trading one dead end for another, was Robert Venturi...

...The significance of this book lies mainly in the fact that we see the nation's most influential A regular contributor on architecture to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Catesby Leigh is a critic living in Washington, D.C...

...But only until it emerges, in another essay published the very same year, that the likes of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson have renounced the preoccupation with "flowing space...

...In a 1969 lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects, Scully spoke contemptuously of "bureaucratic architecture," but he also acknowledged a deeper problem...

...His architecture demands to be understood in terms of associated values—mainly a post-heroic academic modernist sensibility— rather than in terms of its sensuous content, which invariably leaves much to be desired...

...The fundamental shift in Scully's thinking since the 1950s is that he no longer sees architecture as a self-referential endeavor, but as "a communal art, having to do with the whole man-made environment, the human city entire, rather than only the individual buildings in it...

...Elsewhere, the stark interior of an early Le Corbusier house "literally explodes into space," while traditional details are "burned away...

...There is "something real about things as we feel them to be" in Venturi's architecture or the hyper-realist sculpture of Duane Hanson which the tradition could not provide...

...It has led to a postmodern eclecticism that is thoroughly receptive to traditional architectural practice...

...In the 1954 essay about Mies and Johnson, we encounter catch phrases like "decisive details," "direct impact," "direct and simple experience," "a decisive direction of memory," "direct rhythm of the structural skeleton," "a decisively different scale," "a decisive base," and then some, in the course of just four pages...

...The social vision espoused in Scully's essays of the late 1950s is grounded in the idea of a "remade humanity" resulting from the existential discovery of the self in the context of the vertiginous social changes that got underway during the nineteenth century...

...architecture historian gradually renouncing his modernist faith...

...Scully repeatedly attempts to finesse the problem of the modernist negation of tradition by comparing Le Cor-busier's creations to ancient works...

...The Yale urban planning professor Christopher Tunnard and the architecture historian Henry Hope Reed were far ahead of Scully in denouncing the modernist cataclysm...

...The young Scully dismissed suburbia—meaning practically all of the national territory urbanized after World War II—as the "undignified, materialistic formlessness to be found in the Real Estate section of any Sunday newspaper...

...More disturbingly, rhetorical pyrotechnics tend to win out over substance in this collection...

...This leads Scully to relabel that preoccupation as one of the "curious academicisms" of the recent past...

...The entrance to a Venturi house is a "pure void...

...In demolishing the sundry modernist arguments that were already circulating in his time, Scott argued quite explicitly for adherence to the great tradition, and it would cause him no end of amazement to see a gargantuan concrete slab perched, top-heavily, on graceless, stout posts resembling pig's legs portrayed as an embodiment of his principles...

...Based on Scully's doctoral dissertation research, this essay is redolent of his hostility to the "antiquarian," the "academic," the "eclectic" (though the cottage architecture was certainly that)—hostility, in short, to the classically oriented architectural practice that came to the fore in this country during the 1880s...

...A Le Corbusier residential project of the 1920s—one of whose more familiar versions resembles a top-loading clothes-washer on stilts—is likened to an ancient "megaron," by which Scully seems to mean the great hall of a Myce-nean palace...

...This "totalitarian architecture," Mailer declared, "destroys the past," leaving Americans "isolated in the empty landscapes of psychosis...

...Their truly prescient stance was the butt of ridicule in Scully's early essays, and Levine absurdly denounces that stance as "reactionary...

...Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade" includes a fine account of how the landscape architecture of Versailles played out in the urbanism of Paris and the spatial organization of France...

...His tendency then, was to look at architecture through the wrong end of the telescope...

...These essays tend to shed more heat than light on their subject matter...

...A 1980 essay arguing that the formal structure of dreams propounded by Freud is applicable to Wright's design process is certainly provocative, but not terribly convincing, and in any event perfectly unverifiable...

...Indeed, Scully's tendency throughout this book to drop terms like "baroque" or "Palladian" or to mention Greek temples or Hadrian's Villa or Leonardo's drawing of the man of perfect proportions in connection with modernist projects to which they are fundamentally irrelevant becomes tiresome...

...Early in his career, Scully was imbued with a psycho-sociological outlook deeply influenced by existentialism, which reinforced the subjective character of his enthusiasms...

...Scully lambasted Mailer's "lazy, pot-boiling paragraphs," but came closer, over time, to Mailer's viewpoint, eventually becoming an outspoken advocate of the traditional town planning of his pupils Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk...

...Venturi famously took a large McKim, Meade & White cottage (fetchingly modeled with a low, sweeping gable) and reduced the scale, split the gable, jammed a stairwell-cum-chimney-block behind the split, and punched out a big ugly void below the gable-split for the entrance...

...While appreciation of the Beaux-Arts achievement had received the hieratic sanction of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Scully argues that "the academic synthesis no longer responds to the depth, breadth, and critical awareness of our consciousness...

...There can be no doubt," Scully declares, "that the historicism of the modern movement, which said that we could not do this or that because our times would not let us, must be rejected...

...the glass on the hopelessly minimal exterior of Louis I. Kahn's Yale Center for British Art "explodes with light...

...Compared with most academic architecture historians, Scully has had a decidedly beneficial impact since the late 1960s...

...Scully thus focused on the mandarins and seceded from the built environment at large...

...He has eschewed the role of ideological enforcer, and the classically oriented architecture students at Yale, though an unfashionable minority, have regarded him as a sympathetic figure and a great teacher...

...Perhaps the most bizarre passage in this collection involves Scully's identification, in "Modern Architecture," of a Marseilles housing-project behemoth which Le Corbusier designed after the war as a "humanist" work of art, as defined in The Architecture of Humanism, a brilliant 1914 book by the English critic Geoffrey Scott...

...He compares Le Cor-busier's pilgrimage chapel at Ron-champ, France—whose irregular concrete walls are punched out with slots following no pattern or rhythm and crowned with a massive roof curiously reminiscent of a tricorn hat—to the Parthenon...

...The first essay in Levine's collection, "American Villas: Inventiveness in the American Suburb from Downing to Wright" (1954), concerns the nineteenth-century development of wood-framed cottage architecture in the northeastern United States and its influence on Frank Lloyd Wright's early residential work...

...Here Scully instructively demonstrates the East Coast origins of Wright's Prairie Style architecture...

...Venturi made it cool to employ traditional as well as pop-art and consumer-culture motifs as quasi-literary references, while parodying traditional ideas of form, proportion, and decorum in his buildings...

...the shell of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie creates a "pure environment...

...It was time for modern architecture to take a new tack...

...the architect Richardson was blessed with "pure genius...

...It would not be a great exaggeration to say that Venturi's architecture had to be ugly in order to deny tradition its normative authority, which is unambiguously grounded in beauty...

...That represents a very important part of his legacy, certainly a more important part than Modern Architecture and Other Essays...

...When he retired from Yale in 1991, his final lecture made the front page of the New York Times...

...Scully's lengthy 1981 essay "Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting" was essentially a response...

...Some of the early-twentieth-century figures for whom he expresses admiration in these late essays—George Merrick, developer of the eclectic Miami suburb of Coral Gables, along with the traditional architects Cass Gilbert and John Russell Pope—would have been entitled to little more than dismissive references in his early work...

...Time recognized him as one of the nation's ten "Great Teachers" in 1966, and People ranked him as one of the "12 Great U.S...

...The latter espouses the idea of "the ordered town and the special monu-ment"—which is to say that the general spatial and architectural character of a community is seen in more or less traditional terms, but Frank Gehry is welcome to do a civic building...

...The Architecture of Community" and the last entry, "America at the Millennium: Architecture and Community," which is Scully's White House speech, both focus on urban planning...

...Tunnard's The City of Man (1953) is a harbinger of Duany and Plater-Zyberk's "New Urbanism," while Reed's The Golden City (1959) explained why a resurgence of classical architecture was inevitable...

...In his 1966 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (for which Scully wrote the introduction), Venturi propagates the idea of a building as sociological documentation of "the richness and ambiguity of modern experience...