Passionate humanist: modern architecture and other essays - Reviews - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2003 by Jeremy Melvin

MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND OTHER ESSAYS

By Vincent Scully, selected and with introductions by Neil Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003. [pounds sterling]29.95

Placing modernity in relation to tradition calls for a confidence and mastery of material and method that few present-day architectural historians have. But Vincent Scully, doyen of American practitioners of that trade, has rather more than the normal adult dose. When he started his influential career over half a century ago, understanding the oeuvres of the still active Frank Lloyd Wright, Gropius and Le Corbusier had an urgency that compelled him to delve into the very origins of Modernism. Finding more in Wright and the tradition of American democracy, which formed him than the other two, led Scully to look closely at the relationships between urban form, topography and society, as well as individual works of architecture. These studies culminated in an address given at the White House on 'America at the Millennium: Architecture and Community', which Hillary Clinton called 'subversive', though she admitted to being 'very grateful for that'.

With only 20 essays, this volume indicates rather than charts Scully's trajectory, though Neil Levine's selection and commentary are enough to flesh the work out into an impression, if not a summary of Scully's career. There will still be those who find his championing of the 'New Urbanism' of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk difficult to take in someone who initially showed such sympathy towards Modernism, but the sequence of essays shows an underlying consistency of development. It was precisely that sympathy that led him to question Modernist urbanism, to delve back to his graduate work on American architecture of the late nineteenth century--he coined the now common terms 'stick' and 'shingle' style--and even further to the Greek polis for more appropriate urban models.

In both he found a close connection between urban form and topography, a relationship to nature that European Modernism almost completely elided. From that position it was a short step to look at the axis leading out of Princeton through Kahn and Venturi ('Everyone Needs Everything', an analysis of the Vanna Venturi house from Kahnian to the familiar design, is very telling), interwoven with Mumford (faintly) and Jane Jacobs, for more meaningful and relevant approaches to relating architecture and urbanism--at least within the context of the American city.

Covering diverse themes from Classicism to Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright to suburbia, each essay is telling in its own right. But whatever the ostensible theme, almost every one charts a growing awareness of Modernism's complex roots and relationships to tradition. Above all it identifies a strand of humanity and engagement with context (natural or artificial) within the American tradition of Jefferson to Venturi and Charles Moore which Europeans like to overlook and from which they could learn much. Anyone who doubts this might consider whether Mrs Blair would ever express gratitude for subversion.