The Hammock Papers: Vincent Scully, R.I.P.

16 January 2018

Vincent Scully, R.I.P.

Vincent Scully passed on November 30, 2017.

It was one of the best compliments I have received in a long time. After seeing me lecture recently, a classmate of mine from my time at Yale University remarked: “You give pretty good Scully.” As someone whose eyes were opened to architecture by Vincent Scully, who passed away at the age of 97 last week, I couldn’t have been more flattered. For Scully not only taught me architecture, he also talked about architecture in a manner that made me believe it was the most beautiful and important human act. He changed my world not just by what he said, but how he said it. I have, along with many others, been aspiring to live up to the challenge of the greatest architecture teacher of the 20th century for most of my life.

Many of the obituaries that have appeared this last week have mentioned how Professor Scully could keep an auditorium full of us students at Yale completely rapt, rapping the screen with his pointer. All the while, he would be driving home the many ways that the buildings he showed responded to the landscape and to our popular culture, but, above all, to the human drive to mean. Great architecture did that in a manner so effective because it was built—a fact, a soaring aspiration in fact, a fact on and in the ground, a fact all around you.

For Scully, architecture was a way to experience our dreams and our fears, both individually and as a society. The classic Scully lecture for me was the one about American Neo-Classicism. He would describe Robert Kennedy’s body traveling across the country from where he was assassinated in Los Angeles, showing us images of people lining the railroad yard to be present as they saw their hope pass by. He would then trace the body’s arrival in Washington, D.C.—where Kennedy’s cortège moved past the city’s great monuments. Scully used that trip to discuss those memorials: Classicism, he pointed out, was a container for our shared values and our shared grief. At its best, it is truly monumental in its ability to fix and remind us what was important to us as humans.

CONNECT

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL