Vincent Scully: An Art Historian Among Architects (DVD)

Vincent Scully is probably the best-known living art historian in the United States today. Until recently he was still teaching at his alma mater, Yale University, where a wide variety of students were drawn to his undergraduate history of art and architecture courses. For years, Scully's deep engagement with the subject and his passionate presentation style have inspired his students to value these subjects. Many of them have gone on to become prominent architects, historians, or clients of architecture. In his lectures and his more than 20 books on architecture, Scully's insights are eye-opening and have championed the work of such modern architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, and Aldo Rossi. He has focused on topics ranging from the American Shingle Style of the late 19th Century, which he identified and named, to a reassessment of Greek temples and their response to the surrounding landscape. The breadth and depth of his knowledge, which includes a close familiarity with literature as well as with the visual arts, lends a special richness to his historical interpretations. This hour-long film, shot in High Definition, explores the phenomenon of Scully, tracing his connection to New Haven, where he was born, and to Yale from the time he entered as a freshman in 1936 to the present. It follows the arc of his interests in classical art and architecture to American architecture, historic preservation, and urban design in the 20th Century. A number of architects and former students contribute to this dialogue, including David Childs, Andres Duany, Peter Eisenman, Paul Goldberger, John Hale, David McCullough, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Robert A.M. Stern, and Robert Venturi.