At 89, Yale’s Vincent Scully Retires (Again)

The architecture historian Vincent Scully is retiring again from Yale University, where he has taught since 1947 and where he accepted emeritus status—not entirely willingly, if memory serves—way back in 1991. Mr. Scully, the most celebrated lecturer on architecture in modern times, said he did not feel well enough to teach his “Introduction to the History of Art” survey course this semester, according to The Yale Daily News.

Mr. Scully, 89, is credited with having inspired generations of Yale students to an appreciation for art and especially architecture. He is known particularly for his course on Modernist design, but as a writer he has ranged eloquently across centuries of building. Here is a passage about the 19th-century Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, from his 1969 book titled American Architecture and Urbanism:

For the Provident Life and Trust Company, of 1879, surely his grandest success, [Furness] appropriated one of the entrance pavilions of Viollet-le-Duc’s Château de Pièrrefonds, lifted it off the ground, and dropped it, as if from a great height, upon a tough little building whose walls all compacted under the impact, arches fracturing in compression, while the roofs of the wings fell in upon the main mass and, most of all, the polished columns were driven like brass pistons into rupturing cylinders, screeching with heat.

Since his first retirement, Mr. Scully has taught at Yale during the fall semester and at the University of Miami during the spring. He will now devote himself to research and writing, he said.