the vision of urban planners
Yale professor Vincent Scully, considered one of the nation's foremost architectural historians and critics, has been selected as the fourth annual recipient of the Urban Land Institute's (ULI) J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionary Urban Development.
The Nichols Prize honors an individual whose career reflects a commitment to the highest standards of responsible development. The $100,000 prize is named for Kansas City, Missouri, developer J.C. Nichols, a founding ULI member, who had a wide impact on land use in the first half of the 20th century. Scully will receive the prize at a luncheon next month in New York.
Scully, who is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Art, has taught several generations of many of the nation's most prominent architects, urban planners, scholars, developers and politicians. At the age of 83, he continues to fill Yale lecture halls to capacity with his courses on the history of architecture and the history of art, alternating the two from year to year.
He is the author of many books that have helped to shape public discourse about the built environment, including "American Architecture and Urbanism," "The Shingle Style and the Stick Style" and "The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods." A collection of some of his most influential pieces, "Modern Architecture and Other Essays," was published earlier this year.
Scully has advocated planned, small developments modeled on traditional small towns, touting such diversified towns with convenient public spaces as a way of restoring a sense of community in a car-dominated culture. Although he was never officially on the faculty of the Yale School of Architecture, he insisted that those who would practice architecture should learn its history, a position that went against the prevailing current of modernism when he introduced it to the classroom.
The selection of Scully, an academic, represents an additional aspect of the built environment that is recognized by the Nichols Prize, notes Peter S. Rummell, chair of the selection jury.
"It takes academics to create an intellectual stimulus, which is what the award was designed to celebrate," Rummell says. "Nobody has thought about community design in a richer way than Vincent Scully. The people he has taught have had enormous influence on urban planning and design ... they understand that architecture is but one piece of what you do, and that only when planning is done in the whole is a sense of place achieved. Scully has a great ability to put things in context, to show that urban design is not just about architecture."
Scully's selection as the 2003 Nichols Prize laureate is a tribute to "using the power of ideas to influence development," according to one of Scully's former students, the noted architectural critic Paul Goldberger, who also served on the Nichols Prize selection jury.
"Through his writing, his deep and constant civic engagement, and most of all his lifetime of teaching at Yale, Vincent Scully has had an extraordinary influence on the shape of the American city," says Goldberger. "He has always taught that the point of architecture is not just the making of buildings but the making of civilized communities ... His thinking has always been based on the notion that architecture is not purely aesthetics, and that the real meaning (of architecture) is how it can be used to make better places. He has taught the social value of architecture not just to architects, but to lawyers, real estate developers and others who have made the world a better place."
The Urban Land Institute (www.uli.org) is a non-profit education and research institute that seeks to provide responsible leadership in the use of land in order to enhance the total environment. Established in 1936, the institute has more than 18,000 members representing all aspects of land use and development disciplines.
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