American Architecture and Urbanism

by Vincent Scully

Illustrated history of American architectural styles and city planning has special emphasis on today's redevelopment and urban sprawl problems

Genres: Architecture, Art

275 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 1988

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The American Architects and their Building series was a lot better. Starting with the picture quality; maybe I just got some facsimile copy from Amazon, but it doesn't really look that way. I had to go back to pictures in the other books if they had pictures of the same buildings in order to see any details. There are many, many pictures, some of which are not linked very well with the text.

It's true that Scully was trying to say something about urbanism, I guess, but what? From that point of view, he doesn't need to speak so much about engineering of the buildings as Jordy and Pierson did, but nonetheless their explication of how the buildings were built was enlightening for me. There isn't a clear thread in the book relating the architecture he shows and criticizes to the development of cities. I guess he does say a bit about the social background of the New England village and he mentions the "Garden City" concept a lot without really defining it. He has a tone of irony or maybe you could call it snark, that is sometimes amusing but also is not useful in teaching or explaining his thoughts or clearly stating a thesis. Somewhat disappointing. Seems kind of slapdash, free associating on U.S. architectural history with a lot of pictures.

[RC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apparently a forgotten gem. Scully's writing is provocative, and never boring, with lines that will stay with you. Describing colonial New England architecture: "It was indeed middle-class building, self-contained, even smug, not generous, but square and straight, like decency made visible," (39) and New England's colonial churches: "the American spires assert their colonial compulsion toward shapes which are unwavering and pure," "[t]hey burn with that passion for reason, intellectual clarity, and legalistic justice." (47) Or describing Frank Furness's Provident Life & Trust building in Philadelphia: "a Philadelphia row house worked up into a paroxysm at once athletic and mechanical, of mass man, hulking forward, a great golem of industrialism clanking away." (97) Or the "awesomely Cyclopean-Piranesian Allegheny County Court House and Jail." (103)

Scully makes masterful use of cross-references to plates to show the cross-references in American architecture -- both the quotations of the past and the prolepsis of the anticipations of the past -- to develop his suprisingly cohesive thesis that American architecture struggles between the "contained, classical geometry" of "the fixed European past," exemplified by Jefferson's Monticello, and "an instinct to spread out horizontally along the surface of the land," (52) exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright, and later nightmarish echoes of Le Corbusier and his Ville Radieuse, the blasted, joyless concrete wastelands of Robert Moses's fever dreams, cities devastated by massive horizontal freeways bending the city to the will of the automobile -- reaching an apotheosis at the end of the horizon in Los Angeles. The book is haunted by the malicious ghost of Le Corbusier, who would "ideally have" "bomb[ed] the whole city and start[ed] over . . . ." (224)

A powerful little book about American architecture through the late 60s whose insights will stay with you.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a broad, often poetic, and somewhat impressionistic exploration of American architecture (and, more briefly, urbanism). Scully's writing can be odd, but his vision, image choices, and comparisons are top tier.

[Chuck Oliva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterwork from the premier architectural critic of the post-modern era. Filled with important insights about who we are and the way we choose to live.