Specialization, according to a familiar quip, is the condition of coming to know more and more about less and less, until one knows everything about nothing.
The historian and critic Vincent Scully (1920–2017) did not suffer from this condition. He may have refused to write about places he had not visited in person, but in other regards his work was staggeringly expansive. Over the course of his long career, he published on the orientation of ancient Greek temples and the rituals of Pueblo architecture, on Palladian villas and French gardens, on Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, on Modernism and New Urbanism. Possessed of an infectious enthusiasm for architecture as the setting for humanity’s aspirations writ large, he refused to compartmentalize his commitments, allowing his critique of the present to inform his reading of history and his hopes for the future. He published prodigiously. But above all, he taught. At one point, nearly a fifth of Yale’s undergraduates took his courses each year.
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