Yale University art historian Vincent Scully, "whose lectures inspired students for more than 60 years and whose writings on architecture had a decisive influence on its practice in the last half of the 20th century," died November 30, the New York Times reported. He was 97. Author of books on Greek temples, Palladio's villas and the American Indian pueblo, as well as many more on the architecture of modernism, Scully "treated the history of every culture and every period as if it were in continual dialogue with his own time."
Former New York Times and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who was one of Scully's students, said, "I think he probably did more than anyone else over the last 60 years to affect not just architecture but architecture culture as well. He showed us that architecture is not just forms in a vacuum. It's about what kind of society you want to build."
Scully's books include American Architecture and Urbanism (1969); Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade (1991); The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright (1955); Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance (1975); and Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (2004, with Catherine Lynn, Paul Goldberger and Eric Vogt).