It is no tragedy to die at the age of ninety-seven, as Vincent Scully did last November, certainly not after a life as full and accomplished as his. He was America’s most significant historian of architecture, and surely the only one who could have claimed to have changed the course of American architecture. During his half-century at Yale University, he left his mark on generations of consequential architects, from Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Robert A. M. Stern down to Maya Lin, Andrés Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. And yet there is a note of melancholy in Scully’s elegies, and not just because there is no understudy waiting in the wings to take his place. It is rather that the qualities that he sought in buildings—the heroic, the humanistic, the tragic—hold little relevance to today’s incurious culture.

Scully was born in New Haven in 1920 and—except for World War II and an extended stay in Rome—his entire life revolved around the city and Yale University. He received his undergraduate degree at Yale, from which as an Irish Catholic he felt a sense of social exclusion. After military service he returned to Yale, receiving his Ph.D. in 1949, by which time he was already delivering a rough version of what would become his spellbindingly rhapsodic lectures. He begrudgingly accepted compulsory retirement at age seventy, although he continued to lecture into his nineties.

Although Scully wrote a dozen books—most notably The Shingle Style—it was the lectures that