Author Description

Vincent Scully, Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, is one of the outstanding writers and lecturers on architecture today. This fully illustrated history of American architecture and city planning shows him at his pungent and controversial best. The book is based on his conviction that architecture and city planning are inseparably linked and must therefore be treated in conjunction; indeed, he defines architecture as a 'continuing dialogue between generations which creates an environment across time.' His survey therefore extends beyond the cities themselves to the American scene as a whole, which has inspired the 'reasonable balanced, closed and ordered forms, and above all the 'probity, ' that he considers to be typical of American architecture. Professor Scully traces the full cycle of development from the settlements of the Pueblo Indians (the first true urban communities in the continental area of the United States) to the urban megastructures which are being projected today. He describes the qualities shared by buildings as diverse as the mission churches of the South-west and the seventeenth and eighteenth century houses of New England, explaining how the New England towns beautifully expressed the adaptation of the European, and especially the English, classical heritage to American ideals and conditions. Moving on to the nineteenth century and then to the modern period, he examines the work of Frank Furness, H.H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan; the New York skyscrapers; and the emergence of the Beaux Arts School, and of the Prairie School represented by Frank Lloyd Wright. He interprets afresh the influence of the International School and the Bauhaus in our own time, and discusses the work of such major contemporary architects as Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi and Moshe Safdie. Professor Scully concludes with a searching analysis of the role of architecture and urban planning today,