Vincent Scully lecture video about FLW 1914-1959

[JChoate]

Some poetic insights typical of Scully. Also some quirky old photographs I haven't seen before.

https://youtu.be/Xp6pZQSn7gI

[SDR]

Oh, joy. Just what I needed, on a slow Friday evening . . .!

S

[SDR]

A bit surprising that the critic was content to show so many images that are stretched vertically . . . or are they squeezed horizontally ?

There are a few missed dates or other minor errors. Scully, clearly a Wright lover, serves the community as an antidote to other iconoclastic biographers who some see as having gone (at least) slightly astray; Brendan Gill comes immediately to mind.

There is, for instance, no Greene & Greene Dodge house---in Pasadena or anywhere else; perhaps Scully is thinking of Irving Gill's Walter Luther Dodge house in West Hollywood (1914-16), which has nothing to do with Wright, Millard, or Greene.

S

[SDR]

The one photo I couldn't identify on the first viewing of this video (I had the sound off; I was watching an episode of "Morse" at the same time. Shoot me . . .) was Scully's unusual shot of Lloyd Lewis---from the rear corner of the bedroom wing, tilted, with the river invisible in the distance. The comparison of Lewis with Pauson (likewise seen from the "rear" corner), where he refers to the same sorts of forms as modified to suit location, is the kind of surprise insight Scully could be counted on to provide. (Comparing Olive Hill to exposition architecture, in terms of its lightweight construction built for effect, is not entirely inapt, is it ?)

No, there are not four LA houses in the 'twenties, there are five. He means to speak of the Textile Block houses as a group of four but inadvertently includes Hollyhock House in his count. No, Laura Gale is not 1918, it is a decade earlier; again a verbal typo. No, not all of Wright's houses leak; he knows better than that but can't contain the impulse to dramatize a Wrightian flaw---a tiresome cliché he could well have avoided.

S

[Roderick Grant]

As long as SDR is niggling, Scully also has water running uphill from the Hollyhock moat to the circular pond. The flow was the other way, down 3' in level to the square pond on the west façade.

Vince also got the exact construction of Millard wrong. The textile system we all know came first at Storer, while La Miniatura had male/female blocks back to back with vertical metal straps placed every 4'.

The father/mother thing between Larkin and Johnson is a bit too armchair for my liking.

Recent study of Teotihuacan has determined that the Aztecs didn't build it, but came upon it by accident - deserted by whom, no one knows - and moved in. But Vince wouldn't have had that information.

[Rood]

There is, for instance, no Greene & Greene Dodge house---in Pasadena or anywhere else; perhaps Scully is thinking of Irving Gill's Walter Luther Dodge house in West Hollywood (1914-16), which has nothing to do with Wright, Millard, or Greene. S

Scully frequently tended to get carried away with himself. The house in Pasadena he meant to reference was probably the Gamble House, by Greene & Greene

la.curbed.com/2018/1/3/16846440/pasadena-gamble-house-craftsman-greene-and-greene

[SDR]

No doubt; whichever Greene brothers opus is nearest to Millard ? An irrelevant aside in Scully's talk, at any rate . . .

S

[Roderick Grant]

Gamble is a short walk from La Min.