Thursday, October 30, 2025
“The world we design matters,” said National Building Museum President and Executive Director Aileen Fuchs, welcoming attendees to the 2025 Vincent Scully Prize ceremony, held in the museum’s Great Hall on Oct. 22.
Son of a New Haven Chevy dealer, at age 16 Vincent Scully entered Yale, parking himself for more than half a century. In 1949, upon completion of his Ph.D., he joined the faculty, teaching until his 1991 retirement, when he became Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, and beyond.
A prolific author — notably of “The Earth, the Temple and the Gods” of 1962 and “American Architecture and Urbanism” of 1969 — Scully was a key interpreter of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis I. Kahn and Robert Venturi and a prominent advocate for historic preservation.
“Scully mobilized audiences nationwide,” said University of Arkansas architecture professor Stephen Luoni at the ceremony. Using an approach he called “visual empiricism,” with signature doses of wit, Scully instilled the idea that “architecture is the construction of the environment, not individual buildings.”
Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott (right) asks Scully Prize laureate Barry Bergdoll a question during their conversation following Bergdoll’s remarks. Photo by Elman Studio. Courtesy NBM.
The first Vincent Scully Prize, which “recognizes exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design,” went to its namesake in 1999. (Scully died in 2017, aged 97.) The following year, it was awarded to Jane Jacobs, author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Last year’s prize went to designer Walter Hood, professor emeritus of landscape architecture, environmental planning and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley.
This year’s laureate, the 27th: Barry Bergdoll.
Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught for over 30 years, Bergdoll was the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of architecture and design from 2007 to 2014. His MoMA exhibitions included: “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” (five full-scale prototypes were delivered to an adjacent vacant lot); “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront”; “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”; and “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980.”
Bergdoll was introduced by former New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger. A student of Scully’s at Yale and the 2012 Scully Prize laureate, Goldberger chaired this year’s prize jury, on which Luoni, Places Editor and Executive Director Nancy Levinson, architect Toshiko Mori and Andrea Roberts, associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, also served.
“Nearly every previous recipient has inspired me,” said Bergdoll, who began his slide talk with the comment: “I’m an art historian. I can’t speak without images.” Initially referencing the 1792 competition that resulted in the selection of Irish immigrant James Hoban as White House architect, he spoke about attempts to balance design excellence with public engagement. “A city that is of one man only is no longer a city,” he said, quoting from Sophocles’ play “Antigone.”
Bergdoll then surveyed the history of architecture exhibitions, the topic of a current book project rooted in the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts he gave at the National Gallery of Art in 2013. With the caveat that “exhibitions have often been ideal media for propaganda,” he traced a path leading to “the advocacy exhibition,” a show meant to publicly raise an issue, using his MoMA exhibitions as case studies.
In the conversation with Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott that followed, Kennicott asked Bergdoll how he was able to pull off issue-based exhibitions such as “Rising Currents” and “Foreclosed,” which featured workshops with architect-in-residence teams at MoMA PS1. Acknowledging that there was some “pushback,” Bergdoll said that “one of the secret weapons” was funding from the Ford Foundation under Darren Walker. Taking place in 2009 and 2010, “Rising Currents” turned out to be prophetic when “Superstorm Sandy” hit New York in late October of 2012.
Bergdoll noted that MoMA was “much more experimental,” even “scruffy,” in its early years, adding that many more women were involved with the museum then, especially in the architecture and design department.
Unavoidably, the conversation touched on Trump administration policies, proposals and actions. Asked about the “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” executive order, Bergdoll — who stated, “I’m not an anti-classicist, if you will” — said of federal government intrusion into design, “I think it’s unconscionable.”
Regarding efficiency in federal building projects, he commented: “So far we’ve only seen an efficiency of destruction.” As for the proposed Independence Arch, Bergdoll pointed out that, historically, that type of monument was built to welcome home a victorious army. “It’s not quite clear what the arch is meant to receive,” he said.
The evening’s Q&A ended shortly after it began with, oddly, statements from two audience members about bike lanes, one con and one pro.
Created by an act of Congress in 1980, the National Building Museum at 401 F St. NW — originally the Pension Building, completed in 1887 to the designs of U.S. Army Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs — opened as a museum in 1985. Current exhibitions, in addition to the family-oriented “Building Stories,” “Brick City” and “Mimi Memories,” are: “House & Home,” about “what it means to be at home in America”; “A South Forty: Contemporary Architecture and Design in the American South”; and the new “Coming Together: Reimagining America’s Downtowns,” part of the museum’s multiyear “Future Cities” initiative.
Act fast to attend two Halloween events. Tonight, Thursday, Oct. 30, the museum will host an Art Deco Masquerade from 6 to 9 p.m. Tomorrow, Friday, Oct. 31, a Spooky History Tour sets out at 8 p.m.