SEASIDE, Fla. (www.seasidefl.com), Jan. 17, 2018 – The Town of Seaside is pleased to announce that world-renowned street artist Andrew Pisacane, known as “Gaia,” is paying tribute to America’s greatest historian and educator of art and architecture, Vincent Scully, with a wall-sized mural on Seaside’s purple wall at 25 Central Square.
Scully’s death last November was mourned by lovers of architecture and urbanism throughout the world. Scully taught architectural history for more than 50 years at Yale University and for almost 20 years at University of Miami. He also authored more than 20 books. His undergraduate lectures at Yale were always standing-room-only, as he was known as the most dramatic, impassioned and erudite teacher at the university.
Scully was one of Seaside’s early supporters and influenced many who contributed their design, planning and architecture talents to Seaside, several of them his students at Yale and many more who read his books or attended his lectures in Seaside. In a New York Times article, Robert Stern, founder and senior partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects and until recently Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said, “Professor Scully was more than a teacher. He was a critic and a passionate public intellectual. He brought his interests, intellect and knowledge to bear on the world around him. Thanks to him, generations of architects, urbanists and scholars learned to see the world around them through the lens of human tradition and experience.” (Stern’s successor at Yale, Deborah Berke, designed numerous buildings in Seaside early in her career. Stern has also designed buildings in Seaside.)
Scully was revered for being able to explain the innate relationship between architectural style, urbanism and the environment to the mainstream. He inspired future architects with the idea of reconnecting contemporary architecture with its past, thereby planting seeds that grew into the New Urbanism movement.
He taught some of the prominent architects who built in Seaside such as Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Alexander Gorlin, Robert Orr, Ernesto Buch and Robert Stern. Duany and Plater-Zyberk established the DPZ architecture firm and led Seaside’s “Night Crew,” a group of early Seaside designers. In later years, Scully acknowledged Seaside’s impact. “Robert and DPZ put together a kind of way that people seem to want to live, especially people who can afford it,” said Scully. “They’ve turned it around. It’s changed the whole coast.”
“Professor Scully helped us see preservation not simply as a matter of saving buildings, but of saving whole communities,” said Stern in the New York Times article. “He inspired two of his students, Mr. Duany and Ms. Plater-Zyberk, to formulate what would become New Urbanism, a set of ideas and practices that returned city planning to traditional patterns of streets and defined public spaces — a movement so successful that it is hard to imagine a developer trying to build a conventional strip mall ever again.”
“Gaia,” known for his murals about people and neighborhoods, pays artistic tribute to Scully with a mural that depicts a thoughtful portrait of Scully and a background image of the Acropolis from the cover of Scully’s influential book, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture,” said architect and urbanist Dhiru Thadani. True to most of his works, Gaia’s mural of Scully is affected by his experiences from around the world as well as his deep interest in making place, celebrating history and reinforcing community. “We are excited about Gaia depicting Scully in this larger-than-life mural,” said Thadani, “because he shares his artistic skills in capturing the essence of people who have helped shape the environment.”
“The project offers Seaside visitors a cultural and historical experience through the eyes of mural artist Gaia, and portrays the importance and impact Scully had on the town of Seaside,” said Seaside co-founder Robert Davis. Visitors can view the mural from Hwy 30A in Seaside.
Plater-Zyberk, Dean Emeritus of the University of Miami’s School of Architecture and a Scully student, will lead a tribute to Scully on Sat., Feb. 24, at 6 p.m., on the lawn in front of the mural, weather permitting.
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Photo 1:
Andrew Pisacane, known as Gaia, pays artistic tribute to Vincent Scully with a mural that depicts a thoughtful portrait of Scully, America’s greatest historian and educator of art and architecture. Brandan Babineaux photo
Photo 2:
Seaside visitors are stopping by to witness the creation of the wall-sized mural on Seaside’s purple wall at 25 Central Square. Street artist “Gaia” is paying tribute to America’s greatest historian and educator of art and architecture, Vincent Scully, with this artistic portrait. Fletcher Isaacs photo
About Vincent Scully, 1920-2017
Vincent J. Scully Jr. was born in New Haven and attended Hillhouse High School, on the site of what would later become Morse College, where he served as master from 1969 to 1975, and died and died in November 2017 at age 97. For a half a century, Scully has taught hundreds of students in packed lecture halls at Yale. He published many articles and more than a dozen books which span a wide spectrum of subject matter, and was one of the University’s most recognized scholars.
Observing early in his teaching career that urban development during the 1950s tended to destroy neighborhoods by the imposition of freeways and superblocks, Scully argued fervently that the principles of modernism are incompatible with communal values. Several of his students have become important American architects, and his influence is now present in the design of many urban and suburban sites throughout the nation.
Among Scully’s most well-known works are The Shingle Style: Architectural Theory and Design from Richardson to the Origins of Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture, Louis I. Kahn, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, The Villas of Palladio and Architecture: the Natural and the Manmade.
About Gaia
Gaia grew up in New York City and is a 2011 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art with a Bachelor in Fine Arts. His studio work, installations and gallery projects have been exhibited throughout the world most notably The Baltimore Museum of Art, Rice Gallery in Houston and Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive in Spoleto and the Civil and Human Rights Museum in Atlanta. His street work has been documented and featured in several books on urban art, including Beyond the Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art, (Berlin, 2010) and Outdoor Gallery (New York, 2014). Gaia was listed as a 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art and Style recipient in Art and Style and was a Fullbright beneficiary to study and paint in New Delhi on behalf of the State Dept. Gaia lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, but spends a majority of his time painting murals across the world and has produced works in all six habitable continents. Visit @gaiastreetart on Instagram and facebook.com/gaiastreetart/ to view some of his accomplished artwork.
About Seaside
Seaside, built on 80 acres on Northwest Florida’s Gulf Coast, is located on South Walton County’s Hwy. 30-A. Acclaimed world-wide as one of the iconic examples of New Urbanism, Seaside offers a thriving town center with shopping and dining, all within walkable distance to homes, cottages and offices. Consisting of more than 400 homes, many of them vacation rentals, the community offers 18 restaurants and eateries, and 44 shops, galleries and services.
Seaside is included on Cooking Channel’s Emeril’s Florida, Business Insider’s ” 18 of the most beautiful public spaces in the world,” according to urban designers, PBS “10 Towns that Changed America,” one of Trip Advisor’s 2016 “15 Rising Vacation Rental Destinations,” Travel Channel’s “2015 Best Family Beach,” named Travel + Leisure’s “Best Beach on Earth” for families (2014) and included in USA Today’s “Top 10 Best Beach Towns in Florida (2013) by “Dr. Beach,” to name a few. The holiday town was also the primary filming location of the classic movie “The Truman Show.”
Seaside is a prominent topic in architectural schools and housing-industry magazines, is visited by design professionals from throughout the United States, and is included in the American Institute of Architects (Florida chapter) list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years 100 Places.
For more information about Seaside, please visit www.seasidefl.com
