On Nov. 15, Yale alumnus Paul Goldberger ’72 was awarded the National Building Museum’s 14th annual Vincent Scully Prize, an honor named after history of art professor Vincent Scully ’40 GRD ’49 — the Sterling Professor who mentored Goldberger while he was an undergraduate at Yale.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, Goldberger received his prize during a public presentation at the museum last week, where he delivered a talk entitled “Architectural Criticism in the Age of Twitter.” Maya Lin ’81 ARC ’86, who designed the Women’s Table in front of Sterling Memorial Library, gave the opening remarks.
In an interview with the National Building Museum, Goldberger — author of the book “Why Architecture Matters” — said Scully first exposed him to the architecture discipline in high school when he took a field trip to Yale.
“Architecture had an almost holy aura in that lecture hall,” Goldberger said in the interview.
The Scully Prize was established in 1999 by the National Building Museum and is among the most renowned prizes in the architecture field. It is awarded yearly in recognition of “exemplary practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design.”