Apples and Oranges, Chalk and Cheese. Vincent Scully and Bannister Fletcher had very different approaches to History of Architecture, but both made huge contributions.
I have known Sir Bannister’s door-stopper of a book since I was a teenager and it immediately appealed to the young drawing addict that I was (still am). Vincent entered my life later, stumbling across a copy of his “The Natural and the Man Made” in a second hand bookshop in Harare, Zimbabwe about 20 years ago.
THE GREEK TEMPLE WAS an image of victory. It embodied the Greek conquest of the Aegean … expressive of human qualities and challenging the divinity who was embodied in the landscape’s shapes. The old imitation of the forms of the earth was given up … out of that confrontation between nature’s fact and human desire, the luminous structure of Greek Classic thought took form … Architecture itself was never to be the same again. It developed a new language, strictly structured, supple, and…