Prof. Barry Bergdoll has been awarded the Vincent Scully price for excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. The award will be presented at the National Building Museum on October 22 in Washington, DC. Past recipients, include Theaster Gates, Walter Hood, Jane Jacobs, Laurie Olin, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Mabel O. Wilson.
The Vincent Scully Prize, established in 1999, recognizes exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design. It is named for the esteemed professor, and the award’s first recipient, who inspired generations across the building disciplines. Scully was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Miami. For more than four decades his teaching and scholarship have profoundly influenced prominent architects, urban planners, and others.
Barry Bergdoll is one of the world’s most eminent architectural historians. He is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has been a member of the faculty for over three decades. A specialist in the history of modern architecture, he served from 2007 to 2014 as Chief Curator of Architecture & Design at the Museum of Modern Art. His paradigm-shifting exhibitions there have been forward-thinking and unpredictable, making architecture consequential to a broader audience. In particular, exhibitions addressing urgent societal and environmental issues of the time include the groundbreaking Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront (2009-10), Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, and Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 (2015). These exhibitions engaged a wide spectrum of collaborators, bringing important new subjects into the public discourse around architecture. As a public intellectual and architectural historian, he has supported young scholars and mentored generations of practitioners.
Bergdoll has also organized exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay, the Caisse des Monuments Historiques, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture, the Banamex Cultural Center, and the Center for Architecture. He is the author of publications accompanying those exhibitions as well as a widely used textbook, European Architecture: 1750-1890, monographs on Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1994) Mies van der Rohe (2001), Léon Vaudoyer (1994), and (as editor) Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions (2017). He has lectured and taught at institutions around the world and serves on the jury of the Pritzker Prize in Architecture, among other juries in architecture. He is currently working on a volume on the history of exhibiting architecture, derived from the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2013 and an exhibition on the drawings of French architect Viollet-le-Duc to open at the Bard Graduate Center in New York in January 2026. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, among other honors.
For more information and to reserve tickets, visit the National Building Museum website.
Vincent Scully was made an SAH Fellow in 2009.
Barry Bergdoll joined SAH in 1977, and became a Life Member in 2013. He received SAH Exhibition Catalogue awards in 2002, 2010, 2014 and 2017. He was made an SAH Fellow in 2016. He has served on the SAH Board, and was President of SAH from 2006 to 2008.
