The National Building Museum has announced that Dolores Hayden, professor emerita of architecture, urbanism, and American studies at Yale University, is this year’s recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize. As an urban historian and architect, Dolores Hayden has focused throughout her career on the politics of place and the stereotypes of gender and race embedded in American-built environments. As the 24th recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize, Dolores Hayden joins esteemed past recipients, including Mabel O. Wilson, Elizabeth Meyer, Robert Campbell, and Inga Saffron.
With her focus on the politics of place, gender studies, and urban planning, Dolores Hayden is a true pioneer in using the built environment to document the history of gender, class, and race. We are excited to recognize her achievements and impact, which align closely with the work and mission of the Museum around equity and promoting social justice in the built environment. - Aileen Fuchs, National Building Museum President, and Executive Director
The awarding ceremony, scheduled on Monday, October 3, 2022, will include a presentation by Professor Hayden. She will discuss the “urbanism of care” and the benefits of cities’ investment in public infrastructure extending beyond water supply, paved streets, and schools in order to include childcare centers in workplaces, free kindergartens, and public kitchens. During this presentation, Professor Hayden advocates and promotes an “urbanism of care”, as an integral part of sustainable development. She will draw upon her work documenting the beginnings of the concept from the 1860s through the 1920s when women proposed a broader definition of public infrastructure.
Beginning in the 1970s, Dolores Hayden pioneered the analysis of the American built environments with a focus on the history of gender, class, and race. Three of her six award-winning books critique speculative tract housing and commercial development: Redesigning the American Dream, Building Suburbia, and A Field Guide to Sprawl. Material feminists’ neighborhoods are explored in The Grand Domestic Revolution, while Seven American Utopias is focused on nineteenth-century socialists’ model towns. Hayden has also founded a non-profit organization to celebrate the labor of women, men, and children of all ethnic backgrounds in downtown Los Angeles.
Dolores Hayden’s work continues Vincent Scully’s research on American architecture and urbanism. Her work both unearths little-known built precedents of socially progressive housing types and demands that we question whose needs and aspirations were served by the policies that manufactured ‘the American Dream.’ Her powerful voice has inspired and emboldened diverse audiences including next-generation feminists, placemakers, and New Urbanist planners alike, and remains extremely relevant. - Ellen Dunham-Jones, Scully Prize Jury Chair
The Vincent Scully Prize was established in 1999 to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. Vincent Scully, the award’s first recipient, was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University. For more than four decades his teaching and scholarship have influenced prominent architects, urban planners, and others. The Vincent Scully Prize recipient is selected by a jury, including members James Corner, Paul Goldberger, Walter Hood, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and led by chair Ellen Dunham-Jones.
