Between 1937 and 1938, Scott was the President of the AAI and was instrumental in bringing Walter Gropius (1883-1969) to Dublin where he gave a lecture at the Engineers Hall in Molesworth Street on 10 November 1936. The lecture was entitled 'The International Trend of Modern Architecture' and was heavily reported in architectural journals and other publications by John O'Gorman who was Ireland's great exponent of the International Modern style. He performed much the same role for The Irish Builder and Engineer as P. Morton Shand did for the Architectural Review in London. O'Gorman was also an outspoken critic of the older generation of Irish architects, who persisted in designing and educating in outmoded styles, particularly Rudolph Maximillian Butler (1872-1943), the Professor of Architecture at UCD. O'Gorman started his review with a tirade against them:
The large and representative audience which assembled to hear the eminent German architect, Dr Walter Gropius, on 'The International Trend of Modern Architecture' may be regarded as an encouraging omen for the future of architecture in Ireland, consisting as it did of so many of those successful architects whose life-work has been a negation of everything that Gropius stands for, sitting side-by-side with those of a younger generation who are faced with the thankless case of undoing the harm caused by their elders.
This lecture was based on Gropius' recently published book The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935) and the conclusion of the address was almost word for word the final page of the book. Scott later stated in an interview with Build magazine on the importance of the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius to his architectural development that:
The Bauhaus was a remarkable event in the history of architecture. It had a dramatic event on the whole creative world. When I became aware of it, I really began to understand what I was doing.
Scott's position as President of the AAI was the result of the influence wielded by his friend Vincent Kelly, influence that was to result in Scott receiving the commission for the New York World Fair of 1939. Shortly before Gropius' visit, Vincent Kelly was responsible for a book review of Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design (1936) in the magazine Ireland Today. This is an early indication of the way that Scott and a few friends would come to dominate the arts and patronage after the Second World War. According to Ciaran MacGonigal, Scott had a 'high regard for power', political or otherwise and would always try to cultivate those with it.
During this period, he was also responsible for bringing other architects, designers and artists to speak to the AAI, including Erich Mendelssohn (1887-1953) whose lecture was titled 'Rebuilding the World', in which he traced the basic reasons for the natural development of modern architecture. Other speakers included the typographer Eric Gill (1882-1940), the artist Sean Keating, Frank Yerbury from the Architectural Association in London, R.S. Wilshere (who was the architect to the Belfast Corporation Education Committee and heavily influenced by Dudok) and Lennox Robinson (1886-1958), a dramatist and producer with the Abbey Theatre.
