Sullivan's City - The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan & Louis Sullivan - The Poetry of Architecture. . - Ornament isn't Crime - book review

Architectural Review, The, March, 2002 by Francis Duffy

David van Zanten, London: W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. [pounds sterling]40

Robert Twombley and Narciso G. Menocal. London: W. W. Norton & Company. 2001. [pounds sterling]30

Understanding Louis Sullivan had been made difficult, at least for me, by three apparent obstacles -- first, the image of him as a bitter and disappointed John the Baptist (born only to make the way clear first for Frank Lloyd Wright and then for Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius) that emerges in Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture; second, his strained, Whitmanesque, and diffuse prose style -- for example, the generalities that often cloud the narrative of The Autobiography of an Idea; and, third, by what seemed to me for a long time, I now believe for the wrong reasons, the out-landishness and over-elaboration of his decorative schemes -- the equivalent in design terms of his over-strained writing.

I simply couldn't relate Sullivan's tendency to graphic and verbal abstraction with his much more obviously masterful architectural contributions: the Lieber Meister's early reputation as 'the nation's most innovative high rise designer', and particularly the ease and conviction with which he reconciled vertical and horizontal themes in the high office buildings he designed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The essays in these two very well illustrated and attractive books fill many gaps, clear up much of the mystery, and make it possible to understand how this very great architect's intellectual milieu shaped his designs. Studying these books has led me to make three resolutions.

The first is to stop thinking of Sullivan as primarily an architect of tall office buildings. His work is much more versatile and more interesting -- as the 'mixed use' programme for the Auditorium building had already demonstrated as early as 1890 and his later work on low-rise banks and houses, so well described in David van Zantem's synoptic book, very clearly demonstrates. In fact, it becomes very clear from Robert Twombley's more analytical essay, 'A Poet's Garden', that Sullivan's early achievements in the design of tall office buildings have to be reconciled with his growing concern for a more diverse and amenable urbanism than late nineteeth-century Chicago and certainly New York were ever able to represent. Twombley explains how Sullivan was unable to hide his growing antipathy for unbridled entrepreneurialism, for example, in his inability to satisfy both 'the public welfare' (terms he used in a 1891 newspaper essay) with 'the landlord's right to build as he chooses?.

Such high principled concerns about urbanistic and social issues seem to be a more probable and a more challenging explanation of Sullivan's relative failure as a commercial architect in the latter part of his career than the stylistic shift that Giedion proposed. The second resolution stimulated by these two books is to take Sullivan much more seriously as a serious, sensitive, intellectual architect working within a very particular social and political context. The contradictions in democratic society that he saw emerging around him in the rapidly developing Mid West were obviously much more striking and important to him than to his probably more limited and certainly less articulate architectural contemporaries.

The third resolution is to have the patience to appreciate Sullivan's decorative schemes according to his own terms of reference. All three authors insist that decoration was completely integral with Sullivan's architectural ideas. The highly controlled contrast between architectural mass expressed by plain materials, such as brick or stone, and the organic, often polychromatic complexity of the iconographic schemes is not accidental or wilful. Not only are such schemes impressive when well photographed (as they certainly are in both these volumes) but they also shed considerable light on Sullivan's struggle to synthesize in his work a range of ideas drawn from such varied sources as Swedenborg and Herbert Spencer. An example of this kind of analysis is Twombley's discussion of the social and democratic ideas that Sullivan used to underpin the decoration, inside and out, of the exquisite series of bank buildings he designed in small towns in Ohio and Iowa between 1905 and 19-20. Narciso Menocal's more comple x analysis of the meaning of Sullivan's iconography from the Getty Tomb (1890) onwards describes the architect's attempts to create a new, organic and developing architecture, in which for him the process of resolving deep human and psychological conflicts was as important as the thing designed.

These impressive books illuminate not only a very important, complex and sophisticated body of work but also something of the context within which it was created. It certainly isn't true to say that Sullivan has ever been forgotten but it may very well be the case that the colourful and tragic surface of his rollercoaster career -- and perhaps a certain condescension on the part of his successors" and critics -- have obscured for almost a century his full significance as an architect and intellectual.