Legacy of Louis Sullivan

Sullivan was a spokesman for the reform of architecture, an opponent of historical eclecticism, and did much to remake the image of the architect as a creative personality. His own designs are characterized by richness of ornament. His importance lies in his writings as well as in his architectural achievements. These writings, which are subjective and metaphorical, suggest directions for architecture, rather than explicit doctrines or programs. Sullivan himself warned of the danger of mechanical theories of art.

Sources of Sullivan’s ideas have been traced to the mid-19th-century writings of two Americans, the sculptor Horatio Greenough and the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as to the English naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin’s writings on evolution, particularly on organic growth, left their mark on European writers on architecture and, in turn, on Sullivan’s own thinking. The French architect César-Denis Daly, for example, in an essay reprinted in a Chicago architectural journal, stated that

each style of architecture…being born of the intellectual and moral forces of a human society…, has become naturally the expression of a certain civilization…The adoption by one age of a style…other than that which it has itself created, is hence in itself a false principle.

Out of such inquiries into the nature of style came Sullivan’s own famous dictum “form follows function,” a phrase that should not lead one to conclude that Sullivan believed that a design should be a mechanistic visual statement of utility. Rather, he believed that architecture must evolve from and express the environment in addition to expressing its particular function and its structural basis. It has been said that Sullivan was the first American architect to think consciously of the relationship between architecture and civilization.

The skyscraper was central to both Sullivan’s writing and his practice, and it is on this subject that his thought is most concise. His pre-skyscraper commercial buildings in Chicago, such as the Rothschild Store and the Troescher Building, show a conscious clarification and opening up of the facade. This simplification is carried into his “skyscrapers,” the Wainwright and the Guaranty, which are conceived as “a single, germinal impulse or idea” that permeates “the mass and its every detail with the same spirit.” The exceptional clarity of Sullivan’s designs has lost some of its impact because contemporary architecture has in part absorbed his ideas. Sullivan considered it obvious that the design of a tall office building should follow the functions of the building and that, where the function does not change, the form should not change. Unfortunately, Sullivan’s most dramatic skyscraper design, the Fraternity Temple (1891), intended for Chicago, was never built. This was to be a symmetrical structure with bold step-back forms and a soaring 35-story central tower.

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Sullivan was just as much a revolutionary in his ornament as he was in his use of plain surfaces and cubic forms. His ornament was not based on historical precedent but rather upon geometry and the stylized forms of nature. Although his early ornament has some links to that of the Gothic Revival style and to the Queen Anne style, his mature ornament, seen best in his works at the turn of the century, is indisputably his own. It stands as a curious yet unrelated parallel to Art Nouveau ornamentation in Europe. Crisp yet fluid, tightly constructed yet exuberant, these designs remind one of Sullivan’s feeling that architecture should not only serve and express society but also illuminate the heart.

Sullivan’s own Autobiography of an Idea (1924) and Kindergarten Chats (published serially in 1901–02) are indispensable for a grasp of his architectural theory. The 1947 Wittenborn edition of the latter, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (rev. 1918), includes eight additional essays by Sullivan and a bibliography.