Research Bibliography of Louis H. Sullivan Related Studies

Richard P. Adams traces the philosophical lineage of "organic" architectural theory—epitomized in Louis Sullivan's dictum "form follows function" and Frank Lloyd Wright's variant "form and function are one"—back through nineteenth-century romantic literature and criticism, beginning with Coleridge's 1818 distinction between "mechanic" and "organic" form and its embodiment in the Lyrical Ballads. Adams argues the doctrine reached America chiefly through Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Greenough's 1843 essay "American Architecture," and Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman's subsequent elaborations, and probably reached Sullivan and Wright directly via Frank Furness, the eccentric Philadelphia architect in whose office Sullivan apprenticed in 1873-74. He examines Furness's Provident Life and Trust Company and other Philadelphia buildings as an underappreciated transmission point for organic design principles, and documents at length the devotion of both Sullivan and Wright to Walt Whitman—including the full text of Sullivan's 1887 fan letter to the poet—as evidence of a shared understanding of the union of "soul" and "materials" in a building, concluding that romantic literary theory decisively though gradually shaped the emergence of a genuinely organic American architecture. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195721%299%3A1%3C46%3AAATRTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

Adapted from a BBC Third Programme broadcast by a British architect who spent a year teaching at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, this essay argues that mid-century Americans possessed the climate, wealth, materials, and civic enthusiasm for architectural patronage that postwar Britain lacked, and that this patronage found its most vital expression not in private mansions — Richard Morris Hunt's Vanderbilt houses — but in commercial and public building, particularly in the American West. Atkinson surveys frontier boomtown architecture (Denver's Brown Palace Hotel, Mormon Salt Lake City, Central City's Opera House) before turning to Chicago, where H. H. Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store and Louis Sullivan's steel-framed skyscrapers established a distinctly American commercial architecture. He contrasts Sullivan's ideal of the isolated, slim commercial tower, realized decades later in Lever House, with Frank Lloyd Wright's inward-turned commercial interiors — the Larkin Building and the Johnson Wax offices — and closes by praising the General Motors Technical Center as the era's exemplar of decentralized industrial planning. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%28195222%291%3C46%3ATAOAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

Eva Belik reviews two 1987 architectural monographs together: Jack Quinan's *Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building: Myth and Fact* and Lauren S. Weingarden's *Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks*. Quinan's book documents the commission, design evolution, symbolic program, critical reception, and 1950 demolition of Wright's 1904 Larkin Company administration building in Buffalo, and Belik notes its discussion of the initial influence of Sullivan — Wright's former employer — on the building's early design, later eliminated from the final scheme. Weingarden's study catalogs the eight rural bank buildings Sullivan designed between 1906 and 1920, organized into a historical survey, color plates illustrating their "jewel box" character, and an individual catalog of the banks with technical and critical detail; Belik summarizes Weingarden's account of Sullivan's late-career shift from "transcendental idealism" to "pragmatist realism." Belik contrasts the authors' approaches — Quinan's skeptical, evidence-driven reconciliation of Wright's autobiographical claims with the surviving drawings, versus Weingarden's more philosophical, "hidden meaning" reading of Sullivan's ornament, which Belik suggests some readers may find short on concrete definition. She frames the pairing as offering a direct comparison of Wright's and Sullivan's differing architectural concerns during the period when Wright worked as Sullivan's chief draftsman. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0024-094X%281989%2922%3A2%3C273%3AFLWLBM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

Curtis Besinger, a former member of the Taliesin Fellowship, writes a detailed rebuttal to Eileen Michels's JSAH article questioning whether Frank Lloyd Wright was truly a "gifted draftsman" when Louis Sullivan hired him in the 1880s. Besinger argues Michels conflates the specific skill of rendered perspective drawing with the broader practice of architectural drafting, and defends the authenticity and dating of a fragmentary pencil drawing of ornament — identified as Wright's design for a bronze newel post — that Michels had rejected as inconsistent with the Auditorium Building's 1885–87 design period. Drawing on his own professional and Taliesin experience, Besinger reconstructs the office practices of Sullivan's era: the sequence of design sketches, finish drawings, and craftsman-directed ornamental detail drawings; the likelihood that Auditorium ornament drawings continued to be produced into 1889–90, citing a dated Sullivan sketch for a Banquet Hall capital; and the role of the 1885 Chicago Opera Festival Auditorium as a precedent Wright could have observed. He also addresses the drawings' mixed pencil techniques and multiple-hand authorship as ordinary studio practice rather than anomalies. Besinger closes by arguing that Wright's autobiography should be read as a poetic, subjectively true account of his hiring rather than a factual record, and proposes a broader scholarly study of the historical role of architectural drawing itself. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197210%2931%3A3%3C216%3ACO%22EDO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

Daniel Bluestone examines how the critical and historiographical construction of the "Chicago School" narrative shaped Chicago's historic preservation and urban renewal movements from the 1950s through the 1960s. He traces the concept's origins to the Museum of Modern Art's 1933 exhibition Early Modern Architecture, Chicago 1870-1910, which established a canonical genealogy running from Richardson through Sullivan to Wright, and argues that this narrow, aesthetically focused narrative created an unusual postwar coalition between modernist architects and preservationists. Civic boosters invoked the Chicago School during events such as the 1957 Chicago Dynamic Week to legitimize a massive downtown rebuilding campaign, while the same narrative selectively motivated preservation battles: the successful 1957 campaign to save Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, the 1957 founding of the Commission on Chicago Architectural Landmarks, and the unsuccessful but highly publicized 1960-61 fight to save Adler & Sullivan's Garrick Theater (Schiller Building), which ended with architectural fragments salvaged by Richard Nickel, John Vinci, and David Norris. Bluestone contrasts this selective, style-driven preservationism with the routine, unprotested demolition of buildings falling outside the canon—the Pullman Building, the Columbus Memorial Building, the Woman's Temple, and Henry Ives Cobb's Federal Building—and with massive urban renewal clearance in African-American and working-class neighborhoods such as Hyde Park. He concludes that preservationists must more critically examine which historical narratives they reinforce through their choices of what to save. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1046-4883%28199405%2947%3A4%3C210%3APARIPW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

A sharply critical review faulting Mark L. Peisch's book (a Columbia doctoral dissertation) for using the term "Chicago School" to mean the residential Wright-influenced school rather than the tall-building commercial school, while devoting most of its actual content to Walter Burley Griffin's career (including his 1912 win of the international competition for Canberra, Australia) rather than to the broader group of architects named in its title — Purcell and Elmslie, Louis Sullivan, Barry Byrne, Hugh Garden, William Drummond, George Maher, and Marion Mahony. Brooks documents numerous factual errors, singling out the book's incorrect birth year for William Gray Purcell (given as 1890 on one page and 1885 on another, when Purcell was actually born in 1880) as emblematic of its unreliable treatment of everyone besides Griffin. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-6287%28196712%29109%3A777%3C720%3ATCSOAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

Traces how the term "Chicago School," coined by Thomas Tallmadge in 1908 to describe the residential architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries (with Louis Sullivan credited only as their teacher/forerunner), was gradually redefined by later historians — notably Henry-Russell Hitchcock and, decisively, Sigfried Giedion in *Space, Time and Architecture* (1941) — to instead mean the tall commercial skyscrapers of 1880s–90s Chicago. Brooks proposes resolving the resulting confusion by reserving "Chicago School" strictly for the earlier commercial-building movement and adopting "Prairie School" (a term Brooks himself first used in 1960) for the residential movement begun under Sullivan's inspiration and led by Wright, tracing Sullivan's own stylistic pivot toward that horizontality around the 1899–1904 Carson Pirie Scott Store commission. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196605%2925%3A2%3C115%3A%22SMOAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6

Peter Buitenhuis compares the aesthetic responses of Louis Sullivan, Henry James, and Frank Lloyd Wright to the skyscraper, the distinctively American building form enabled by steel-frame construction from the mid-1880s onward. He opens with Sullivan's 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," in which Sullivan rejected historical ornament in favor of a form derived from the repeated office-floor module and summarized in his maxim "form follows function," realized architecturally in buildings such as the Wainwright Building, the Reliance Building, and the Carson Pirie Scott Store. Buitenhuis then turns to Henry James's 1904–5 observations in *The American Scene*, contrasting James's distaste for New York's crowded, historically rootless "towers of glass" — which he found driven by naked commercial motive and lacking the settled beauty of Giotto's bell tower — with Sullivan's more sympathetic, functionally grounded aesthetic. Finally he examines Frank Lloyd Wright's 1930 Princeton lecture "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper," in which Wright, trained under Sullivan, echoes James's condemnation of New York's set-back towers as dishonest and congested while remaining more optimistic than James about the form's redemptive possibilities, as demonstrated in Wright's own Johnson Wax Building. Buitenhuis concludes all three figures recognized the skyscraper as a peculiarly American symbol whose meaning could not be separated from the surrounding city's planning. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195723%299%3A3%3C316%3AAOTSTV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2

A wide-ranging essay on the state of architectural criticism and theory at mid-century, arguing that modern architects rejected historical precedent and "de gustibus" relativism simultaneously, leaving critics without either traditional or agreed-upon modern standards for judging quality. Surveys shifts in architectural theory from Gothic scholasticism and Renaissance Neo-Platonism through eighteenth-century empiricism to contemporary functionalism, arguing that criticism has confused "expression" (style) with "formal design" (composition), which the author identifies as architecture's true, if neglected, basis for aesthetic judgment. Discusses Louis Sullivan repeatedly as a case study in this confusion: notes that despite Sullivan's polemical rejection of "fugacious" historicist theory, his Wainwright Building in St. Louis retained classical axial planning and tripartite elevation; discusses historians' tendency to cast Sullivan as the heroic dissenter at the 1893 Columbian Exposition against Charles McKim's classicism, despite Sullivan's own Beaux-Arts training; and examines critical responses to Sullivan's stated rationale for the two-story base of the Prudential (Guaranty) Building in Buffalo. Surveys architectural criticism from Herbert Croly and Montgomery Schuyler through Lewis Mumford, citing Sullivan's own attack on the Chicago Tribune Tower competition as an instance of architect-authored criticism. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28195912%2918%3A2%3C143%3ATAP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2

Brief review by former Prairie School architect Barry Byrne of the first issue of a new quarterly, The Prairie School, edited by W. R. Hasbrouck and devoted in this inaugural number to architect George Maher. Byrne, recalling his own formative encounter with Prairie School work (Maher, Robert Spencer, Hugh Garden) before he knew Frank Lloyd Wright's, credits Louis Sullivan's teaching and Wright's built example as the movement's necessary preconditions. He argues the School's decline after 1914 into fashionable eclecticism resulted from most of its members treating architecture as a matter of surface style, whereas Sullivan and Wright understood style as a "resultant factor" rather than a starting point, and singles out George Elmslie and Walter Burley Griffin (who relocated to Australia after winning the Canberra competition) as among the few who continued pursuing a genuinely indigenous, creative architecture. He welcomes the new quarterly as a counterweight to the predominance of European-derived modernism and a valuable act of recovery for a neglected native tradition. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0047-2239%28196412%2919%3A3%3C47%3ATPS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K

Under the title "An American Image in Architecture," J. A. Chewning jointly reviews two 1986–87 books on the two architects he presents as forming, with Frank Lloyd Wright, a continuous American architectural tradition from the Civil War to World War I. James O'Gorman's concise study of H. H. Richardson (140 pages) is organized around specific building types across urban, rural, and suburban contexts — Trinity Church, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, the Ames Monument, the Ames Gate Lodge, and New England town libraries — and argues for Richardson's role in creating a distinctively American architectural imagery; Chewning praises its authority while faulting its comparative neglect of the Allegheny County Courthouse and Richardson's town-house work. Robert Twombly's 530-page biography of Sullivan is described as the most comprehensive interpretive account of Sullivan's life to date, its first chapters resolving factual questions in Sullivan's own *Autobiography of an Idea* and later chapters analyzing the Adler and Sullivan partnership building by building; Chewning credits its appendices (documenting 238 works, including 40 newly identified Adler and Sullivan commissions) but criticizes its comparatively thin attention to Chicago's economic context and to Sullivan's professional relationships with contemporaries like Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root, concluding Twombly remains somewhat captive to the "egocentric power" of Sullivan's own autobiographical narrative. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28198806%2940%3A2%3C266%3AAAIIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

Robert J. Clark presents a biographical and design study of architect Louis Christian Mullgardt (1866-1942) centered on his Court of the Ages (originally Festal Court, officially renamed the Court of Abundance), his major contribution to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Clark traces Mullgardt's early training under H. H. Richardson's successor firm, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, in Boston, and in the Chicago office of Henry Ives Cobb, where Mullgardt is credited as the largely uncredited principal designer of the ornament for Cobb's Fisheries Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition—work praised, alongside Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building at the same fair, for its inventive naturalistic ornament. The article details the Court of the Ages's evolution from an extravagant "Oriental" fantasy involving a giant pipe organ and golden-calf monuments into a more restrained arcaded court whose reliefs narrated an evolutionary "sermon in stone" from plant to animal to human life, describes its construction in plaster staff over a wood frame under sculptor collaborators including Chester Beach, Albert Weinert, and Leo Lentelli, and situates Mullgardt within a lineage that Louis Skidmore later invoked, alongside Sullivan's Transportation Building, as a rare instance of American exposition architecture breaking from academic classicism. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196212%2921%3A4%3C171%3ALCMATC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3

Carl W. Condit reviews Willard Connely's 1960 biography, crediting Connely with rescuing Sullivan's personal life from obscurity through original research — tracking down surviving documents and a niece who had not seen Sullivan in fifty years — and thereby producing the first full portrait of Sullivan as a living man, treating his family background, friendships, and the bitterness of his declining later years with sympathy but without sentimentality. Condit's central criticism is that Connely oversimplifies the causes of Sullivan's professional decline by attributing it to three events concentrated in 1891 (the classicists' victory in planning the 1893 World's Fair, the death of John Wellborn Root, and the failure of the Fraternity Temple setback-skyscraper project), arguing this ignores that Sullivan received his three largest commissions after the Auditorium in the following decade, and that Connely's Manichean treatment of Sullivan as hero against uniformly shallow rivals is unfair, particularly to Daniel Burnham. Condit concludes that Connely, while offering a lively and concrete account, does not penetrate deeply into the forces that shaped Sullivan's art or explain how his ornament and total architectural vision fused lyrical subjectivity with the positivism of contemporary science and engineering. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28196206%2953%3A2%3C270%3ALSAHLT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S

Carl W. Condit examines Louis Sullivan's major commercial buildings — the Auditorium, Wainwright, Guaranty (Prudential), and Carson Pirie Scott — as symbolic expressions of the structural engineering achievements of nineteenth-century iron and steel construction, arguing Sullivan's organic theory of "form follows function" drew its emotional force from his lifelong fascination with bridge engineering. Tracing Sullivan's own account, in *The Autobiography of an Idea*, of a childhood encounter with a suspension bridge and his adult absorption in the construction of James B. Eads's St. Louis bridge and Charles Shaler Smith and L. F. G. Bouscaren's cantilevered Kentucky River bridge at Dixville, Condit provides extended technical histories of both structures — Eads's pioneering use of pneumatic caissons, chrome steel, and cantilever erection; Bouscaren's introduction of hinges based on Karl Culmann's graphical statics. He then argues Sullivan translated his emotional response to these engineering feats into architectural form: the Auditorium's masonry-clad iron and steel framing beneath Richardsonian walls; the Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings' vertical pier rhythms expressing "movement" analogous to a suspension bridge's dynamic tension; and the Carson Pirie Scott Store's cellular steel-cage screen expressing "power." Condit concludes that Sullivan's ornament and formal vocabulary constitute a coherent artistic response to industrial technology, the one stable cultural order available amid the century's disruptions. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0040-165X%28195924%291%3A1%3C78%3ASSATEO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

Book review assessing Leonard K. Eaton's argument that H. H. Richardson and Louis Sullivan, not only Frank Lloyd Wright via the 1910 Wasmuth publication, exerted significant influence on European architecture through wide circulation of their work in European professional journals during the 1890s–1900s. Coolidge summarizes Eaton's account of Richardson's Romanesque influence on architects including Charles Harrison Townsend, Ferdinand Boberg, and Lars Sonck, and Sullivan's influence on Anton Rosen and Hendrik Berlage, and Eaton's explanation for why this influence reached England and Northern Europe but not the Romance countries (attributed to the dominance of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau). The reviewer questions whether the book adequately situates these episodes against larger, more consequential contemporaneous developments (Perret, Maillart, early Cubism). PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-4866%28197306%2946%3A2%3C301%3AAACOAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

An essay reassessing the critical legacy of Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building, his sole contribution to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and in particular its famed polychrome "Golden Doorway." Crook traces how successive critics and biographers — Montgomery Schuyler, Claude Bragdon, Hugh Morrison, Albert Bush-Brown, Philip Johnson, and Sullivan's biographer Willard Connely among them — mythologized the building as Sullivan's lone act of artistic defiance against the classicizing "White City" imposed on the fairgrounds after his collaborator John Root's death left Daniel Burnham in charge of the Exposition's design. The article questions the standard narrative that Sullivan was simply punished with a minor commission, examining Sullivan's actual participation in and attitude toward the Fair more critically than prior accounts had done. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196712%2926%3A4%3C250%3ALSATGD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

Review of Richard Cahan's 1994 biography of architectural photographer and preservation advocate Richard Nickel, whose Institute of Design graduate work surveying Louis Sullivan's buildings grew into a campaign to salvage ornament and, later, entire structures from demolition, beginning with the failed effort to save Chicago's Garrick Theater (1891). Davidson traces Nickel's evolving role in Chicago's postwar preservation movement, his documentation work for the Historic American Building Survey, his ornament collections placed at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and the Art Institute of Chicago, and the book's account of his death in the ruins of the Chicago Stock Exchange Building in April 1972. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0272-3433%28199523%2917%3A4%3C107%3ATAFDRN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

A dispatch on Chicago's architecture and museum scene in 1987, reporting on the city's expanding roster of exhibitions and on the flourishing market for architectural salvage. Its centerpiece is the Art Institute of Chicago's new permanent wall-and-floor installation of over fifty architectural fragments in its main stairwell, including a terra-cotta spandrel panel by Adler and Sullivan salvaged from the demolished St. Nicholas Hotel. The column also previews the Musée d'Orsay's forthcoming "Chicago Architecture: 1872–1922, Birth of a Metropolis," curated by John Zukowsky and designed by Stanley Tigerman, and surveys the Struve Gallery's dealings in salvaged decorative-arts material, including windows from a Peter B. Wight-designed house (originally built in Minneapolis, dismantled in 1971) being sold by New York's Metropolitan Museum. Sullivan is named alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Burnham, and John Root as one of the architects who put Chicago on the map, and the 1972 demolition of his Chicago Stock Exchange Building is cited as the recurring touchstone in the city's ongoing debate over whether the fragment trade helps or hastens the loss of historic buildings. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0888-7314%28198723%296%3C90%3ACL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Traces the intellectual genealogy of "organic architecture" from Plato through Schiller, Kant, Goethe, and Coleridge to Emerson and Whitman, arguing that Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were the theory's two most significant architectural exponents. Davies contends that Sullivan articulated the philosophical concept of organic expression while Wright, his draughtsman for six years, translated it into actual built form, quoting extensively from both men's writings on nature, function, and imagination to demonstrate the close correspondence of their thinking. The essay focuses in detail on the design and construction of Unity Temple, Oak Park (1904–08), which Wright himself repeatedly described as the first building he consciously conceived as an expression of organic architecture, examining its concrete construction, its "H"-shaped plan resolving two functions, and Wright's own account of the creative process behind it. Davies closes by surveying how later critics (Pevsner, Giedion, Hitchcock, Banham, Peter Blake, Walter Curt Behrendt) have understood Wright's achievement, arguing that most have isolated formal or stylistic aspects of his work without grasping the underlying organic philosophy inherited from Sullivan. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0066-622X%281982%2925%3C120%3ATEOTCO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

Don de Nevi argues that Louis Sullivan deserves recognition as an art educator and theorist alongside his architectural achievements, comparing his ideas on teaching to those of Walter Smith, Arthur Wesley Dow, and, especially, John Dewey — asserting that Sullivan had developed a pragmatic philosophy of art and "art as experience" well before Dewey's more famous formulations, and noting recent scholarly interest in whether Dewey drew on Sullivan. Surveying Sullivan's educational writings (*Education*, 1902; *Natural Thinking: A Study in Democracy*, 1905; *Democracy: A Man's Search*, 1908; *Kindergarten Chats*, 1918; *The Autobiography of an Idea*, 1924), de Nevi presents Sullivan's view that art is a necessary democratic force against cultural and technological deterioration, that teachers should resist rigid rules in favor of imaginative instruction, and that architecture and art criticism are properly branches of social science since buildings encode the thought of the people who produce them. The essay quotes at length from Sullivan's writings and from Frank Lloyd Wright's tribute to his mentor, concluding that Sullivan's legacy lies in his insistence that art must stand alongside business, politics, science, and religion in shaping democratic society. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28197023%2930%3A1%3C45%3ALSOAE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

James M. Dennis and Lu B. Wenneker survey Frank Lloyd Wright's use of architectural ornament across three career phases—an early period (1890s-1920) of surface-applied ornament, a middle period (through the late 1920s) in which ornament becomes a structural module, and a late period (early 1930s onward) in which entire buildings function as full-scale ornament. The authors trace Wright's debt to Louis Sullivan's theory of "organic ornament," absorbed during his years at Adler & Sullivan, contrasting Sullivan's "synthetic" method of elaborating simple geometric shapes into foliation with Wright's later "analytical" method of abstracting actual plant forms into geometric components, illustrated through the Winslow House, Heller House, Larkin Building, and Unity Temple. They document Wright's long collaboration with sculptor Richard Bock beginning in 1895, the influence of Wright's childhood Froebel "Gifts" kindergarten blocks on his geometric patterning, and the emergence of Wright's "ornament-buildings"—the A. D. German Warehouse, Hollyhock House, the Millard House, and ultimately the Guggenheim Museum—in which decoration and structural form become fully unified, closing with the observation that Wright's late ground plans, such as the Ralph Jester House and Arizona State Capitol project, directly echo geometric patterns from his own earliest ornamental work. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28196523%2925%3A1%3C2%3AOATOAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

Review of sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan's 1965 study of Chicago's turn-of-the-century cultural matrix, structured around the "rhetoric of social institutions." Dieterich describes Duncan's kaleidoscopic, essay-based treatment of Chicago in the 1890s — its journalism, department-store culture, and social rhetoric of wealth and status — built through intellectual portraits of figures including John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, George Pullman, Marshall Field, Thorstein Veblen, Robert Herrick, Daniel Burnham, John Root, and Dankmar Adler. The review identifies Louis Sullivan as the book's central, heroic figure, whose buildings and writings Duncan treats as an attempt to give explicit form to democratic ideals, calling Duncan's treatment "a significant intellectual biography" despite uneven chapters. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0043-4078%28196706%2920%3A2%3C468%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

Martin Donougho critically reviews David S. Andrew's revisionist study, which rejects the standard heroic narrative of Sullivan as a prophet of Modernism, portraying his career instead as an allegory of selfish aggrandizement rooted in personal failings (drink, an unsociable temperament, discomfort with domestic architecture) rather than tragic historical necessity. Donougho outlines Andrew's dual interpretive strategy — reading Sullivan's architecture as an expression of his psychology and, separately, as an instrument of capitalist interests — and finds both approaches unconvincing: he argues Andrew overstates the case by linking Sullivan too closely to "high capitalism" when many of his patrons (Wainwright in St. Louis, midwestern rural bank clients) were provincial rather than metropolitan financiers, and that Andrew conflates Sullivan's symbolic use of "function" with a narrowly utilitarian one. Donougho credits Andrew for close attention to Sullivan's prose but finds the book less illuminating than Narciso Menocal's 1981 study, concluding that Andrew has produced an exposé of the Sullivan myth rather than a balanced account of the architecture itself. (Note: the extracted page also contains the tail end of an unrelated review, by Albert William Levi, of an anthology on urban planning, and the start of a review of a Howard Hawks book, both bracketing the Sullivan review in the same journal issue.) PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8510%28198823%2922%3A3%3C114%3ALSATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

Short review praising Carl Condit's survey of nineteenth-century American building technology — interior framing, trusses, reinforced concrete, metal and concrete arches, and suspension construction — for placing American engineering achievement in an unprecedented historical context, and for highlighting under-recognized figures such as Daniel Badger, George Herbert Wyman, Timothy Palmer, Albert Fink, and Ernest Ransome. Eaton disputes Condit's claim that "the best architecture usually lay outside the main stream of technical innovation," citing William Strickland's Naval Hospital and Adler & Sullivan's technologically inventive Chicago Auditorium as counterexamples where aesthetic and technical achievement coincided. He concludes that the book establishes an essential "technological environment" for understanding the curious design tensions in Louis Sullivan's large commercial buildings, and states he eagerly awaits the promised second volume. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28196109%2952%3A3%3C436%3AABANC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I

Reviews the same Walter L. Creese festschrift covered independently by Mary Corbin Sies in the Journal of American History (see sullivan181.pdf), giving a fuller essay-by-essay account. Eaton highlights Craig Zabel's essay on George Grant Elmslie's effort to sustain Louis Sullivan's legacy, including Elmslie's late Maxwelton Braes Resort; Narciso Menocal's reassessment of Sullivan's banks; Roula Geraniotis's tracing of German and Austrian influence (Richard Wagner and Gottfried Semper's proscenium theories) on Dankmar Adler's design of the Auditorium Theatre; Deborah Slaton's history of Burnham & Root's Rookery; Christopher Vernon's study of Walter Burley Griffin's landscape designs for the Martin, Mueller, and Irving residences; Ellen Weiss on the Bay View, Michigan chautauqua community; Susan Appel on Midwest brewery architecture; and John Garner's own essay on S. S. Beman's design of the company town of Pullman. Eaton judges the collection uneven in scholarly maturity but valuable as a whole as a tribute to Creese's influence on the field. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199206%2951%3A2%3C213%3ATMIAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

A methodological note addressed to American Studies scholars, using Louis Sullivan as its central case study to argue that visual works of art constitute a distinct "third category" of primary source material — alongside an artist's own writings and secondary scholarship — that historians outside art/architectural history are often ill-equipped to interpret. Ehrlich uses Sullivan's skyscraper designs (with reference to the Wainwright Building and the earlier Jayne Building in Philadelphia) and the interpretive difficulty of his slogan "form follows function" to illustrate how relying on written sources alone, without close visual analysis of the buildings themselves, produces a superficial or distorted understanding of an architect's actual practice and legacy. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195822%2910%3A2%3C206%3AAPFCSM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A

Rochelle Berger Elstein reviews Lauren S. Weingarden's *Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks* (MIT Press, 1987), which argues for reassessing Sullivan's eight midwestern bank commissions not as evidence of career decline but as a mature, richly colored final phase of his art, countering the earlier dismissive view associated with Sigfried Giedion. Elstein summarizes Weingarden's two-part structure — an interpretive essay tracing Sullivan's sources (John Dewey's pragmatism, Michel Chevreul's and Ogden Rood's color theory, the concept of "democratic architecture," and the open bank plan) followed by an extensive building-by-building catalogue with dates, costs, client information, and press reception — and credits Weingarden with restoring Sullivan's primacy as a designer against critics who credited his ornament to assistants like George Elmslie, Parker Berry, Louis Millet, and Kristian Schneider. Elstein's critique faults the book for omitting critical rankings among the banks, for not connecting the banks formally to Sullivan's contemporaneous tombs and skyscrapers, and for neglecting the influence of Henry Hobson Richardson and Frank Furness on the bank designs, while noting a few bibliographic omissions. (Note: the PDF's opening pages are the tail end of an unrelated review by Jonathan Lipman of a book on Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building, preceding Elstein's review in the same JSAH issue.) PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198812%2947%3A4%3C432%3ALHSTB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Elstein's article is a career-spanning study of Dankmar Adler's independent architectural style, written to counter the tendency — encouraged by Adler's own modest self-assessment — to view him solely as Sullivan's engineering partner. Tracing Adler's training under Detroit and Chicago architects, his Civil War service, and his practice with Ashley Kinney and then Edward Burling, the article identifies recurring stylistic traits in Adler's pre-Sullivan commercial buildings, including the First National Bank, Methodist Church Block, Sinai Temple, and Central Music Hall: an emphasis on wall as plane and texture, subtle floor-to-floor variation in ornament, and a rhythmic patterning of openings. Elstein argues the Borden Block (1881) marks the first collaboration with Sullivan and traces how this synthesis matured through industrial buildings such as the Aurora Watch Factory, Wirt Dexter Building, and J. W. Oakley Warehouse into the soaring commercial vocabulary of the Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings. The essay closes by examining Adler's late, independent work as D. Adler & Company after the 1895 dissolution of Adler & Sullivan — the Mayer Building, the Morgan Park Academy dormitories, and Isaiah Temple — as a continuation, not an abandonment, of the planar, rhythmically ordered approach he had developed since the 1870s. Elstein concludes that Adler's architecture, though less innovative in ornament than Sullivan's, exemplifies the best structural and compositional achievements of the Chicago School. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196712%2926%3A4%3C242%3ATAODA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K

Compares the architecture of Chicago's two world's fairs, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and A Century of Progress of 1933. Opens by noting Louis Sullivan's contemporary protest, as one of the 1893 fair's own architects, against the "slavish copying" of European classical tradition that dominated the earlier fair's design, and credits Sullivan's example with eventually proving influential on European modernism, which by the 1930s had begun to affect American design in turn. Contrasts the unified classical planning and monumental white plaster "staff" construction of 1893 with the commercially driven, unplanned sprawl, artificial (rather than daylight) interior lighting, prefabricated veneer construction, restrained ornament, and extensive use of colored illumination at the 1933 fair. Singles out Paul Philippe Cret's Hall of Science and Raymond Hood's Electrical Building as the strongest designs of 1933, criticizes the Agricultural Building and the truss-roofed Travel and Transport Building, and closes by characterizing the 1933 fair as a commercial "carnival" lacking the earlier fair's unity of purpose and enduring architectural significance. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6314%28193305%295%3A4%3C17%3AEA1V1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

Illustrated account of Roosevelt University's occupancy, since 1947, of Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building (completed 1890), covering the university's conversion of hotel and office spaces into classrooms and its restoration program under consulting architect Crombie Taylor. Details the restoration of the former Banquet Hall (renamed the Rudolph Ganz Recital Hall) and the former Ladies' Parlor (renamed the Louis Sullivan Room, dedicated 1959 with funding from Morris Hirsch), including recovery of stenciled ornament hidden under paint, Frank Lloyd Wright's on-site recollection of his and Sullivan's respective roles in designing the Banquet Hall's capitals, and the unrestored Auditorium Theater, for which the article recounts the 1959–60 fundraising campaign led by the Auditorium Theater Council under Mrs. John V. Spachner amid a wider Chicago debate (prompted by the Civic Opera House's threatened conversion to a movie theater) over the city's need for large-theater space. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6322%28196022%2919%3A4%3C363%3ARUITCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W

Etienne Fouilloux's French-language review essay, occasioned by a 1983-84 Paris and La Rochelle photography exhibition ("Chicago, 170 ans d'architecture 1833-1983"), surveys a century and a half of Chicago architecture for a French readership, working to dispel Prohibition-era gangster-city clichés. Fouilloux traces the city's explosive growth after the 1871 fire, the emergence of the first "Chicago School" under William Le Baron Jenney with Louis Sullivan as its most gifted product, the eclectic reaction following the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (which Sullivan himself denounced as a calamity that cost him clients and preceded his death in near poverty in 1924), Frank Lloyd Wright's parallel but distinct organic and residential practice in and around Chicago, the mid-century "second Chicago School" under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe following his 1938 arrival as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and the postmodern reaction of the 1970s-80s led by German-born Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. The essay situates Sullivan's functionalism and Wright's organicism as the twin poles around which subsequent Chicago architecture, including that of Mies and his successors at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, continually re-orients itself. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0294-1759%28198404%290%3A2%3C95%3AUSDAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2

A triple book review assessing three then-recent Sullivan publications. Of Albert Bush-Brown's short critical biography, Gebhard praises its perceptiveness but disputes Bush-Brown's claim that Frank Lloyd Wright substantially shaped Sullivan's ornament during their years together at Adler & Sullivan, arguing instead that Sullivan's mature style — visible in works from the Charnley House through the Wainwright and Schiller Buildings — developed continuously from his own pre-1887 designs, with George Elmslie's later presence a more plausible stimulus than Wright's. Of the facsimile reissue of Sullivan's *A System of Architectural Ornament*, Gebhard finds the twenty folio plates a weak sample of Sullivan's actual ornamental achievement, valuable chiefly for the philosophy in its accompanying text (rooted in Bergson and William James). Of the first publication of *Democracy: A Man-Search*, edited by Blaine Hedges, he finds the prose pompous and derivative of Nietzsche's *Thus Spake Zarathustra* but notes flashes of Sullivan's characteristic critique of property and institutional power. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196212%2921%3A4%3C194%3ALS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

A review of Sherman Paul's study situating Louis Sullivan within the late-19th/early-20th-century American literary and intellectual tradition, alongside figures like Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Henry D. Lloyd as part of a broader "Chicago School" of social thought, not just architecture. Gebhard credits Paul's analysis of Sullivan's relationship to American Transcendentalism and pragmatism as genuinely perceptive, but argues Paul, like nearly every prior Sullivan scholar, has "succumbed to the Master," presenting an unrealistically coherent philosophical portrait rather than the "forceful, passionate...eclectic" Sullivan known through the more skeptical accounts of George Elmslie, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Gray Purcell. Gebhard also suggests Paul under-explores a more direct connection between Sullivan's philosophy (especially in *Democracy: A Man-Search*) and Nietzsche's *Thus Spake Zarathustra*, a well-worn copy of which was in Sullivan's own library. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196403%2923%3A1%3C51%3ALSAAIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

A review of Maurice English's edited anthology of Sullivan's writings, several drawn from obscure journals or previously unpublished. Gebhard praises English's introductory essay as unusually objective among Sullivan literature, quoting English's own candid assessment that Sullivan's prose ranged from "sentimentally poetic" to badly overwrought, with his best writing concentrated in the 1890s and his later, more ambitious works (*Democracy: A Man-Search*, *Kindergarten Chats*) tending toward "crude, confused, and highfalutin" language. The review situates Sullivan's cultural status as less about documentary reassessment of his buildings and more about his function as a symbolic rallying point for early-20th-century American architectural progressives, positioned against academic contemporaries like Daniel Burnham and the firm of McKim, Mead & White. Gebhard mildly dissents from English's premise that Sullivan's nonarchitectural writing has independent literary importance, arguing his ideas were expressed better by Whitman, William James, and Nietzsche. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196412%2923%3A4%3C215%3ATTOSTO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

James Grady surveys the Art Nouveau movement (c. 1890-1910) as fundamentally an architecture of Nature, arguing against critics who dismissed it as a merely decorative "wavy line" style. He examines how designers including Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Victor Horta in Brussels, Hector Guimard in Paris, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow each developed distinct methods of transmuting natural forms into ornament and structure, then situates Louis Sullivan within this international movement, arguing that although Sullivan's buildings remain governed by strong underlying geometry rather than literal natural imitation, his belief that ornament should possess "the spirit of the structure...just as a certain kind of leaf must appear on a certain kind of tree" anticipated Art Nouveau principles even before the style was formally established elsewhere. Grady cites the ornament of the Auditorium Building, the Gage Building, the Van Allen Store, and the Guaranty Building as examples of Sullivan's logically integrated, rather than imitative, use of natural form, and closes by tracing the movement's later influence on painters including Picasso, Miró, and Dalí. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3079%28195509%2937%3A3%3C187%3ANATAN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3

This Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin notice by curator Morrison H. Heckscher announces two major acquisitions for the American Wing: four cast-iron ornamental staircases salvaged from Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's Chicago Stock Exchange Building (1893–95) before its demolition, and the entire living room from Frank Lloyd Wright's Francis W. Little House (1912–15) on Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota. Heckscher recounts Sullivan and Adler's partnership and the Stock Exchange's engineering significance — notably Adler's pioneering caisson foundation — before describing the staircases' ironwork, cast by the Winslow Brothers Company's Ornamental Iron Works, with their star and pinwheel motifs and electroplated bronze finish. He then traces Wright's early career as a Sullivan draftsman before Wright's independent domestic practice and the development of the Prairie style, culminating in the Little House commission, built for a client Wright had also served in Peoria. The essay describes the Little House living room's spatial and material qualities in detail — its leaded-glass window bank, clerestory, stained-glass skylights, white oak trim, and surviving Wright-designed furniture — as it was being reinstalled at the Museum. Heckscher frames both acquisitions as rescue efforts prompted by the demolition or endangerment of significant American buildings, hoping their display will build public support for architectural preservation ahead of the Bicentennial. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-1521%28197206%2F07%292%3A30%3A6%3C300%3AORA1AF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

Review of Wilson and Robinson's 1977 history/guidebook to Prairie School buildings in Iowa. Henry credits the book's completeness of illustration and its documentation of lesser-known Iowa architects such as William Steele of Sioux City (a collaborator with Purcell and Elmslie on the Woodbury County Courthouse), but faults its introductory definition of the Prairie School as vague and its failure to distinguish Louis Sullivan's ornamental contribution from Frank Lloyd Wright's formal one. Henry specifically criticizes the book's Iowa-only scope for omitting the closely related Minnesota bank commissions by Purcell and Elmslie (the Merchants National Bank in Winona and other bank work in Grand Meadow, Adams, Le Roy, Mankato, Hector, and Madison), built in the same prairie-town social milieu as Sullivan's Farmers and Merchants Bank in Owatonna, and notes "no monograph on the work of Purcell and Elmslie has even been published." PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197903%2938%3A1%3C66%3ATPSII%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

Argues that Frank Lloyd Wright, though usually understood solely as Louis Sullivan's protégé, was by 1892–93 "almost certainly the ablest academic designer in Chicago" — accomplished enough in the imitated-Renaissance "academic tradition" then triumphant at the Columbian Exposition (demonstrated in his Blossom House, Harlan House, and his entry in the Milwaukee Public Library and Museum competition) that Daniel Burnham offered to fund six years of study at the École des Beaux-Arts and in Rome, an offer Wright declined, citing Sullivan's influence. Hitchcock traces the emergence of the American academic classical revival through Richard Morris Hunt, H. H. Richardson, and especially the firm of McKim, Mead & White (via draughtsman Joseph M. Wells and the Villard Houses and Boston Public Library), contrasts it with the parallel but distinct "Queen Anne" academic revival of Norman Shaw in England, and situates the World's Columbian Exposition's Renaissance building program as its American culmination. He concludes that Wright's brief but intense academic apprenticeship of 1892–93 fused productively with his earlier Richardsonian and Sullivanian training to shape his mature Prairie style, including the axial, chimney-centered planning first realized in the Winslow House. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0075-4390%281944%297%3C46%3AFLWAT%27%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

Henry-Russell Hitchcock offers a detailed, critical review of Carl W. Condit's 1952 book The Rise of the Skyscraper, praising its illustrations and documentary detail on Chicago commercial architecture of the 1880s-1890s while faulting its scholarly thoroughness and geographic myopia. Hitchcock argues Condit's exclusive focus on Chicago wrongly slights parallel skyscraper work in St. Louis, Buffalo, New York, and Minneapolis, and criticizes Condit's uncritical adoption of Sigfried Giedion's "constituent facts" thesis and his neglect of earlier English and American cast-iron and fireproof-construction precedents. He faults gaps in Condit's bibliography (Mariana Van Rensselaer, Turpin Bannister, Baumann and Birkmire) and disputes several specific attributions and datings, including the true completion date of Burnham and Root's Reliance Building and the relative credit due engineers versus architects for English railway sheds. Hitchcock revisits the historiographic debate over whether Louis Sullivan's design genius derived chiefly from partner Dankmar Adler or from Sullivan's own architectural consciousness, and traces Sullivan's stylistic debts to H. H. Richardson through the Central Music Hall and Marshall Field Wholesale Store. He closes by placing Condit's achievement between the "philosophical" historicism of Giedion and the antiquarianism of Thomas Tallmadge, judging it an indispensable but incomplete account of the Chicago School's true national and international context. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195224%294%3A4%3C351%3ATROTS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-U

Donald Hoffmann identifies and republishes a previously unindexed 1891 essay by Sullivan, "The High-Building Question," published in the Chicago pictorial journal *The Graphic*, which had escaped every prior Sullivan bibliography. The essay proposed a zoning formula for regulating skyscraper height by progressively restricting a building's footprint at set elevations, and was illustrated with a rendering — reproduced here — of an imaginary "setback skyscraper city," which Hoffmann calls the most significant surviving document of Sullivan's thinking about urban planning. Hoffmann traces the setback principle's origins to William Le Baron Jenney and William B. Mundie's Manhattan Building (1889–91), whose setbacks Hoffmann shows were actually a structural response to party-wall foundation constraints rather than a concern for light and air, and follows its development through Adler & Sullivan's Schiller Building (1891–92) and their unbuilt Odd Fellows (Fraternity) Temple project (1891), which realized the setback concept most fully. Hoffmann draws on Dankmar Adler's 1892 essay "Light in Tall Office Buildings" to clarify the economic motivations (rentability of well-lit offices) that Sullivan's essay, focused on public amenity, left unstated. The full text of "The High-Building Question" is reprinted as an appendix. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197005%2929%3A2%3C181%3ATSSCO1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

Donald L. Hoffmann corrects the standard historical account, which credited Chicago's Adler & Sullivan Stock Exchange Building (1893) with pioneering caisson foundations for tall buildings, by documenting a more extensive caisson system used three years earlier under the Kansas City, Missouri City Hall, completed in 1890. Hoffmann opens by describing the well-known settlement problems of Burnham & Root's Monadnock Building and of Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Building—quoting Frank Lloyd Wright's account of Dankmar Adler's anxiety over the Auditorium tower's continuing settlement into cast-iron box fronts—before presenting evidence, drawn from contemporary newspaper accounts and 1890 American Institute of Architects convention proceedings, that architect Louis Curtiss, then assistant superintendent of Kansas City buildings, devised ninety-two brick-and-steel-cylinder caissons for the City Hall, correcting attributions made by earlier historians including Hugh Morrison, Frank A. Randall, and Carl Condit, all of whom had credited Chicago's Stock Exchange as the first true caisson foundation. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196603%2925%3A1%3C68%3APCBF1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

Charles B. Hosmer Jr. reviews Robert Twombly's *Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work* (Viking, 1986), assessing it against Hugh Morrison's pioneering 1936 biography as the new standard treatment of Sullivan's career. Hosmer notes that Twombly, drawing on the full range of Sullivan scholarship available by the mid-1980s, integrates far more material on Sullivan's personal life than Morrison chose to include, and weaves his critical assessments throughout the narrative rather than reserving them for summary chapters. He highlights as controversial Twombly's speculation about a possible latent homosexuality in Sullivan's life, judging the evidence offered insufficiently documented, while noting the book gives comparatively little attention to Sullivan's drinking problem during his years of professional decline. Hosmer praises the book's appendixes, particularly its catalog of Sullivan's built work compiled from Twombly's own site visits to nearly all surviving Adler & Sullivan and solo Sullivan buildings, as an essential research tool given how many structures had been lost since Morrison's 1930s fieldwork. Placing the book within cycles of Sullivan scholarship — from Morrison's "prophet of modernism" framing to Willard Connely's 1960s emphasis on Sullivan's character flaws — Hosmer concludes that Twombly charts a balanced middle course and calls the book "a fitting successor" to Morrison's biography. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28198612%2973%3A3%3C774%3ALSHLAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

Compares three landmark buildings raised between the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 and the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 as emblematic of an emergent, independent American architecture: Henry Hobson Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store, Louis Sullivan's Guaranty Building, and Charles Follen McKim's Boston Public Library. Written to accompany a Smithsonian exhibition, the essay identifies four themes common to all three works — a compelling sense of large, equilibrated order; an aestheticism paralleling contemporary painting and mural work (Whistler, Edwin Austin Abbey, Will Low, Francis Millet); a naturalism rooted in the commonplace and the vernacular, including Sullivan's debt to Whitman and his organic ornament; and a shared "corporate dimension," in which each building's impersonal, monumental order expresses the rising power of American institutions and business elites. Jordy traces Sullivan's admiration for Richardson's Marshall Field Store into the Guaranty Building's terra-cotta skin and block-like massing, and shows how McKim's library balances Renaissance precedent (Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Alberti's San Francesco) with democratic accessibility ("Free to All"). Henry James's ambivalent praise of the library's lack of "penetralia" illuminates the tension between monumentality and popular openness running through all three buildings. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-9853%281983%2923%3A4%3C27%3AAABWFR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

William H. Jordy's brief review assesses sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan's *Culture and Democracy* (1965), a study situating Sullivan's architectural "functionalism" within the broader intellectual ferment of Chicago pragmatism. Jordy summarizes Duncan's central, somewhat overstated claim that the Chicago schools of philosophy, sociology, and education were effectively "born" in the Chicago School of architecture, and traces Duncan's parallels between Sullivan's ideas and Thorstein Veblen's "instinct of workmanship," John Dewey's instrumentalism, George Herbert Mead's "consummatory phase of the act," and Charles Cooley's "sympathetic understanding," noting the book's partial overlap with Sherman Paul's earlier *Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought*. He credits Duncan's account of how money and civic ambition intertwined in Chicago — evoking William James's remarked-upon "sense of concrete reality" in the city's culture — but finds the book's later chapters, covering the Chicago School's architectural origins and the World's Columbian Exposition, thin and secondhand, and judges Duncan's own architectural criticism as a sociologist to be "trite and uncertain." Jordy concludes that Sullivan's writings alone cannot fully explain his ambiguous place in American culture, a problem the book does not resolve. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8762%28196610%2972%3A1%3C320%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., a close personal acquaintance of Frank Lloyd Wright and son of the client for Fallingwater, surveys Wright's lifelong, often contradictory engagement with painting and sculpture despite his public denunciations of modern art, arguing that Wright's late-life campaign to build the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was not an attempt to subordinate the fine arts to architecture but the culmination of a genuine, Emerson-rooted belief in the integration of the arts. Kaufmann traces this sensibility to the Anglo-American Arts and Crafts tradition of Emerson, Ruskin, and Morris absorbed during Wright's Wisconsin upbringing, and follows its development through Wright's apprenticeship under Louis Sullivan at Adler & Sullivan—where the Auditorium Building's rich figural ornament and murals set an early model—into Wright's own house and studio, where sculptor Richard Bock and painter Hermon Atkins MacNeil supplied statuary and murals. The essay documents Wright's collaborations with Bock across the Larkin Building, Heller House, and other early houses, his friendship with English Arts and Crafts figure C. R. Ashbee, and his increasingly self-authored abstract glass and relief ornament culminating in the Coonley Playhouse windows, Midway Gardens murals, and the Imperial Hotel's ballroom decoration. Kaufmann describes Wright's turn toward Japanese and East Asian art (including the tokonoma display niche) as a more satisfying substitute for Western fine art collaboration, and closes with personal recollections of Wright's visits to Fallingwater, where he continued to actively curate the placement of modern sculpture despite his rhetorical hostility to it. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281963%298%3C37%3AFLWATF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

Examines the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition as a cultural symbol of Americans' ambivalent relationship to the machine age. Argues that the fair's classical "White City," designed largely by Beaux-Arts-trained architects under Daniel Burnham's direction, concealed and repressed anxieties about industrial machinery even as it celebrated technological progress, an ambivalence traced through contemporary accounts of the fair's construction, a carpenters' strike during its final preparations, and its critical reception. Positions Adler and Sullivan's Transportation Building, and Louis Sullivan's public dissent from the fair's imposed classicism, as a notable exception to the prevailing historicist consensus, quoting Sullivan's complaint about the fair's "dream of misinterpretation." Contrasts the fair's sanitized, machine-repressing "White City" with the surrounding industrial "Black City" of Chicago, and with the Midway Plaisance's licensed carnival space (including the Ferris wheel), arguing that only in Chicago's emerging skyscraper architecture, exemplified by Adler and Sullivan and Henry Ives Cobb, did an authentic new architectural idiom begin to emerge from the era's technological transformation. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195022%292%3A2%3C112%3ATWCATB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1

Stephen J. Kelley and Jerry G. Stockbridge, engineers with the preservation-engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, present a technical case study of the 1985 facade renovation of the Railway Exchange Building in St. Louis (Mauran, Russell & Crowell, completed 1913), the flagship office building and department store constructed for David May's Famous & Barr, whose glazed cream terra cotta cladding was one of the first large-scale uses of that material in the city. The article notes the building's design competed against, and was influenced by, precedents including Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building and Union Trust Building in St. Louis and Sullivan's Carson, Pirie, Scott store in Chicago, the latter studied directly by architect J. F. Roache while researching an earlier, unbuilt 1905 scheme for the same site. The authors describe the investigation of corroded steel bearing brackets and cracked terra cotta glazing, laboratory testing of the material's moisture absorption and structural stresses, and the renovation's two-part chemical cleaning, steel window replacement, and precast-concrete patch-repair methods, completed on a fast-track schedule to coincide with the opening of the adjacent St. Louis Centre mall. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0848-8525%281988%2920%3A3%3C15%3ATREBAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C

Museum bulletin essay by the Philadelphia Museum of Art's director introducing a traveling exhibition, circulated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, on the "International Style" of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and J. J. P. Oud. Kimball frames the exhibition as the culmination of a lineage he says he first traced in a 1917 general history of architecture back to two Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan, whose Wainwright Building was the first fully realized artistic solution to the steel-frame skyscraper, and Sullivan's "spiritual heir" Frank Lloyd Wright. He notes Wright's earlier European reception (a sumptuous German publication of his work in 1912, the 1916 Imperial Hotel commission in Tokyo) against his belated American recognition only after 1928, and distinguishes Wright's romantic, site-responsive individualism from the more standardized, purely rationalist ambitions of the younger International Style modernists represented in the show, while praising the exhibition's attention to modern housing reform. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0891-3609%28193204%2927%3A148%3C131%3AMAAEIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

Documents the early transatlantic reception of H. H. Richardson's and Louis Sullivan's architecture in England and continental Europe, published in the Journal's "American Notes" department. Koch traces the English painter Hubert von Herkomer's 1886 meeting with Richardson in Massachusetts and the resulting design (executed 1889–90, largely redrawn by Herkomer) for his house "Lululand" in Bushey, Hertfordshire, which became a gathering place for artists including Charles F. A. Voysey, James Pryde, and William Nicholson. He follows the designer Walter Crane's 1891–92 American visit, including his stay at Adler & Sullivan's Auditorium Hotel; the Paris dealer Samuel Bing's 1896 survey La Culture Artistique en Amérique, which singled out Richardson's Allegheny County Courthouse and the Chicago Auditorium as America's finest buildings; and silversmith André Bouilhet's 1893 letter praising Sullivan after meeting him at the World's Fair. Koch connects this documented American influence to C. Harrison Townsend's Whitechapel Art Gallery, H. P. Berlage's Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and Joseph Olbrich's Vienna and Darmstadt work. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28195905%2918%3A2%3C66%3AAIA1AL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

Traces the development of ornamental glass in American architecture from H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston, where John La Farge introduced opalescent stained glass in the late 1870s, through Louis Comfort Tiffany's innovations of the 1880s-1890s, and finally to its structural, abstracted use by George Grant Elmslie and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth century. Discusses Tiffany's "squash" and "eggplant" windows for the George Kemp house (1879), his decoration with Stanford White of the Veterans' Room at the Seventh Regiment Armory, and his chapel interior at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, comparing its round-arched, mosaic-covered design to Louis Sullivan's "Golden Door" of the Transportation Building at the same fair. Argues that while Tiffany and La Farge treated glass pictorially, as painting in another medium, it was Elmslie and Wright who first fully integrated ornamental glass architecturally, treating it as a transparent solid subordinated to and structurally continuous with the building itself, citing Wright's window for the Darwin Martin house (1904) as the culmination of this development. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-843X%281975%2934%3A2%3C28%3AGAOFRT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

Review of Paul E. Sprague's catalogue (foreword by Adolf K. Placzek) of the roughly 120 surviving Sullivan drawings — mostly ornament designs — given by the dying Sullivan to his former draughtsman Frank Lloyd Wright, thirty-nine of which Wright had earlier published in *Genius and the Mobocracy* (1949) and which now reside at Columbia's Avery Architectural Library. Lever praises Sprague's chronological arrangement and scholarly discussion of sources, technique, and style, illustrating the point through Sullivan's Bayard Building ornament and its base-wall-attic functional division, while noting the catalogue could have included more comparative architectural drawings and a checklist of Sullivan holdings elsewhere. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-6287%28198010%29122%3A931%3C702%3ATDOLHS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Esther McCoy presents and annotates a sequence of personal letters written by Louis Sullivan to the architect R. M. Schindler between 1920 and 1923, concerning Sullivan's repeated, increasingly anxious efforts to recover the manuscript of *Kindergarten Chats*, which he had lent to Schindler for possible European publication through Adolf Loos in Vienna and then a Berlin publishing house (Langenscheidtsche Buchdruckerei). The letters trace a failed publication scheme — including a proposal that Sullivan might join Loos in heading a new Paris art school, relayed through Schindler and Richard Neutra — and document Sullivan's worsening financial distress in his final years (accepting a $200 loan arranged through Frank Lloyd Wright via Schindler, taking on the small Krause Music Store façade commission "to turn out in a few days," and repeatedly asking after Wright's whereabouts in Los Angeles and Japan). The correspondence also touches on Schindler's supervision of the Barnsdall House and his own emerging independent practice at 835 Kings Road, and closes with Sullivan noting the serialization of his *Autobiography of an Idea* in the *Journal of the American Institute of Architects* shortly before his 1924 death. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196112%2920%3A4%3C179%3ALFLHST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

An edited selection of correspondence between R. M. Schindler and Richard Neutra spanning March 1914 to February 1924, drawn from Schindler's carbon copies and introduced and annotated by Esther McCoy. The letters trace the two architects' friendship from their student years in Vienna through Schindler's emigration to Chicago (where he worked for Ottenheimer, Stern and Reichert and later for Frank Lloyd Wright) and Neutra's wartime military service, postwar privation in Switzerland and Austria, and prolonged effort to immigrate to the United States with Schindler's sponsorship. Recurring subjects include Adolf Loos's health and domestic life in Vienna, Neutra's admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright's work (formed initially through publications rather than firsthand experience), and an extended subplot concerning the manuscript of Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats, which passed from Loos to Neutra in Berlin and which Schindler and Neutra tried unsuccessfully to get published in Europe before returning it to Sullivan. Later letters document Schindler's work supervising construction for Wright (including the Barnsdall House) and the two men's plans, ultimately unrealized, for Neutra to join Wright's Tokyo office for the Imperial Hotel. The correspondence closes as Neutra prepares to join Schindler in Los Angeles in the mid-1920s. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197410%2933%3A3%3C219%3ALBRMSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

A short poem evoking a small Illinois prairie town whose Main Street architecture — "it's Louis Sullivan all the way," with terra cotta, cast iron, and incised limestone commercial facades, and residential work by Frank Lloyd Wright, George Maher, Walter Burley Griffin, William Gray Purcell, and George Grant Elmslie — the poet reads as authentically rooted in the land, "real America," before closing on a wry note about wealth reshaping that heartland vision. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-0994%28197603%2937%3A7%3C686%3ATCOTUM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2

Narciso G. Menocal's review essay on Robert Twombly's *Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work* praises Twombly's exhaustive documentary research — public records, tax assessments, newspaper accounts — into Sullivan's Boston childhood, MIT and Ecole des Beaux-Arts training, and partnership with Dankmar Adler, while offering an architectural historian's corrective to several of Twombly's interpretive claims. Menocal endorses Twombly's suggestion that Sullivan was homosexual and that this shaped his design theory, drawing on his own earlier discussion of the Lotos Club and Sullivan's friendship with Bill Curtis, but disputes Twombly's specific reading of masculine/feminine symbolism in the Gage Building ornament, offering his own transcendentalist (Emerson/Ruskin-derived) explanation instead. The review closes by criticizing Viking Press for the poor reproduction quality of the book's illustrations. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0048-7511%28198709%2915%3A3%3C428%3ATTLOAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G

Narciso G. Menocal's review of *Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament*, catalogue for the 1986–87 Chicago Historical Society/Cooper-Hewitt/Saint Louis Art Museum exhibition edited by Wim de Wit, situates the volume within the mid-1980s Sullivan scholarly revival alongside Menocal's own *Architecture as Nature* and new books by Twombly, Millett, and Andrew. Menocal summarizes and assesses the catalogue's four essays — David Van Zanten on Sullivan's French Beaux-Arts and Richardsonian formation, William Jordy on the tall buildings as an expression of Sullivan's individualism, Wim de Wit on the progressive-banking movement behind Sullivan's rural banks (including comparison to Purcell and Elmslie's bank work), and Rochelle Berger Elstein on the critical historiography of Sullivan — and separately reviews David Andrew's *Louis Sullivan and the Polemics of Modern Architecture* unfavorably. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28198724%2946%3A4%3C320%3AS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Narciso G. Menocal reviews two Art Institute of Chicago publications on Louis Sullivan. The first is a new folio edition of Sullivan's 1924 *A System of Architectural Ornament*, reproducing for the first time all twenty plates and thirty-six holograph text sheets in full-scale facsimile with a two-color process superior to the original linecut printing; Menocal summarizes and largely endorses Lauren Weingarden's accompanying essay, which reads the plates as a systematic visual-verbal treatise moving from conceptual to perceptual understanding of Sullivan's design philosophy (rooted in Swedenborgian correspondence and Spencerian evolutionary theory), while questioning Weingarden's claims for the influence of Charles Blanc and John Ruskin on Sullivan. The second book, edited by Sarah C. Mollman, is an illustrated catalogue of the Art Institute's Sullivan holdings, organized into five sections: architectural drawings by Sullivan/Adler & Sullivan and successor firms; drawings by Sullivan associates and followers (Dankmar Adler, Parker Noble Berry, Homer Grant Sailor); architectural ornament fragments; non-architectural drawings (including student copies after Ruprich-Robert and Vignola, and early sketches); and a miscellany of correspondence, manuscripts, and medals. Menocal describes the contents of each section building by building. (Note: the JSTOR scan's first ~100 lines are the tail end of an unrelated review, by Leland M. Roth, of two Stanford White biographies that precedes Menocal's review in the same journal issue.) PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199106%2950%3A2%3C210%3ALHSASO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M

Eileen Michels re-examines Frank Lloyd Wright's account, in *An Autobiography*, of the freehand drawings of ornament he prepared to win his position with Adler and Sullivan around 1887, arguing that the surviving published record of Wright's early perspective drawings for J. L. Silsbee and for his own independent projects does not support Wright's self-portrait as an already-exceptional draftsman who dazzled Sullivan at first meeting. Comparing Wright's published drawings against contemporaries such as Paul Lautrup (Adler and Sullivan's own preferred outside renderer), Oliver Smith, Irving K. Pond, and Harvey Ellis, Michels finds Wright's early technique unremarkable and derivative of prevailing Chicago drafting-room fashions. She questions the chronology of Wright's move from Silsbee to Sullivan implied by *An Autobiography*, analyzes a surviving fragment of ornament drawing attributed to Wright's first Auditorium Building assignment (arguing its style corresponds more closely to Sullivan's ornament of 1890–91 than to his 1885–87 work, casting doubt on the attribution or its dating), and shows that Wright did not in fact draw any of the office's major published presentation renderings during his tenure, which were instead the work of other delineators. Michels concludes Wright's drawing ability was likely not what secured or sustained his position with Adler and Sullivan, and that his early Chicago years, like his later-documented Madison years, were substantially mythologized in his own retrospective writing. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197112%2930%3A4%3C294%3ATEDOFL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

Analyzes the rhetorical and ideological strategies used by early twentieth-century American architects — chiefly Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and Richard Neutra — to legitimate their break from historicist eclecticism. Argues that because modern architecture challenged deep-seated aesthetic and social values, its advocates needed to justify their work with words as well as buildings, and traces three overlapping lines of justification: an appeal to "community integration" (the architect as social reformer and planner), an appeal to "nature" (as simplicity, instinct, or the primitive), and an appeal to "science" (objective, biologically grounded design criteria, associated especially with Neutra). Discusses how a broadened notion of "functionalism" let architects treat buildings as expressions of, and remedies for, a fragmented, industrialized, urbanized society, citing Sullivan's dictum that architecture is "a branch of social science" and his search in nature for "the few and simple principles" underlying design. Also examines Wright's "Broadacre City" as a program for reintegrating architecture with nature and Gropius's community-planning theory. Frames all these positions as responses to a perceived "axiological crisis" produced by industrialization. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28196221%2920%3A3%3C251%3ATLOMAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

Review-essay occasioned by Frank Lloyd Wright's book A Testament (1957), published as Wright neared his ninetieth birthday. Moholy-Nagy reads the book as revealing an unacknowledged tragic dimension beneath Wright's public confidence: a lifelong, unconsummated love for an America that repeatedly passed him over for major public commissions. She traces Wright's debt to Louis Sullivan and to American individualist and transcendentalist thought (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Horatio Greenough), and contrasts Wright's regionally rooted, site-specific organicism — Fallingwater, Taliesin West, the Robie House, the Larkin Building, the Johnson Wax Building — with Le Corbusier's placeless, archetypal "Architecture as Idea," represented by the Unité d'Habitation and the Chapel at Ronchamp. She notes Sullivan's own late-career "shouts of desperation" in the Transportation Building and Bayard Building as a cautionary parallel to what she sees as overreach in Wright's late projects, the Price Tower and the unbuilt Mile-High Illinois tower. The essay closes with a postscript recording Wright's death in April 1959. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6322%28195922%2918%3A4%3C319%3AFLWT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Editorial by SAH president Keith Morgan announcing Seymour H. Persky's 1995 gift funding the Society of Architectural Historians' purchase of the James Charnley House (1365 North Astor Street, Chicago) as its new headquarters, renamed the Charnley-Persky House. Reviews the 1891 design's disputed authorship between Adler & Sullivan's Louis Sullivan and junior draftsman Frank Lloyd Wright, situates the house's massing and ornament against Sullivan's Wainwright Building and the Ryerson and Getty tombs, and against Wright's own contemporaneous domestic work, with reference to Henry-Russell Hitchcock's earlier scholarship. Covers the Charnley family's timber-industry wealth, Sullivan's own adjacent house at Ocean Springs, Mississippi, later ownership by the Waller family, the 1976 Astor Street Historic District designation, and the building's 1989 restoration by architect John Eiffler for the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Foundation. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199509%2954%3A3%3C276%3ATCHAHA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6

In this brief notice for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, architectural historian Hugh Morrison — himself Sullivan's first major biographer — reviews photographer John Szarkowski's *The Idea of Louis Sullivan* (University of Minnesota Press, 1956). Morrison describes the book as far more than a picture-book of Sullivan's buildings: it pairs Szarkowski's photographs, taken with an unusually personal and unsentimental eye toward buildings that people had "worked in and maimed and ignored and perhaps loved," with roughly thirty quotations from Sullivan's own writings and dozens more drawn from contemporaries such as Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright. Morrison highlights specific photographic "sequences" built around the Garrick Theatre and the Chicago Stock Exchange, and singles out images of the Carson Pirie Scott Store and the Auditorium's ornamental panels as capturing both the triumph and the neglect of Sullivan's surviving work amid the "shabby vulgarity" of the modern city. He judges the book a wholly new kind of architectural history — less documentary than an emotional meditation on the meaning of Sullivan's ornament as art and as a record of American life — and praises it as the most profound engagement with Sullivan's spirit since Sullivan's own writing. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28195822%2917%3A2%3C30%3ATIOLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

Mumford traces the intellectual origins of American organic architecture through Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, arguing that their design methods derive not primarily from native transcendentalist philosophy but from French Beaux-Arts "Romantique" theory transmitted to America through Richard Morris Hunt's New York atelier (where Furness trained) and through the writings of Leopold Eidlitz. The essay reconstructs a theoretical lineage running from Emerson, Coleridge, and Horatio Greenough through Beaux-Arts theorists Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, César Daly, and Victor Ruprich-Robert, who analyzed natural and architectural forms as organisms governed by laws of structural adaptation and function-driven expression. Mumford shows how Eidlitz's writings on empathic, force-based architectural expression, and Henry Van Brunt's essays on abstracted "lines of beauty," fed into Sullivan's own theory of ornament and composition (articulated in *Kindergarten Chats* and "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered") and, through Sullivan, into Wright's later organic principles, concluding that despite stylistic differences all three architects shared a common aesthetic method rooted in this transatlantic organic tradition. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1046-4883%28198921%2942%3A3%3C26%3AFFNTOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

Reviews George Thomas, Michael J. Lewis, and Jeffrey A. Cohen's catalogue raisonné of Frank Furness's architectural output, situating Furness within a lineage that runs from his teacher Richard Morris Hunt through Furness's own student Louis Sullivan to Sullivan's student Frank Lloyd Wright — a genealogy the reviewer attributes to David Van Zanten's 1978 essay on Second Empire architecture in Philadelphia. Surveys shifting critical assessments of Furness's idiosyncratic, "anticlassical" red-brick buildings, from contemporaries such as Montgomery Schuyler, Talbot Hamlin, and Fiske Kimball, who dismissed his work as ugly and undisciplined, to mid-twentieth-century reappraisals by William Campbell and Vincent Scully that recast Furness as a pioneering figure preparing the ground for Sullivan and Wright. The reviewer credits the volume's catalogue as an indispensable scholarly resource but criticizes its accompanying essays for lacking sustained critical interpretation, arguing that a definitive biography and analytical study of Furness's architecture remains to be written. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199209%2951%3A3%3C323%3AFFCW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Traces the history of the Luxfer Prism Company, founded in Chicago in 1896-97 by James Pennycuick and a group of prominent local businessmen, which manufactured prismatic glass tiles designed to redirect daylight deep into commercial interiors. Describes the technical development of the product (including physicist Henry Crew's and Olin Basquin's scientific daylight calculations and the patented "electroglazing" process), its extensive marketing as both a practical daylighting solution and a stylistically modern building material, and Frank Lloyd Wright's role, while his office occupied the same floor as the Luxfer Prism Company's, as a paid designer of forty-one patented ornamental prism-tile patterns. Documents installations in numerous Chicago buildings, with particular attention to Louis Sullivan's use of Luxfer Prisms on the Gage Building facade (part of the Holabird & Roche McCormick Buildings group, 1898) despite site architect Edward Renwick's objections, on the Schlesinger & Mayer (later Carson Pirie Scott) store beginning in 1899, on the Chicago Stock Exchange trading room, and later on the Van Allen and Son store in Clinton, Iowa (1913-15). Also quotes William Gray Purcell's recollection of Beaux-Arts architects' contempt for Luxfer Prisms as an affront to classical precedent, and traces the material's eventual decline and replacement by other lighting technologies. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199503%2954%3A1%3C24%3A%22CTILT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

A personal, reminiscence-driven review by architect Richard Neutra of Hugh Dalziel Duncan's 1965 study, comparing Chicago's civic self-image to that of Nuremberg. Neutra recounts his own early inspiration from meeting Louis Sullivan, his unsuccessful effort (with Jane Addams's help at Hull House) to secure a reprint of Sullivan's *Kindergarten Chats*, standing beside Frank Lloyd Wright at Sullivan's graveside funeral in Graceland Cemetery in 1924 where I. K. Pond and others spoke, and his own speech at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel urging that Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, and Walter Gropius be brought to the Midwest. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162%28196609%29367%3C213%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

An illustrated essay from Yale's architecture journal *Perspecta* arguing that the rise of industrial technology and new materials in the "Machine Age" threatened to displace the traditional craftsman, but that a new generation of "artist-engineers" — working in dams, grain elevators, bridges, and transmission towers — recovered a genuine architectural discipline from pure engineering, and that the craftsman's sensibility remains essential to giving such abstract forms real aesthetic life. The text is built from quotations (Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier) interleaved with a long sequence of paired historical and contemporary photographs illustrating the argument, ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge and Crystal Palace to Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation and Wright's Johnson Wax buildings. Louis Sullivan's Bayard Building in New York (1898) is included among the photographic exempla of enduring architectural quality achieved through craft, alongside Philip Johnson's Glass House and Mies's Lake Shore Drive apartments. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281955%293%3C64%3ATEOTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

A brief letter to the editor from Pfc. Stephen T. Ousley, a U.S. Army enlisted man stationed at Kagnew Station, Eritrea, requesting help locating letters, drawings, or other primary materials relating to Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924) or his partner Dankmar Adler, for use in a biography of Sullivan he was researching. A short, purely archival-appeal notice rather than a scholarly article. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196210%2921%3A3%3C146%3ALS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Mark L. Peisch's brief conference-paper abstract asks why American architectural criticism failed to develop a body of clear, authoritative commentary during the crucial decade 1929-1939, comparable to the role played by critics such as Russell Sturgis and Montgomery Schuyler in preparing the public for Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright's late-nineteenth-century Chicago skyscraper innovations. Peisch surveys the era's leading architectural observers—Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson above all, along with Lewis Mumford, Thomas Tallmadge, and Talbot Hamlin—and argues their close personal involvement in promoting the International Style left them unable or unwilling to adopt a genuinely critical, detached perspective, leaving historians to draw instead on contemporary painting criticism to understand the architectural events of the period. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196503%2924%3A1%3C78%3AMAAACI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

A short biographical research note identifying the real identity of "Minnie," a woman Louis Sullivan describes meeting as a young man and writes of fondly in *The Autobiography of an Idea*, previously misidentified by editors and by biographer Robert Twombly as "Minnie Whittlesey," niece of Sullivan's uncle-by-marriage Walter Whittlesey. Drawing on two 1922 letters from Sullivan to Charles H. Whitaker recently made available, Pettengill establishes that her actual name was Mary Louise "Minnie" Culver of Utica, New York (1851–1922), daughter of grain merchant Abraham Ellis Culver, and shows through genealogical records that she had no family relationship to the Whittleseys at all. The note also questions Sullivan's recollection that Minnie's brother Edward attended Yale, and situates the correspondence as evidence of a decades-long continuing connection between Sullivan and Culver. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198806%2947%3A2%3C177%3AWWSM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

A first-person reminiscence by William Gray Purcell on the culture of Chicago-area "journeyman draftsmen" active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that architectural history has neglected this class of skilled, largely self-taught practitioners whose uncredited work shaped countless buildings attributed to the architects of record who employed them. Recalls his own boyhood introduction to Sullivan and Wright's work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition's Transportation Building and, two years later, at the sketch of Wright's first Oak Park studio, and describes his 1902 employment in the office of E. E. Roberts alongside draftsman Roy Hotchkiss, who adapted Wright's forms independently rather than merely copying them. Profiles two journeyman designers in particular: F. W. Fitzpatrick, an itinerant, professionally uncredited competition specialist who ghost-designed public buildings including the Chicago Post Office for Henry Ives Cobb, and Harvey Ellis, whom Purcell calls the most distinguished of this group, discussing Ellis's pen-and-ink renderings, his design work for inventor-architect Leroy Buffington of Minneapolis (whose 1887 tall-building patent anticipated Sullivan's Wainwright Building), and an 1888 bank design praised for its integrated color scheme and ornament. Also recalls the technological rationale behind eliminating street-level windows in commercial buildings, crediting Adler and Sullivan's Chicago Auditorium with pioneering mechanical ventilation and Sullivan's engineering partner with early use of incandescent lighting at the McVicker's Theater. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1544-9890%28194310%293%3A4%3C16%3ATTMBH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X

J. William Rudd's comparative essay contrasts the architectural compositional principles of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright despite their shared roots in Henry Hobson Richardson's rational planning and their mentor-protege relationship. Using Heinrich Wolfflin's formal categories (closed form/open space, articulation/integration, formal plasticity/spatial continuity), Rudd contrasts Sullivan's National Farmers' Bank (Owatonna) and Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings, emphasizing self-contained, object-like mass, with Wright's Fallingwater, Robie House, and Johnson Wax Research Tower, emphasizing spatial flow. Sullivan's emphasis on "MAN" as a generic humanistic ideal is contrasted with Wright's emphasis on individual sovereignty, and the two architects' differing client bases (Sullivan's largely commercial/urban commissions versus Wright's largely private/suburban ones) are quantified from published building lists. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0149-2993%28197704%2930%3A4%3C28%3ASAWADO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D

In a short notice within the Burlington Magazine's "Literature of Art" review roundup, J. Rykwert assesses the Wittenborn "Documents of Modern Art" edition of Sullivan's *Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings*, edited by Isabella Athey. Rykwert situates Sullivan within the American tradition descending from Walt Whitman, finding his prose style "turgid" and marked by an "unjustified self-praise" that has obscured his real importance, yet judges the volume an adequate and valuable source-book for Sullivan's architectural doctrines when read alongside the essays it collects. He singles out "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" and "Ornament in Architecture" as essential for understanding Sullivan's formalization of the skyscraper and his revolutionary approach to ornament, and notes that Sullivan's influence in Europe came almost entirely through his "great disciple" Frank Lloyd Wright. Rykwert closes by praising Athey's editing and Wittenborn's publication as an important addition to an already valuable series. The review appears amid a page of unrelated short book notices (on Elizabethan portraiture, English architecture, and Islamic and European pottery) typical of the Burlington's review section format of the period. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-6287%28194810%2990%3A547%3C302%3AKCAOW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Lawrence E. Scanlon's literary and philosophical analysis of Sullivan's *The Autobiography of an Idea* (1924), written near the end of his life amid "the degradation of cheap Chicago hotels." Scanlon argues against prior critics (Hugh Morrison, John Summerson, an anonymous *Architectural Forum* reviewer, Harry Hansen) who treated the book as either a conventional autobiography or a simple restatement of "form follows function," proposing instead that its central "Idea" is a theory of man's creative power closely paralleling William James's pragmatist psychology and philosophy. Scanlon traces the development of this idea of "power" through Sullivan's autobiographical vignettes — the suspension bridge at Newburyport, the architect who builds "out of his head," the Sistine Chapel frescoes — to Sullivan's late affirmation of man as "Free Spirit" and "Creator." PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0678%28195924%2911%3A4%3C521%3ALS%22%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P

A formal defense of Louis Sullivan's later architectural ornament against Philip Johnson's contemporary charge that it undermined Sullivan's buildings after the Wainwright Building of 1891. Scully closely reads the ornament of the Guaranty (Prudential) Building, the Bayard-Condict Building, the Gage Building, and the Carson Pirie Scott Store as expressing physical forces of compression and tension in "humanist," empathetic terms, tracing sources in Islamic ornament and Irish manuscript illumination and situating Sullivan's aesthetic against Geoffrey Scott's *The Architecture of Humanism*. Contrasts Sullivan's sculptural, force-laden buildings with Frank Lloyd Wright's more earth-bound, spatially "destroyed-box" architecture, and closes by citing Le Corbusier's regard for Sullivan as a precursor. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281959%295%3C73%3ALSAOAB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

Architectural and theatrical history of Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan and commissioned by lawyer-philanthropist Ferdinand W. Peck as a democratic "people's" opera house. Covers the building's dimensions and flexible seating (capacity reducible from 4,200 to 2,584 by means of hinged, counterweighted ceiling panels), Adler's acoustic design, the Asphalia Geselschaft hydraulic stage machinery imported from Vienna, and the decor, including murals by Albert Fleury and Charles Holloway. Traces the theatre's performance history — praised by John McCormack and Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked on it as Sullivan's assistant), and hosting Bernhardt, Duse, Chaliapin, Caruso, Gershwin, Stokowski, and Toscanini — through its decline after the Chicago Civic Opera's 1929 move to a new building, its varied later uses (USO center, Masonic Lodge banquet hall), Roosevelt University's 1946 purchase, and the early-1960s restoration campaign that prompted the article. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-1989%28196503%2917%3A1%3C38%3ATAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P

Reviews a festschrift honoring architectural historian Walter L. Creese, who taught at the University of Illinois from 1958 to 1987, summarizing its nine essays on midwestern design. Sies highlights Deborah Slaton's essay on Burnham & Root's Rookery, Craig Zabel's account of George Grant Elmslie's struggle to sustain Louis Sullivan's legacy after their partnership ended, Narciso Menocal's reappraisal of Sullivan's bank buildings, Roula Mouroudellis Geraniotis's argument for German and Austrian influence on Dankmar Adler's design of the Auditorium Theatre (challenging the assumption that the Chicago and Prairie schools were purely indigenous), Christopher Vernon's study of Walter Burley Griffin's landscape work, Ellen Weiss's study of the Bay View, Michigan chautauqua community, John Garner's own reassessment of the company town of Pullman, Susan Appel's history of Midwest brewery architecture, and Ronald Schmitt's account of Sullivanesque terra-cotta manufacturing. Sies frames the collection as extending Creese's own scholarly interests in community planning and the Chicago and Prairie schools, noting the essays are grouped loosely rather than argued as a sustained thesis. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28199306%2980%3A1%3C289%3ATMIAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Joseph Siry's detailed architectural-historical study of Sullivan's John D. Van Allen and Son department store (1913–1915) in Clinton, Iowa, is based on extensive surviving Sullivan–Van Allen correspondence in the Burnham Library, Art Institute of Chicago. Siry reconstructs the commission's origins — banker Frederick H. Shaver's recommendation of Sullivan following his People's Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids — the evolving structural and material design (interior column spacing, brick versus terra-cotta cladding), and offers an original explanation for the building's much-criticized ornamental vertical mullions on the south facade: that they resolve irregular structural bay widths, dramatize the wide long-span girders, and visually heighten the building relative to its planned but unbuilt taller future stories. The article situates the store within Clinton's civic-improvement ambitions and compares it to Sullivan's earlier Schlesinger and Mayer (Carson Pirie Scott) store in Chicago and his contemporary rural bank commissions. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199003%2949%3A1%3C67%3ALSBFJD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

Joseph Siry provides a comprehensive centennial study of the Guaranty Building (1895–96), which Sullivan himself considered the "sister" of the Wainwright Building and a key statement in his logical-poetic expression of metallic-frame construction. The article covers the building's original client, oil producer Hascal L. Taylor, and its downtown Buffalo site amid the City and County Hall, St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral, and the rival Ellicott Square Building; the 1894–95 design and construction process as the last joint commission of Adler and Sullivan before their partnership dissolved; the steel frame and its terra-cotta cladding as a constructive system, compared to contemporaneous tall office buildings; the building's elevations and planning (including its light court and ninth-floor and other plans); and an extended analysis of the exterior ornament and its fabrication in terra-cotta. A central interpretive section argues that Sullivan's design method — distilling a building type's essential character (here, verticality/loftiness) and making it visually predominant — parallels Hippolyte Taine's aesthetic theory of art, which Sullivan encountered as a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Taine's successor Vaudremer. Siry concludes that the Guaranty represents Adler and Sullivan's organic integration of spatial, structural, mechanical, and ornamental systems into a unified whole, rather than mere applied "composition." PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199603%2955%3A1%3C6%3AAASGBI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

Siry situates Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building (1886–1890) within the social and political conflicts of 1880s Chicago, arguing that its design was an ideologically calculated response to class tensions between the city's capitalist elite and a working-class socialist and anarchist political movement. He contrasts the Auditorium's civic, subscription-based patronage model — championed by patron Ferdinand W. Peck as a democratic alternative to elite private ownership — with New York's Metropolitan Opera House, designed by Josiah Cady around a hierarchy of privately owned boxes for the "wealthy, fashionable classes." Siry analyzes Dankmar Adler's acoustical and sightline engineering, the theater's seating and box arrangement as a built expression of Peck's more egalitarian social vision, and Sullivan's ornamental and iconographic program, including the murals, allegorical relief portraits of Wagner, Haydn, Shakespeare, and Demosthenes, and Sullivan's poem "Inspiration" (originally titled "Growth and Decadence"), delivered at the building's dedication. The article offers this analysis as an alternative, patronage-centered perspective on Chicago School historiography, which typically emphasizes only technical and stylistic innovation in the city's commercial buildings. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199806%2957%3A2%3C128%3ACABOOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z

A review of the 2000 Bulfinch Press reissue of John Szarkowski's 1956 photographic study of Sullivan's architecture. Solan frames the book less as architectural history than as "a complex and elegant visual critique of the relationship between architecture and photography," describing how Szarkowski — later the longtime director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art — was inspired by Sullivan's *Kindergarten Chats* to produce a personal, impressionistic photographic portfolio interspersed with excerpts of Sullivan's own writing and an interview with the Wisconsin couple who commissioned one of his late banks. The review credits the new edition's higher-quality reproductions and Terence Riley's contextualizing introduction, and singles out Szarkowski's images of the Chicago Auditorium Building and the Carson Pirie Scott department store as its strongest material, connecting the reissue to renewed scholarly interest in Sullivan following David Van Zanten's *Sullivan's City*. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28200209%2961%3A3%3C408%3ATIOLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-6

Paul E. Sprague reviews four books marking the mid-1980s Sullivan revival. He is sharply critical of David S. Andrew's socially deterministic "debunking" thesis and of factual errors in his account of the Wainwright Building's client and the prairie banks; he is also critical of Robert Twombly's claim (following Narciso Menocal) that Sullivan's office role was limited to ornament and facades while Dankmar Adler designed the buildings, and of Twombly's speculative reading of Sullivan's sexuality. Sprague praises the essays in Wim de Wit's exhibition catalogue (by David Van Zanten, William Jordy, de Wit, and Rochelle Berger Elstein) and singles out Larry Millett's Owatonna bank study — based on the Purcell and Elmslie correspondence at the Northwest Architectural Archives — as the most engaging and best written of the four. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198712%2946%3A4%3C423%3ALSATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Dimitri Tselos reviews the first publication of Louis Sullivan's unpublished 1908 manuscript *Democracy: A Man Search*, issued in 1950 by the Louisville Free Public Library as an early experiment in non-profit micro-card publishing, with an introduction by Hugh Morrison. Tselos situates the essay within Sullivan's long meditation on democracy as a moral and spiritual project of human emancipation from "Feudalist" ignorance and prejudice, written during the lean years of his practice in the early twentieth century. He characterizes the text's prose as oracular and poem-like, echoing Morrison's own description, and finds its emotional intensity compelling but its argument for the meaning of democracy insufficiently clarified — "a good deal of quartz" amid "some precious diamonds." The bulk of the review, however, is devoted to the micro-card format itself: Tselos explains the technology (36 to 58 pages photographically reduced onto a single 3-by-5-inch card, read via a magnifying micro-reader), reports his own difficulty using it comfortably, and questions whether the process is genuinely economical once the cost of the cards and reader access are weighed against ordinary printing. He nonetheless credits the Library for making Sullivan's last literary work available at all, sparing readers a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, where the original typescript is held. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1543-6322%28195124%2910%3A2%3C210%3ADAMS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Dimitri Tselos challenges the enduring narrative that the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 represented architecture's "Lost Cause" — the idea that a Chicago School triumph, embodied in the Neo-Romanesque style of Louis Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, and Henry Hobson Richardson, was thwarted by the Fair's classical Court of Honor. Reconstructing the Fair's planning and the limited stylistic options realistically available to its architects, Tselos argues Richardson's death and Root's own uneven, retrogressive late work make the counterfactual implausible, and that even Sullivan later admitted no American architect was equal to inventing a wholly new style for the Fair on short notice. He offers a detailed formal analysis of Sullivan's Transportation Building, arguing — against admirers who cite it as evidence of what might have been — that it is itself an eclectic pastiche of Roman basilican form, Gothic nave articulation drawn from Notre Dame, and an ornamental "Golden Gate" and cupola derived from Islamic and North African precedents, also traceable in Sullivan's Wainwright Tomb. Tselos further faults the Transportation Building's interior, comparing it unfavorably to George B. Post's Manufactures Building, for failing to advance the century's engineering achievements in glass-and-metal exhibition sheds. He concludes that Sullivan's own evolution toward a rationalized classicism undercuts the notion that his 1900s attacks on academic eclecticism were driven by principle rather than declining fortunes. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196712%2926%3A4%3C259%3ATCFATM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

Jane Van Norman Turano's review of Narciso G. Menocal's *Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan* praises the book as a dense, well-documented study of the intellectual sources — Rousseau, Taine, Emerson, Whitman, Nietzsche, Froebel, Hegel, Schiller, Swedenborg — behind Sullivan's writings and their relation to his architecture. Turano summarizes Menocal's account of Sullivan's partnership with Dankmar Adler (crediting Adler with most of the firm's acclaimed commissions while Sullivan supplied ornament and facade composition), his subsequent decline into a career largely of rural banks and few residential commissions, and Menocal's explanation of Sullivan's professional failure as rooted in an increasingly anachronistic romanticism rather than any genuine modernism. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7359%28198123%2913%3A4%3C88%3AAANTTI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E

Robert Twombly reviews Paul E. Sprague's *The Drawings of Louis Henry Sullivan*, a catalogue of the 122 Sullivan drawings in the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection at Columbia's Avery Architectural Library — drawings Sullivan gave to Wright days before his death and which Wright's foundation later sold to Avery. Twombly summarizes Sprague's stylistic periodization of Sullivan's ornamental development and his account of Sullivan's design process (the Beaux-Arts esquisse method, plan-before-elevation habits), then takes issue with Sprague's claim that Sullivan regarded his drawings as expendable utilitarian documents, arguing this contradicts Sullivan's own evident care in dating and ultimately preserving them for publication. The review situates the volume against the small existing shelf of Sullivan biography — Hugh Morrison, Wright's *Genius and the Mobocracy*, Willard Connely, Sherman Paul — and calls it an important addition despite reservations about Sprague's interpretive framing. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0084-0416%28198121%2916%3A1%3C109%3ATDOLHS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9

Robert Twombly's detailed reconstruction of Sullivan's little-known 1919–1922 remodeling of the First National Bank Building in Manistique, Michigan, based on newly available drawings and correspondence, corrects the earlier notion — traceable to architectural photographer Richard Nickel's 1958 site visit — that the project was never realized. Twombly reconstructs the commission's origin through bank cashier William S. Crowe's admiration of the Owatonna bank, analyzes Sullivan's solution for unifying a dual-purpose (banking and rental office) building through a light/dark color program and facade realignment, and describes distinctive features — a double vestibule, an off-center vault relocated to accommodate new heating ducts, and a "children's nook" — compared with Sullivan's other rural and small-town banks. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28200106%2960%3A2%3C200%3ALSFNBB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

Robert Twombly argues that Sullivan scholarship has overemphasized his Chicago work at the expense of his significant trans-Mississippi practice, particularly in St. Louis, where Adler & Sullivan pursued ten skyscraper projects (1890–1894) alongside commissions in Pueblo, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. Twombly traces Sullivan's rhetorical construction of "the West" as an honest, democratic counterpoint to a corrupt, tradition-bound East (drawing on *Kindergarten Chats*), and situates this ideology within Sullivan's biography and his leadership of western architectural associations. The article then presents detailed design and construction histories of the Pueblo Opera House Block (1888–1889), the unbuilt Ontario Hotel and Seattle Opera House Block projects (1890), the Dooly Block (1890–91), the Wainwright Building (Sullivan's first skyscraper, 1890–91), the Mercantile Club and Union Trust Building projects, the Portland Building and St. Nicholas Hotel projects, unbuilt "Trust and Savings" skyscraper studies, and the Chemical National Bank project, arguing that these St. Louis buildings pioneered Sullivan's mature "system of vertical construction" and, in the Chemical National Bank scheme, anticipated the neutral curtain-wall aesthetic of twentieth-century Modernism before Chicago examples did. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-8684%28198511%2954%3A4%3C405%3ABCLSIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V

Robert Twombly reviews Joseph Siry's *Carson Pirie Scott: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Department Store* (University of Chicago Press, 1989), a study of Sullivan's last major built commission (1898–1903). Twombly praises Siry's use of newly discovered archival sources and his extensive, often previously unpublished illustrations, singling out Siry's comparison of the building's architectural ornament with its adaptation in contemporary advertising graphics as illuminating the marketing strategies of Chicago's State Street dry-goods merchants. He summarizes the book's structure: a first chapter tracing State Street's development as a retail district from Potter Palmer's 1852 arrival to Sullivan's design; a second chapter he calls the definitive account of the building's conception and execution; and a final chapter dissecting the store's show windows, ornament, entryways, and circulation to reconstruct it as a unified work of art expressing Sullivan's philosophy of form following function. Twombly frames Siry's achievement as recasting Carson Pirie Scott not as a mere precursor to Miesian structural rationalism but as Sullivan's own interpretation of American commercial culture, situating the book within a broader wave of Sullivan scholarship since 1985 that he judges has substantially enriched a previously thin literature. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28198912%2976%3A3%3C955%3ACPSLSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Twombly reviews two 1990–91 books on the "trinity" of Richardson, Sullivan, and Wright. He faults Johnson's Frank Lloyd Wright versus America for disorganization and a politically tendentious closing section that defends Wright's opposition to U.S. entry into World War II while mischaracterizing European modernism as a monolithic "Central European" socialist architecture; he credits its extensive new archival research from the Taliesin West archives but judges the synthesis to add little genuine interpretation. He reviews O'Gorman's Three American Architects more favorably on Richardson but criticizes its central thesis that Sullivan and Wright were essentially conduits for Richardsonian ideas — "one Olympian, plus two minions" — arguing this undervalues scholarship by David Van Zanten, Lauren Weingarden, Wim de Wit, and Narciso Menocal showing Sullivan's ornament and banks to be intellectually independent, and Wright's own range of influences beyond Richardson. (Note: this PDF's extracted text runs slightly past the review's actual end into the opening paragraph of the next article in the issue — Leonard Eaton's separate review of The Midwest in American Architecture, catalogued here as sullivan187.pdf — a page-boundary artifact of the scan, not part of Twombly's review.) PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199206%2951%3A2%3C210%3AFLWVAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M

Everard M. Upjohn reviews Hugh Morrison's *Louis Sullivan—Prophet of Modern Architecture* (Museum of Modern Art and W. W. Norton, 1935), the first substantial scholarly biography of Sullivan, praising it as "at last ... a worthy discussion of Sullivan, his life, his architecture, and his theory." Upjohn credits Morrison's compact, well-organized treatment of Sullivan's early life — drawn largely from *The Autobiography of an Idea* but rendered with more narrative discipline than Sullivan's own discursive prose — and his clear tracing of Sullivan's stylistic development away from Richardsonian influence in the 1880s toward a more personal expression in the 1890s. He finds the book's illustrations the best yet published, apart from a few plates in the *Western Architect*, but regrets the absence of detailed close-up photographs of ornament, particularly at the National Farmers' Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota, and the scarcity of building plans, including for the Auditorium Building. The bulk of the review engages Morrison's closing discussion of eclecticism versus functionalism, in which Upjohn questions several of Morrison's specific architectural and historical arguments — including his claim that Reims Cathedral's flying buttresses are structurally superfluous — while broadly endorsing the book's stature as an essential reference, closing with the observation that Morrison, like Sullivan, has demonstrated that "form follows function." PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3079%28193603%2918%3A1%3C125%3ALSOMA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

David Van Zanten reviews Ronald E. Schmitt's *Sullivanesque: Urban Architecture and Ornamentation* (University of Illinois Press, 2002), which documents a vernacular genre of terra-cotta-clad Midwestern shopping-street facades of the 1910s–20s derived from, and mass-produced in imitation of, Louis Sullivan's ornamental designs. Van Zanten credits Schmitt with identifying the fabricators, developers, and local designers behind this widespread building type, and with a detailed history of the Midland Terra Cotta Company, while praising the book's potential to spur preservation of threatened Midwestern shopping streets. However, he argues Schmitt's definition of "the Sullivanesque" — buildings whose ornament simply resembles Sullivan's — is too narrow and treats Sullivan's ornamental system as a fixed style rather than the generative geometric practice Sullivan himself described in his lectures, *Kindergarten Chats*, and *A System of Architectural Ornament*. Van Zanten contends a fuller account would need to address Sullivan's early collaborators John Edelmann and Louis J. Millet, his rivalry with John Wellborn Root, and admirers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, situating vernacular ornament within the same geometric practice underlying the Chicago School and Prairie School alike. He concludes the book does important documentary work but shortchanges both its stated goals — analyzing Sullivan's technique and chronicling the terra-cotta streetscape — by focusing narrowly on individual facades rather than the urban fabric they compose. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28200312%2962%3A4%3C528%3ASUAAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

J. Carson Webster reviews Sherman Paul's *Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought* (Prentice-Hall, 1962), describing it as an intellectual-history study, comparable to Charles R. Metzger's work on Emerson and Greenough, that situates Sullivan's ideas in relation to Walt Whitman (the primary and lasting influence), Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, A. F. Chamberlain, G. Stanley Hall, William James, Thorstein Veblen, and Chicago figures Oscar L. Triggs and Henry D. Lloyd, drawing chiefly on Sullivan's *Autobiography of an Idea*. Webster finds Paul's summary of Sullivan's ideas accurate and convincing, particularly the parallel Paul draws between Sullivan's linked concepts of "natural thinking," education, and democracy and Dewey's own program relating scientific method, education, and democracy. Webster's main criticism is that Paul, while an excellent surveyor of Sullivan's thought, offers little critical assessment of Sullivan's actual architectural achievement, leaving the reader to assume a connection between the ideas and the buildings without demonstrating it — Webster himself suggests the ornament in some of Sullivan's banks and the Carson Pirie Scott Store looks "hung on" rather than integrated with structure. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3249%28196421%2923%3A3%3C262%3ALSAAIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3

An article examining a previously unstudied 1893 French-language manuscript held in the Sullivania archives at the Art Institute of Chicago's Burnham Library — a handwritten revision of Sullivan's 1886 prose-poem essay "Inspiration," not (as earlier assumed) a mere translation but an independent theoretical reworking. Weingarden argues the 1893 document sharpens Sullivan's underlying philosophy of art (the union of the artist's soul with nature) into more explicitly didactic form, coinciding with the international acclaim his ornament received in France — particularly through his work on the Union Centrale's exhibition headquarters, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs — and situates Sullivan's aesthetic theory alongside contemporary French Art Nouveau and Symbolist thought. The piece connects directly to Sullivan's earlier 1874–75 architectural training at the École des Beaux-Arts. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198012%2939%3A4%3C297%3ALHSIOA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

A scholarly article arguing that Louis Sullivan's use of color in architecture was not merely decorative but a deliberate metaphor for nature and the generative forces that shape it, a dimension of his work Weingarden contends was suppressed by twentieth-century modernist historians who emphasized his functionalist legacy instead. Building on Narciso Menocal's transcendentalist reading of Sullivan and David Van Zanten's work on nineteenth-century polychromy, the article situates Sullivan's color theory within a broader nineteenth-century tradition of architectural and pictorial color theory and Wagnerian ideas of synaesthesia, tracing it back to Sullivan's earliest writings on color in his student "Lotus Club Notebook" with fellow draftsman John Edelmann, and connecting it to his concept of the "Infinite Creative Spirit" as manifested through the interplay of objective (geometric, structural) and subjective (organic, ornamental) architectural elements. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0084-0416%28198524%2920%3A4%3C243%3ATCONLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-B

A review of Narciso Menocal's monograph arguing that Sullivan's entire body of work and writing was driven by a single sustaining "transcendentalist idea" — the artistic expression of spiritual communion with nature — which Menocal traces from Sullivan's 1886 essay "An Essay on Inspiration" through his late-life *Autobiography of an Idea*. Weingarden summarizes Menocal's chapter-by-chapter argument, including his treatment of the Adler & Sullivan partnership years (1883–1895), Sullivan's mature ornament and skyscraper designs, and his post-1895 career including the Bradley House commission, while also raising critical questions about Menocal's psychological framing of Sullivan's late-career decline as rooted in "obstinate dedication to anachronistic conceptions" rather than simple external misfortune. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198203%2941%3A1%3C74%3AAANTTI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-F

This review essay evaluates three books central to the mid-1980s reassessment of Sullivan: David S. Andrew's polemical *Louis Sullivan and the Polemics of Modern Architecture*, Larry Millett's *The Curve of the Arch* (on the Owatonna bank), and Robert Twombly's biography *Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work*. Weingarden summarizes Twombly's formalist and biographical treatment of Sullivan's partnership with Dankmar Adler, his ornamental theory, and his controversial suggestion that Sullivan was homosexual. She praises Millett's account of the Owatonna bank's patron Carl K. Bennett and draftsman George Grant Elmslie, including Millett's attribution of much of the bank's ornament to Elmslie while crediting Sullivan with the overall design; Kristian Schneider (terra-cotta modeler) and William Winslow (ornamental ironwork) are also discussed as members of Sullivan's execution team. The review closes with a critical look at Andrew's argument that Sullivan's skyscraper work was socially irresponsible. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0084-0416%28198722%2F23%2922%3A2%2F3%3C202%3ALSATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5

Weingarden reviews David Van Zanten's *Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan*, which traces Sullivan's career through five essays from his emergence as Chicago's preeminent skyscraper designer to his isolated late career as an ornamentalist. The review situates Van Zanten's contribution within the post-1968 reappraisal of Sullivan's ornament (following Paul Sprague and the 1987 Chicago Historical Society exhibition *Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament*) and highlights Van Zanten's discussion of Sullivan's early skyscrapers (Wainwright Building, Schiller Building), his rivalry and camaraderie with Daniel Burnham, his later mentorship of Prairie School designers, and his houses of 1891–1912 as an underappreciated body of work alongside the rural banks. Weingarden praises Van Zanten's urban contextualization but notes his conventional, quasi-psychobiographical reading of Sullivan's late ornamental treatise as autobiography. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28200106%2960%3A2%3C229%3ASCTMOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

A second review of Paul E. Sprague's *The Drawings of Louis Henry Sullivan*, this one by Lauren S. Weingarden in *The Art Bulletin*, published alongside an unrelated review of a survey of German Romantic painting. Weingarden credits Sprague as the foremost authority on Sullivan's ornament for dating, attributing, and stylistically classifying the 122 drawings, and for tracing Sullivan's sources (Owen Jones's *Grammar of Ornament*, Asa Gray's botanical texts, Frank Furness's Gothic Revival vocabulary). She argues, however, that Sprague's catalogue essay under-theorizes Sullivan's metaphysical conception of ornament as an expression of the "Infinite Creative Spirit," and offers her own extended discussion of Sullivan's philosophical sources, his technical affinity with French Impressionism, and the debate over why so many Sullivan drawings were lost or destroyed, including the question of George Elmslie's culpability. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-3079%28198112%2963%3A4%3C690%3ATDOLHS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P

Lauren S. Weingarden argues that Louis Sullivan's search for a native American architectural style continued, rather than broke from, nineteenth-century tradition, tracing a shared Ruskinian-transcendentalist aesthetic discourse running from Frank Furness through Henry Hobson Richardson to Sullivan. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson's writings on nature and art and John Ruskin's *The Seven Lamps of Architecture* and *The Stones of Venice*, Weingarden shows how Furness's Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Richardson's Trinity Church, Marshall Field Wholesale Store, and Ames Memorial Town Hall transmitted Ruskin's naturalistic ornamental principles and "lamp of power" mass-composition ideals to Sullivan, who synthesized them in the Auditorium Building and his mature skyscraper ornament and verticality (the Wainwright and Guaranty Buildings), later systematizing them in his *System of Architectural Ornament*. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0084-0416%28198921%2924%3A1%3C43%3ANNARDO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N

Lauren S. Weingarden reviews two 1990 publications on Sullivan: Joseph Siry's monograph on the Carson Pirie Scott (Schlesinger & Mayer) department store, and Robert Twombly's edited volume of Sullivan's collected public writings. Only the concluding paragraph of the review is legibly extractable from this PDF (the middle pages are untranscribable scanned images, see note below); in it, Weingarden situates Sullivan's work as inheriting both a nineteenth-century romantic tradition and a functionalist tradition, both of which gave way to Modernism, and states that the two books together allow a reconciliation between the "romantic and functionalist polemics" that have characterized Sullivan criticism. The review closes with Weingarden's byline (Florida State University) and is followed immediately in the JSAH issue by an unrelated review of Elizabeth Meredith Dowling's *American Classicist: The Architecture of Philip Trammell Shutze*. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28199006%2949%3A2%3C222%3ACPSLSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Argues that Louis Sullivan's characteristic "functionalist" vertical-pier commercial facades — the Wainwright, Guaranty, and other skyscrapers — had direct forerunners in a little-known group of mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia commercial buildings, especially William L. Johnston's Jayne Building (1849–51), first identified by Charles Peterson in 1951. Weisman surveys three categories of Philadelphia commercial facade design from 1849–1859 — structural glass-and-stone skeleton fronts, vertically articulated palazzo variants, and the structural-vertical synthesis exemplified by the Jayne Building — tracing their sources back to Boston (Isaiah Rogers, Alexander Parris) and to German and Lombard Romanesque revivalism (Schinkel, Thomas Tefft). Through newspaper research (the Philadelphia Ledger) and building-by-building comparison, he shows that Sullivan, who worked in Philadelphia for the firm of Furness and Hewitt in 1873 in the immediate vicinity of the Jayne Building, plausibly absorbed this local tradition of projecting piers and recessed spandrels directly, and argues for a reassessment both of Sullivan's originality and of Philadelphia's overlooked contribution to the prehistory of the Chicago School. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196103%2920%3A1%3C3%3APFAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1

Winston Weisman reviews Carl Condit's The Rise of the Skyscraper a year after Henry-Russell Hitchcock's own review of the same book in American Quarterly (see sullivan188.pdf), crediting Condit with a lucid, well-illustrated account of Chicago's post-fire commercial architecture but arguing the book's central premise—that the skyscraper is fundamentally a technological phenomenon explicable entirely through Chicago developments—is asserted rather than demonstrated. Weisman notes Condit never resolves whether the Montauk or Home Insurance Building deserves priority as the first true skyscraper, and contends the book slights significant vertical-emphasis precedents in Philadelphia (citing Sullivan's documented familiarity, through his apprenticeship with Frank Furness, with buildings like the Jayne Building) as well as New York's own tall-building lineage running from George Post and Bruce Price through McKim, Mead and White. He also faults Condit's account of John Root's early New York training under John Snook for failing to connect Root's exposure to that city's contemporaneous office-building boom, concluding the book is a valuable but incomplete contribution pending further research into skyscraper development outside Chicago. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28195310%2912%3A3%3C30%3ATROTST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4

Robert N. Wilson reviews Hugh Dalziel Duncan's 616-page study, which situates Sullivan simultaneously as shaper of and subject to Chicago's civic and economic development, arguing the same city that spurred his architectural and philosophical innovation ultimately destroyed him through neglect. Wilson credits Duncan's "hero-worship" of Sullivan with animating an absorbing dual narrative of the growth of the city and the growth of the architect, quoting Duncan's account of Sullivan's development of the "form follows function" and "mobile equilibrium" concepts and his insistence that architectural criticism is properly a branch of social science. Wilson's chief reservation is that Duncan's zeal produces excesses of factual inclusion and overwrought rhetoric — extensive digressions into Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead sometimes cause Sullivan himself to "get lost or out of focus" — but concludes the book successfully shows how Sullivan and contemporaries sought a "democratic art" responsive to human need, opposed to what Sullivan termed "feudal" architecture, and that it usefully teaches sociologists about Sullivan, the social history of Chicago, and the potential role of the arts in a democratic industrial society. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-7732%28196612%2945%3A2%3C289%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

A multi-book review covering several early-1970s reissues and studies of Frank Lloyd Wright's writings and buildings. Wilson highlights the reissue of *Genius and the Mobocracy* (1949), Wright's own tribute to Louis Sullivan — "the tragedy, triumph, and significance of the great man" — as revealing more about Wright's own personality than about Sullivan, portraying Sullivan as primarily an ornamentalist while leaving Wright's own contribution and the office force's role underacknowledged; also reviews Cary James's photographic study of Wright's Imperial Hotel and Martin Pawley's survey of Wright's public buildings. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28197310%2932%3A3%3C262%3AAOATAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

A joint review reading Maurice English's anthology of Sullivan's writings and Sherman Paul's critical study together as complementary halves of a single project — primary text paired with scholarly analysis. Winkelhake, writing from an aesthetic-education standpoint, highlights Sullivan's 1894 essay "Emotional Architecture as Compared with Intellectual" and his 1900 "The Young Man in Architecture" (in which Sullivan calls beginning an architect's education with a book "an intellectual crime") as evidence of Sullivan's belief that architectural education should be rooted in direct, embodied experience of natural and social conditions rather than abstract study, tracing this position back to Emersonian ideas of the building as "spiritual form." The review frames both English and Paul as indebted to the Burnham Library's Sullivan holdings, and Sullivan himself as making possible a fuller understanding of the relationship between architecture, democracy, and nature in this period. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8510%28196804%292%3A2%3C137%3ATTOSTO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J

A brief 1957 review by Paul Zucker of John Szarkowski's photographic anthology *The Idea of Louis Sullivan*, paired in the same journal issue with a review of Eduard Sekler's book on Christopher Wren. Zucker frames Sullivan's influence on modern American architecture as resting more on the rhetorical force of his aesthetic writings ("form follows function," *Kindergarten Chats*, *The Autobiography of an Idea*) than on his relatively small built oeuvre, and credits Szarkowski's documentary photographs, paired with contemporary quotations from figures including Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Adams, and Thorstein Veblen, with restoring the architect's major buildings to view without competing with Hugh Morrison's earlier biography. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28195706%2915%3A4%3C500%3ATIOLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

Wartime essay surveying the history of American architectural eclecticism from the Greek Revival through the "Imperial Façade" of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, arguing that the brief functionalist "Chicago school" breakthrough led by Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright around 1890 was submerged by a new wave of Beaux-Arts eclecticism before resurfacing after World War I in dialogue with European functionalism (Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany) and American engineering works such as bridges, dams, and industrial plants. Zucker proposes that postwar architecture must move beyond both the aesthetic and the merely technical/functionalist paradigms of the previous century toward a "social functionalism" responsive to new patterns of collective postwar life, arguing that Sullivan's and Wright's early example, though initially eclipsed by eclecticism, anticipated this eventual synthesis of technical, social, and artistic considerations. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%281944%293%3A9%2F10%3C30%3ATROAIF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

John Zukowsky, writing from the Art Institute of Chicago's Burnham Library, reviews Paul E. Sprague's *The Drawings of Louis Henry Sullivan*. He praises Sprague's introduction and catalogue entries but challenges three of Sprague's claims by comparing them against the Art Institute's own roughly 540-sheet Adler and Sullivan drawing collection: that ornamental drawings dominate Sullivan's surviving graphic work, that the Avery drawings were made entirely freehand, and that fewer than 200 Sullivan drawings survive in total. He also raises the problem of attribution given draftsmen such as Parker Berry and Louis J. Millet, and notes George Elmslie's role as executor of Sullivan's estate and as the source of a separate cache of Sullivan sketches. PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198110%2940%3A3%3C251%3ATDOLHS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3