“Louis Sullivan and the Golden Doorway”

AboutAn 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