“The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan's Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth-Century Color Theory”

AboutA 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