“Review of *Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan*, by David Van Zanten, photographs by Cervin Robinson”

AboutWeingarden 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