“The Tragic Life of an American Architect”

AboutNarciso 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.

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