“Naturalized Nationalism: A Ruskinian Discourse on the Search for an American Style of Architecture”

AboutLauren 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*.

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