“Review of *Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks*, by Lauren S. Weingarden”

AboutRochelle Berger Elstein reviews Lauren S. Weingarden's *Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks* (MIT Press, 1987), which argues for reassessing Sullivan's eight midwestern bank commissions not as evidence of career decline but as a mature, richly colored final phase of his art, countering the earlier dismissive view associated with Sigfried Giedion. Elstein summarizes Weingarden's two-part structure — an interpretive essay tracing Sullivan's sources (John Dewey's pragmatism, Michel Chevreul's and Ogden Rood's color theory, the concept of "democratic architecture," and the open bank plan) followed by an extensive building-by-building catalogue with dates, costs, client information, and press reception — and credits Weingarden with restoring Sullivan's primacy as a designer against critics who credited his ornament to assistants like George Elmslie, Parker Berry, Louis Millet, and Kristian Schneider. Elstein's critique faults the book for omitting critical rankings among the banks, for not connecting the banks formally to Sullivan's contemporaneous tombs and skyscrapers, and for neglecting the influence of Henry Hobson Richardson and Frank Furness on the bank designs, while noting a few bibliographic omissions. (Note: the PDF's opening pages are the tail end of an unrelated review by Jonathan Lipman of a book on Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building, preceding Elstein's review in the same JSAH issue.)

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28198812%2947%3A4%3C432%3ALHSTB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q