“Review of *Louis Sullivan as He Lived: The Shaping of American Architecture*, by Willard Connely”

AboutCarl W. Condit reviews Willard Connely's 1960 biography, crediting Connely with rescuing Sullivan's personal life from obscurity through original research — tracking down surviving documents and a niece who had not seen Sullivan in fifty years — and thereby producing the first full portrait of Sullivan as a living man, treating his family background, friendships, and the bitterness of his declining later years with sympathy but without sentimentality. Condit's central criticism is that Connely oversimplifies the causes of Sullivan's professional decline by attributing it to three events concentrated in 1891 (the classicists' victory in planning the 1893 World's Fair, the death of John Wellborn Root, and the failure of the Fraternity Temple setback-skyscraper project), arguing this ignores that Sullivan received his three largest commissions after the Auditorium in the following decade, and that Connely's Manichean treatment of Sullivan as hero against uniformly shallow rivals is unfair, particularly to Daniel Burnham. Condit concludes that Connely, while offering a lively and concrete account, does not penetrate deeply into the forces that shaped Sullivan's art or explain how his ornament and total architectural vision fused lyrical subjectivity with the positivism of contemporary science and engineering.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-1753%28196206%2953%3A2%3C270%3ALSAHLT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-S