“Review of *Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West during the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan*, by Hugh Dalziel Duncan”

AboutRobert N. Wilson reviews Hugh Dalziel Duncan's 616-page study, which situates Sullivan simultaneously as shaper of and subject to Chicago's civic and economic development, arguing the same city that spurred his architectural and philosophical innovation ultimately destroyed him through neglect. Wilson credits Duncan's "hero-worship" of Sullivan with animating an absorbing dual narrative of the growth of the city and the growth of the architect, quoting Duncan's account of Sullivan's development of the "form follows function" and "mobile equilibrium" concepts and his insistence that architectural criticism is properly a branch of social science. Wilson's chief reservation is that Duncan's zeal produces excesses of factual inclusion and overwrought rhetoric — extensive digressions into Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead sometimes cause Sullivan himself to "get lost or out of focus" — but concludes the book successfully shows how Sullivan and contemporaries sought a "democratic art" responsive to human need, opposed to what Sullivan termed "feudal" architecture, and that it usefully teaches sociologists about Sullivan, the social history of Chicago, and the potential role of the arts in a democratic industrial society.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-7732%28196612%2945%3A2%3C289%3ACADTSF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8