“Review of *H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society*, by James F. O'Gorman, and *Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work*, by Robert C. Twombly”

AboutUnder the title "An American Image in Architecture," J. A. Chewning jointly reviews two 1986–87 books on the two architects he presents as forming, with Frank Lloyd Wright, a continuous American architectural tradition from the Civil War to World War I. James O'Gorman's concise study of H. H. Richardson (140 pages) is organized around specific building types across urban, rural, and suburban contexts — Trinity Church, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store, the Ames Monument, the Ames Gate Lodge, and New England town libraries — and argues for Richardson's role in creating a distinctively American architectural imagery; Chewning praises its authority while faulting its comparative neglect of the Allegheny County Courthouse and Richardson's town-house work. Robert Twombly's 530-page biography of Sullivan is described as the most comprehensive interpretive account of Sullivan's life to date, its first chapters resolving factual questions in Sullivan's own *Autobiography of an Idea* and later chapters analyzing the Adler and Sullivan partnership building by building; Chewning credits its appendices (documenting 238 works, including 40 newly identified Adler and Sullivan commissions) but criticizes its comparatively thin attention to Chicago's economic context and to Sullivan's professional relationships with contemporaries like Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root, concluding Twombly remains somewhat captive to the "egocentric power" of Sullivan's own autobiographical narrative.

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