“Form Follows Nature: The Origins of American Organic Architecture”

AboutMumford traces the intellectual origins of American organic architecture through Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, arguing that their design methods derive not primarily from native transcendentalist philosophy but from French Beaux-Arts "Romantique" theory transmitted to America through Richard Morris Hunt's New York atelier (where Furness trained) and through the writings of Leopold Eidlitz. The essay reconstructs a theoretical lineage running from Emerson, Coleridge, and Horatio Greenough through Beaux-Arts theorists Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, César Daly, and Victor Ruprich-Robert, who analyzed natural and architectural forms as organisms governed by laws of structural adaptation and function-driven expression. Mumford shows how Eidlitz's writings on empathic, force-based architectural expression, and Henry Van Brunt's essays on abstracted "lines of beauty," fed into Sullivan's own theory of ornament and composition (articulated in *Kindergarten Chats* and "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered") and, through Sullivan, into Wright's later organic principles, concluding that despite stylistic differences all three architects shared a common aesthetic method rooted in this transatlantic organic tradition.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1046-4883%28198921%2942%3A3%3C26%3AFFNTOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J