“Review of *Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan*, by Narciso G. Menocal”

AboutJane Van Norman Turano's review of Narciso G. Menocal's *Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan* praises the book as a dense, well-documented study of the intellectual sources — Rousseau, Taine, Emerson, Whitman, Nietzsche, Froebel, Hegel, Schiller, Swedenborg — behind Sullivan's writings and their relation to his architecture. Turano summarizes Menocal's account of Sullivan's partnership with Dankmar Adler (crediting Adler with most of the firm's acclaimed commissions while Sullivan supplied ornament and facade composition), his subsequent decline into a career largely of rural banks and few residential commissions, and Menocal's explanation of Sullivan's professional failure as rooted in an increasingly anachronistic romanticism rather than any genuine modernism.

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