“Review of *The Idea of Louis Sullivan*, by John Szarkowski”

AboutIn this brief notice for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, architectural historian Hugh Morrison — himself Sullivan's first major biographer — reviews photographer John Szarkowski's *The Idea of Louis Sullivan* (University of Minnesota Press, 1956). Morrison describes the book as far more than a picture-book of Sullivan's buildings: it pairs Szarkowski's photographs, taken with an unusually personal and unsentimental eye toward buildings that people had "worked in and maimed and ignored and perhaps loved," with roughly thirty quotations from Sullivan's own writings and dozens more drawn from contemporaries such as Walt Whitman and Frank Lloyd Wright. Morrison highlights specific photographic "sequences" built around the Garrick Theatre and the Chicago Stock Exchange, and singles out images of the Carson Pirie Scott Store and the Auditorium's ornamental panels as capturing both the triumph and the neglect of Sullivan's surviving work amid the "shabby vulgarity" of the modern city. He judges the book a wholly new kind of architectural history — less documentary than an emotional meditation on the meaning of Sullivan's ornament as art and as a record of American life — and praises it as the most profound engagement with Sullivan's spirit since Sullivan's own writing.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28195822%2917%3A2%3C30%3ATIOLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5