SULLIVAN’S CITY: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan
By David Van Zanten
Photographs by Cervin Robinson
Norton, 179 pages, $60
Architect Louis Sullivan’s city was, of course, Chicago. In a larger sense, it was the city of man. He was its artist-poet, breathing life into stone and steel, and bursting out in ravishing ornament.
Sullivan has been written about at length as flawed genius, tragic hero, world dreamer. But there is still more to it than that. David Van Zanten, a Northwestern University architectural historian, offers some provocative insights. And Cervin Robinson’s color photos are fascinating: a superior eye addressing the work of a superior artist.
Who hasn’t been captivated by Sullivan’s ornamental flourishes at the Auditorium Theater or Carson Pirie Scott in the Loop? (The swirling streetside forms at Carson’s actually were designed by Sullivan’s gifted assistant, George Elmslie, under the master’s guidance.) Van Zanten and Robinson pay due attention, but they also focus, for example, on the amazing variety of column capitals created by Sullivan for the Auditorium Building’s banquet room.
Chicago’s Charnley House, often seen as the handiwork of Sullivan’s then-assistant, Frank Lloyd Wright, is analyzed for its Sullivanesque spaces.
Sullivan and his partner, Dankmar Adler, enjoyed great success in the late 19th Century with theaters and early skyscrapers. But even when Sullivan was reduced in later years to designing small-town banks for a meager living, he came up with facades that swelled with Michelangelesque passion. They are still there, and the photos tell the story.
Supposedly the supreme individualist, Sullivan was at the same time a civic man. His buildings generated a powerful sense of place within the framework of city and town. Shortly before he died in 1924, he completed his series of drawings, “A System of Architectural Ornament.” They remain breathtaking. Van Zanten sees in them a concept of the city itself, be it dream or reality.
For Sullivan scholars and buffs, “Sullivan’s City” opens fresh lines of thought.
IRVING GILL AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF REFORM:
A Study in Modernist Architectural Culture
By Thomas S. Hines
Monacelli, 303 pages, $75
In 1970 the Dodge House, an acclaimed masterpiece of clean-lined modernist design, was destroyed by assorted Los Angeles philistines. The house was 54 years old, and it didn’t die easily.
Wreckers ” `beat it and beat it and it wouldn’t go down,’ ” a neighbor recalled. ” `It was like an animal being beaten. They kept beating and beating. . . .’ “
Its architect, Irving Gill, also took a beating late in life, carefully totaling the pennies he spent for food. It was a disturbing finale for a true and rare original, largely unsung, who distilled design to an essence.
Gill did nearly all of his signature work in California, but he learned in Chicago. As a young man he worked for Louis Sullivan (and thus for Frank Lloyd Wright too). Gradually, after moving to San Diego for his health in 1893, Gill refined his own way. Even the lordly Wright had to admit it. Concrete was Gill’s chosen material. “The straight line, the arch, the cube and the circle” were his root sources, he said.
He preached plainness and simplicity and the art of leaving out rather than overstuffing. He nonetheless was immensely inventive, preoccupied if not obsessed with sanitation and labor-saving devices in the home. And he benefited from progressive clients, often women, and did pioneering work with low-cost housing. Gill’s stamp is on the modernism that is virtually vernacular in California.
Historian Thomas S. Hines, biographer of Daniel Burnham, tells Gill’s story in an amply illustrated study. House after house unfolds (many are now gone). But Gill’s influence faded as design fashions changed. (Something similar happened to Sullivan.) Depression America and illness finished Gill in 1936.
Now, to be sure, Gill has been reclaimed as a form-giver of world architecture, well-served in this welcome study.
LOST NEW YORK
By Nathan Silver
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 274 pages, $25 paper
As if great cities didn’t have enough trouble, they fell prey in mid-20th Century to their own self-devastation, masked and marketed as “progress” and “urban renewal.” New York suffered severe losses of architectural treasures. But when the majestic Pennsylvania Railroad Station was demolished in 1963, it was just too much. The modern preservation movement was born as a result. New York set out to make sure nothing like that would happen again.
It hasn’t–in New York, although Grand Central Station narrowly escaped the maulers. Much-maligned New York has preserved thousands of landmark buildings since then. Even Chicago, that most wanton and persistent destroyer, has slowed the wrecking ball, grudgingly. Let’s not forget, though, that 1970s Chicago wiped out the concourse of Union Station, a space created in the mold of Penn Station. Very little is left of railroad stations in the Midwest rail capital.
Nathan Silver’s 1967 “Lost New York” and David Lowe’s even more memorable 1975 “Lost Chicago” were significant books of the period. Now Silver, an architect and educator, has done some updating. This reissue is filled out with memories of his boyhood in New York, with its parades and music, movies and real-life disasters, crowds and family folk.
The good news is that the city managed to save most of the buildings that seemed particularly endangered in the late 1960s. Unforgivably, it accepted the axing of the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway. The Astor Hotel in Times Square went, too, along with movie palaces and the nightlife of “Swing Street”–52nd Street. Silver despises Robert Moses, the power broker who destroyed so much while building parks, bridges and highways. For anyone who loves great cities, this is a cautionary tale.
