Sullivanesque: Urban Architecture and Ornamentation
By Ronald E. Schmitt
University of Illinois Press, 348 pages, $50
Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Landscape Designs
By Charles E. Aguar and Berdeana Aguar
McGraw-Hill, 373 pages, $45
Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright form the pinnacle of Chicago’s architectural achievers in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. While shelves can be filled with books about them, two new publications explore some previously neglected facets of the architects’ work. “Sullivanesque: Urban Architecture and Ornamentation,” by Ronald E. Schmitt, is an evaluation of Sullivan’s influence on contemporaries who practiced in his supposedly singular style. “Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Landscape Designs,” by Charles E. Aguar and Berdeana Aguar, evaluates Wright’s career from the perspective of the landscape architect. Both add to our still evolving understanding of these remarkable architects.
It is generally acknowledged that Sullivan was the father of the skyscraper, the oracle who uttered the famous words “form follows function” and employed the precocious Frank Lloyd Wright in his office. Accomplishing this by the end of the 19th Century, when he was just 44, Sullivan then squandered his great gifts in an alcoholic decline over the next quarter-century. In his lengthy twilight, he built little buildings that continued to incorporate elaborate and highly personalized ornament inspired by his idealized view of nature.
Ronald E. Schmitt, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an unabashed fan and champion of Sullivan’s and the work he inspired. “Sullivanesque” is his paean to the surprisingly large quantity of buildings that drew from Sullivan’s richly ornamental aesthetic, many by previously unnoticed designers.
Sullivan practiced in Chicago from 1876 until he died in 1924, though his most important work was completed by 1903. Schmitt dates the flourishing of the Sullivanesque style from 1895 to 1930. Practitioners of the Sullivanesque fell into several categories. The best work was generally produced by those who worked for him during his most prolific years. Others adopted the style because of their own aesthetic sympathies, and there was a third tier who found the readily available, Sullivan-style terra-cotta ornament to be an expeditious way of decorating their own designs.
Schmitt finds Sullivanesque buildings across the country and documents them with historical and visual acuity. His alluring photographs depict many relatively ordinary buildings that fit his definition of the Sullivanesque. But while Schmitt’s prose is generally readable, it often falls into a repetitive litany of building parts and esoteric data that will interest only the specialist.
The book’s most interesting tale is Schmitt’s detailed exploration of the terra-cotta business, centered in Chicago. This malleable and durable material, a type of molded clay tile masonry, was often used by Sullivan, and its major manufacturers were quick to emulate his style in examples shown in their stock catalogs, often providing contemporary architects with pattern books of convincing facade treatments that could be ordered for immediate delivery to the construction site. Generally these mass-produced pieces were used for the decorative embellishment of otherwise inexpensive brick buildings.
Schmitt has done well to uncover this trove of previously unheralded, quality architectural work from a century ago. While antithetical to the current architectural-star culture, it is large quantities of well-designed buildings produced by architects like those who practiced the Sullivanesque that make compelling neighborhoods and cities. Schmitt understands this, recognizing how these buildings did and still do contribute to Chicago’s cityscape.
But he’s not immune to conventional wisdom, and he constantly touts the Sullivanesque as a “progressive” style to the detriment of other modes of composition that the Sullivanesque architects sometimes adopted. Schmitt also overreaches when he perceives the seeds of Art Deco design in the Sullivanesque.
“Sullivanesque” is a study of how one highly talented and tragically flawed individual influenced a generation of architects. This is their works’ belated 15 minutes in the spotlight.
Frank Lloyd Wright has been universally applauded for breaking down barriers between interior and exterior space. His designs have always held strong material and metaphysical relations to the American landscape, particularly here in his native Midwest. In “Wrightscapes,” the late Charles E. Aguar and his wife, Berdeana Aguar, are the first to approach Wright’s entire career from the disciplined perspective of landscape architecture and environmental design.
The Aguars were married more than half a century before Charles’ death in 2001 and spent the entirety of their married life looking at Wright’s work as a team. In 1948 they celebrated their first wedding anniversary at Wright’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin, and met the then-81-year-old architect. Charles was a landscape architect and professor at the University of Georgia; Berdeana was his editorial collaborator and is the writer who finished the “Wrightscapes” manuscript after he died. “Wrightscapes” is a term coined by the Aguars to describe Wright’s designs, including their surrounding landscape and environment.
Organized chronologically, “Wrightscapes” provides ample biographical information about Wright, so the reader understands where each commission fits within the broader context of his life and travels. What’s missing are the larger public buildings like Oak Park’s Unity Temple, Racine’s Johnson Wax headquarters and New York’s Guggenheim Museum. While none of these is critical to the Aguars’ discussion, it would have been helpful to include them.
“Wrightscapes” is dense and comprehensive, covering 85 designs by Wright in verbal and graphic depiction. The illustrations are plentiful and include period photographs and original drawings as well as modern-day photographs and diagrams prepared by the authors. These are essential supplements to the text, but it’s unfortunate that many are quite small because of the book’s relatively small format and do not always completely delineate the points made in the text. The Aguars provide consistently sensitive analysis, skillfully applied and rendered in relatively jargon-free prose.
Wright always denied being influenced by others, but the Aguars note various factors that shaped Wright’s approach to the environment. It is clear that Walter Burley Griffin, a noted Prairie School architect in his own right, co-authored many of Wright’s landscape designs during the first phase of Wright’s career. Wright’s trip to Japan in 1905 had a more profound effect on his overall understanding of the interaction between building and landscape. The Aguars demonstrate the later influence of historical European landscape design following Wright’s year-long flight to the Continent with the wife of a former client.
To their credit, the Aguars are not apologists for Wright and can be sharply critical in instances where his so-called organic designs were hardly so. Fallingwater, a noted Wright house in Pennsylvania, is the most notable example, as it’s built directly on top of a waterfall, completely dominating the natural feature that led its owners to that site. At times Wright seems to be the quintessential “tree hugger.” For every project described as a complex piece of environmental design that sensitively incorporates the requirements of prevailing breezes, solar orientation and native vegetation, there’s another one where Wright merely places his building’s mass to avoid existing trees on the site. Sometimes, in what might be described as a recurring parlor trick, Wright keeps a tree growing through a broad eave or other architectural feature.
Despite his own rhetoric, Wright’s interest in environmental siting varied from the intense to the non-existent. Throughout his career, Wright used his own homes as laboratories for the relationship between his architecture and the landscape. But from the Aguars’ clear evidence, the older he got, the less his landscape creativity made it beyond the boundaries of his own back yard. Countless clients in his later years received less than adequate environmental solutions while Wright lavished attention on his own Taliesin homes in Wisconsin and Arizona. Amusingly, many of these same clients, in interviews years later with the authors, praise the architect who they barely met and whose product was assuredly inferior to those on which he had made his reputation.
“Wrightscapes” is a balanced and fair assessment of an aspect of Wright’s architecture that has previously escaped detailed scrutiny. As such, it’s a welcome addition to the vast volume of literature on Wright.
