Com- Mercial Buildings and Manly Forms in the Architecture of Louis
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97 Traces: Te UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Buildings and Body Language: Com- mercial Buildings and Manly Forms in Isaiah Ellis the Architecture of Louis Sullivan What is the chief characteristic of the ofce building? … It must be tall, every inch of it tall. Te force and power of alti- tude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit with- out a single dissenting line—that it is the new, the unexpect- ed, the eloquent peroration of most bald, most sinister, most forbidding conditions. —Louis H. Sullivan, “Te Tall Ofce Building Artis- tically Considered” (1896)1 Louis Henri Sullivan (1856-1924) became an architect just as architecture emerged as a professional discipline in the United States. In January 1871 he entered (but did not fn- ish) the architecture program at Te Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the frst of its kind in the country (inaugurat- ed in late 1865). After his time at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux- essays Arts, Sullivan bounced between several temporary jobs in Chicago architecture frms before landing a more permanent arrangement in the frm of Dankmar Adler, where he be- came a full partner in 1883. He joined the American Insti- tute of Architects (est. 1867), and in 1884 he was a founding member of the Western Association of Architects based in Chicago.2 In a career spanning roughly twenty-fve years, he wrote and spoke prolifcally on architecture, innovated within the commercial style emerging at the turn of the twenti- eth century, and mentored the United States’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, in his early career. Sullivan’s 1 Louis H. Sullivan, “Te Tall Ofce Building Artistically Considered,” in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings (New York: Dover, 1979), 207. 2 For an authoritative biographical treatment of Sullivan and his work, see Robert Twombly, Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work (New York: Viking, 1986). 98 Essays 99 Traces: Te UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History infuence on American modernist architecture—on the built environments that literally and ungraceful end, Sullivan gendered architectural forms as a way of giving architects shaped the lives of those inhabiting most major eastern and Midwestern U.S. cities—is and their audiences the power to visualize the relationship between material change and thus immense. spiritual forces. Besides aiding in the design of more than 200 projects, Sullivan asked questions In general, Sullivan viewed architectural forms as fundamentally transparent, utter- that defned the architectural feld at the turn of the century: what is architecture’s ly revealing of the artistic “spirit” at work within them, and of the bodies of the artists relationship to engineering, industry, and the country’s commercial future; and what is behind them. In a building, he wrote in 1906, “everything is there for us to read … [it] to become of architecture’s relationship to art? Sullivan was adept at raising the stakes tells us more truths about him who made it, who thought it…revealing his mind and his of these questions to a metaphysical heart exactly for what they are worth.”4 As is often the case, the thing doing the reveal- level, often using language garnered ing was less fundamental to Sullivan than what it revealed: the male body. He argued from transcendentalist luminaries in 1901 that “every building you see is the image of a man whom you do not see… Te like Ralph Waldo Emerson and man is the reality, the building its ofspring.”5 In other public speeches he averred that Walt Whitman to express the social a building must look “well-formed and comely in the nude.” Ornamentation, while far and spiritual importance of design. from necessary, would act to uplift the “spiritual and emotional quality” that “resides in In his well-known essay, “Te Tall the mass of a building … from the level of triviality to the heights of dramatic expres- Ofce Building Artistically Con- sion.”6 By 1901 Sullivan had successfully submerged himself into his own framework of sidered,” Sullivan links closely the aesthetic masculinity. Critics saw him as “democratic and progressive; …[fnding] in- musings reproduced in the epigraph spiration neither in the past nor the future, but in the immediate and the present,” with at the beginning of this essay with “optimism and vitality… of the kindred of the spirit that has brought forth the greatest extended enumerations of tall build- art of the world.”7 Whether or not one views an interest in male bodies and soaring ings’ technological and structural towers as evidence of a Freudian preoccupation, of greater interest to my argument is the Te facade of the Wainwright building designed by Adler requirements, like uniform foor- ways masculinity and “spirit” interlocked in Sullivan’s work and reputation to a specifc and Sullivan in St. Louis, 1891. (Photo courtesy of the author.) plans and the newly-invented electric end: to promote a particular kind of gendered architectural forms as an authentic Amer- elevator. Sullivan staunchly opposed ican commercial style, a proposition largely accepted in the historiography on Sullivan utilitarian approaches to tall com- and the “Chicago School” of architecture.8 mercial structures, believing that in their artlessness they squandered “one of the most In spite of the praise he garnered as a result of his prolifc architectural and written magnifcent opportunities that the Lord of Nature in His benefcence has ever ofered work in the 1880s and early 1890s, by 1901 Sullivan’s professional future was hardly se- 3 to the proud spirit of man.” Tough ostensibly more interested in things unseen—the cure. His partnership with Dankmar Adler had dissolved in 1895 due to a fnancial crisis spiritual valences of “Nature”—his metaphysics necessarily and literally took shape in an that began two years earlier. Despite this set-back, in 1901 Sullivan began work on the economic and technological context that shaped the parameters within which Sullivan Schlesinger and Mayer Store (later renamed Carson, Pirie, Scott) in Chicago. It would could bring the unseen to visibility. Tis essay is about what Sullivan saw in contempo- 4 Sullivan, “What is Architecture?: A Study in the American People of Today,” in Louis Sullivan: Te Public Papers (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1988), 181; this essay was printed originally, in three installments, in Te Craftsman 10 (May 1906): 145-9; rary design principles that signaled an imaginative engagement with late-nineteenth and and ( June 1906): 352-8; and ( July 1906): 507-13. 5 Sullivan, “Kindergarten Chats,” in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, 24. early-twentieth century technological change and the impending merger of architecture 6 Sullivan, “Ornament in Architecture,” in Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, 187, 190. 7 Anthony W. Barker, “Louis Sullivan: Tinker and Architect,” Te Architecture Annual, Second Edition, ed. Albert Kelsey (Phila- with capitalism. It argues that, in grappling with that context as well as his career’s early delphia, PA: Te Architectural Annual Press, 1901), 50. 3 Quoted in Lauren S. Weingarden, “Louis Sullivan’s Emersonian Reading of Walt Whitman,” in Walt 8 For a critical assessment of the historiography I am referencing, see David S. Andrew, Louis Sullivan and the Polemics of Modern Whitman and the Visual Arts, ed. Geofrey M. Sill and Roberta K. Tarbell (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 114. Architecture: Te Present Against the Past (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 100 Essays 101 Traces: Te UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History be his last major commercial project in any booming American city. Notoriously unable male body. to deal amicably with clients, and increasingly unable to secure fruitful patronage from Convinced that growing up begets a harmful preoccupation with the material con- corporate clients like Schlesinger and Mayer, Sullivan was forced to to sell most of his cerns of life, Sullivan held to the last onto an idealized notion of youth as an open and personal belongings, along with his frm’s ofce on the top foor of his and Adler’s most inspired time where the divine entered and was welcomed prior to the distraction of famous project, the Auditorium Building (completed in 1889) in Chicago. It was just practical concerns. “Realities are images very difcult to awaken in an atmosphere of before that fall from grace, in January of 1901, that Sullivan began Kindergarten Chats, unreality and falsehood,” he tells his pupil, “but you are young; and while there is youth a 52-part serial publication that he hoped would inform the public—indeed convert there is still hope, for there is still heart.”11 Te last clause in this statement contains two 9 them—to his philosophy of architecture. His most thorough and succinct theorization implicit exhortations: that one should remain young-at-heart for as long as possible in of architecture, in Chats Sullivan meant to “broadly trace physical appearances to their the face of expectation and social demands; and that “hope” may be measured in a young 10 moral causes, and moral or social impulses to their manifestations in brick and stone.” heart’s potential to support proper growth. Sullivan’s interest in youth as a life-space of Te text was intended from its inception to reach an audience beyond the world of ar- creation and “heart” matched his interest in the growth and maturation of the male body. chitecture, a goal it failed utterly to attain. For him, a building’s visual impact ofered a more valuable artistic return than the expe- In spite of this failure, Chats remains interesting as an explicit accounting of Sulli- rience of a building.