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. van’s interest in using the male form as a heuristic device to teach his audience that a Tis emphasis on architecture’s “picture-language” becomes more apparent in his society’s architectural inventiveness exemplifed its social and spiritual health. Structured gendered discussion of Henry Hobson Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store at times like a Socratic dialogue and at others like an excursus on the seasons, Chats in the early installments of Chats. An infuential piece of architecture in its own right, features a teacher (Sullivan) holding court Marshall Field lies, along with the rest of Richardson’s oeuvre, “on the knife edge be- with a young and attentive, but unimag- tween utilitarian form and symbolic representation.”12 Its severe exterior and large, inative and overly academic male pupil. arched windows referenced Renaissance palaces, while its massive size and squared shape Te pupil embodies American architec- maximized the interior commercial space. Besides being one of the frst and most infu- tural malaise, and is plainly in need of a ential block-long industrial buildings in post-Great Fire Chicago, and besides providing spark of inspiration from his wise teacher. inspiration for Adler & Sullivan’s Walker Warehouse and their famous Auditorium Trough the fgure of the teacher, Sullivan Building, Marshall Field represented, for Richardson as well as for Sullivan, a move is able to assert his judgments on objects toward an authentically-American aesthetic. Sullivan noted the austerity of Marshall at all scales, from particular buildings Field’s exterior, as well as its “virile force.” “Here,” he wrote, “is a man for you to look at… and architects, to fowers and trees, to the a real man, a manly man.”13 Te visual resonances between Marshall Field and Adler and great American cities of the early twenti- Henry Hobson Richardson’s Marshall Field Ware- Sullivan’s Auditorium Building thus correspond to the “manly” aesthetic usually ascribed eth century. Chats shows that Sullivan saw house Store, one of many points of gendered discus- to industrial forms.14 In both works, arched, Renaissance-style windows sink deeply into sion Sullivan undertook in his Kindergarten Chats. all these scales as linked through archi- (Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.) an austere stone façade. Because of the buildings’ girth and because its height apart from tecture to the proper growth of a society, the tower is not substantial enough to draw the eye vertically, the rhythmic arrangement which in its various scales resembled a of windows on each level lends power, height, and weight to the buildings’ overall com-

9 “Kindergarten Chats” was originally published in Interstate Architect and Builder, from 16 February, 1901 (Vol. 2, no. 52) to 8 11 Sullivan, “Kindergarten Chats,” 30-1. February, 1902 (Vol. 3, no. 51). Te installments were collected, edited, and published in 1918, at Sullivan’s request. Tis is the edition 12 Curtis, Modern Architecture, 44. I use in this essay. Another edition was published in 1934 (Lawrence, KS: Scarab Fraternity Press) under the editorial supervision of 13 Sullivan, “Kindergarten Chats,” 29 (emphasis in original). Claude Fayette Bragdon, a colleague, fan, and friend of Sullivan’s, and a third in 1979. Tis last edition is the one I use in this essay. 14 See Mona Domosh, Invented Cities: Te Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century New York and Boston (New Haven: Yale 10 Sullivan, “Kindergarten Chats”, 33. University Press, 1996). 102 Essays 103 Traces: Te UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History position. with “the law[s] of variation.”18 By the 1860s, metallurgists working on behalf of large If virility as a concept for design in Chats refected commercial spaces’ presumed corporate clients had induced chemical changes to wrought iron that that increased its masculinization (and their opposition to the feminized domestic sphere), it also aided in tensile strength a hundredfold. Wrought iron, then steel, along with the increasing price- Sullivan’s efort to transcend architecture’s commercialism by masculinizing it. He writes by-square-foot of urban properties and demand for rental ofce space, brought dramatic that “stone and mortar, here, spring to life, and are no more material and sordid things, changes in the pace of construction and would come to shape the visual dynamics of but, as it were, become the very diapason of a mind rich-stored with harmony.”15 Te Chicago’s architecture over the next fve decades. Tese new techniques brought tourists pervasive erotic metaphors (a “diapason” is a grand swelling) elevate Richardson’s own from all over the country who sought to catch a glimpse of steel-framed buildings with body (and by association, Sullivan’s) to the level of art by way of their material re-compo- completed walls on top and bare foundations on the bottom. In the late-nineteenth cen- sition as bricks, stones, and steel. Te reverse is also implied: likening the Marshall Field tury visitors now looked at architecture, and the urban fabric at large, as a visual spectacle 19 Store to a biological entity imbues its angles, curves, and stones with signifcance beyond ofering a glimpse of technological change. Teir structures so often laid bare for all their measure and arrangement. to see, Sullivan took many an occasion to refect on buildings as organisms, as organic In Chats Sullivan expressed his commitment to virile architecture by pointing out wholes. In much of his work, Sullivan explored what came to be a “defning feature of that its broader social context featured centrally in the question whether architecture both modern architecture and modern skylines, their three-dimensional character unit- 20 could achieve the social and spiritual efects its makers sought. Consistent with his ing fairly simple design, structure, and real estate in a singular tectonic expression.” To masculine metaphysical schema, he argued that this meant cities, too, were subject to design in three dimensions was to make holistic aesthetic decisions that sought to make nature’s laws of masculine bodily development. Chicago and New York, the two great kinetic the potential of every inch of a building’s height, width, and girth; to apply the American cities in Sullivan’s estimation, both confounded his ideals for inspired ar- heat of imagination meant to temper the chill of capital; to grow ideas naturally rather chitectural education and creation, each representing “the opposite poles” of American than mechanically. urban experience. Yet Chicago showed more promise, for Sullivan, as the site for the Sullivan’s proposition in Chats that architecture is composed of “images…difcult to growth of American architecture as a profession. Tis was because “young, clumsy, [and] awaken” is revealing of his preoccupation with the visual content, more than the expe- foolish,” a fault vastly preferable to New York’s feeble decrepitude. Only in a place like rience, of architecture. Art historians like Richard Etlin have argued the opposite, that Chicago, with its stubborn geology and the efuent lifeblood of lumber, grain, and cattle Sullivan “sought to instill in his audience” a “deep aesthetic and spiritual experience” in that moved through it, could raw energy be harnessed in the name of the “Infnite Cre- which “the individual could feel deeply the power and rhythm of [the] ‘fow of life’” as ator.” Autobiography and Kindergarten Chats both give the impression of a kind of energy well as “the moral force … the existential power which reveals to us our inherent, latent 21 particular to the modern city, a kinetic force guided by nature, and made masculine in its capacities” for the development of Self and society. Indeed the notion of “rhythm” does expression on city streets.16 appear in Sullivan’s writing, and as Etlin notes Sullivan’s ornament is generally carried 22 Te notion that buildings and cities need refect the bodies of their designers had, out in a rhythmic pattern along his buildings’ faces. Yet when we ask what sorts of by 1901, merged in a comprehensive vision of urban aesthetics that Chats was meant to bodies, what sorts of experience, and what sorts of embodied and experiential meanings articulate in response to the particular context in which Sullivan wrote it. He felt that 18 Ibid., 3, 7. the urban environment, “like a new species of any class… must be a growth, that slow 19 Tomas J. Misa presents a detailed narrative of iron’s development and use in railroad and architecture in A Nation of Steel: Te 17 Making of Modern America, 1865-1925 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 44. For a detailed account of the and gradual assimilation of nutriment and a struggle against obstacles.” It must grow developments in metallurgy I mention in this paragraph, see Misa, 1-91. 20 Richard Bluestone, “Louis H. Sullivan’s Chicago: From ‘Shirt Front,’ to Alley, to ‘All Around Structures,’” Winterthur Portfolio organically from a “spontaneous architectural feeling” that works intuitively, in concert, 40(1) (Spring 2013), 65. 21 Richard A. Etlin, “Louis Sullivan: Te Life-Enhancing Symbiosis of Music, Language, Architecture, and Ornament,” in Te 15 Sullivan, “Kindergarten Chats,” 29. Orchestration of the Arts—A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers: Te Vibrating Interplay of Sound, Color, Image, Gesture, Movement, 16 Sullivan repeatedly refers to Nature as “her” in “Kindergarten Chats,” but never in reference to its manifestations within cities. Rhythm, Fragrance, Word, Touch, ed. Marlies Kronegger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 165-182, particularly 165-6. 17 Sullivan, “Characteristics and Tendencies,” 3. 22 Ibid., 167. 104 Essays 105 Traces: Te UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Sullivan identifes as important, we see that if Sullivan was in fact trying to convey a It is tempting to conclude that Sullivan’s enduring interest in youthfulness and “spiritual experience,” its content was not, strictly-speaking interior to humans seeing vitality, especially as expressed through physical exercise and mental acumen, renders architecture. It was, rather, fundamentally about the power of pictures, of visual poetry him rather a “man of his time.”28 On the other hand Sullivan was, like most middle class, elucidating manly bodies. 23 white men of the nineteenth century, undoubtedly intrigued by the possibility his pro- Sullivan found himself tortured by Chats’s failure to get the public’s attention—only fession presented him to articulate his own manliness. Yet what Sullivan might add to in its later published forms would it make its way into architecture and art history historians’ understanding of the role “the body” played in nineteenth and early-twentieth classrooms. In this sense, the “body language” that pervades Sullivan’s late-life writings century civic and commercial life is his postulate of literal and intentional—rather than reads as compensatory for his professional and personal failures (Sullivan had one brief, symbolic or subconscious—masculine projection onto the American landscape. disastrous marriage).24 His 1923-4 memoirs, for example, never mention his career be- Yet as a key to social and spiritual progress this bodily-architectural projection was yond the year 1893, and focuses almost half of its 300 pages on his childhood. Its initial useless if an ignorant public had refused to view the contents of the doors it opened. In chapters feature a young Sullivan and his father, Patrick, fshing and swimming almost a 1909 essay he made his bitterness apparent: “Te reason we do not see is simple; we do every day. Sullivan is quick to mystify his father’s bodily movements in these encounters. not look. Te whole vast spectacle of ourselves is right before our eyes… the absence of “He [Patrick] must have been a pagan, this man, for in him nature’s beauty, particular- clear vision among us is astounding.”29 From the depths of his decline, Sullivan saw ft to ly in its more grandiose moods, inspired an ecstasy, a sort of waking trance, a glorious re-assert what, from his perspective, the American public should have seen in Chats: that mystic worship.”25 A precocious and excitable child himself, according to Autobiography, gendered vision was the sovereign force governing the relation of American civilization Sullivan “would sit beside his father on a great boulder watching him fsh with pole to the nature that surrounded it. For what kind of man, ft of body and mind, could fail and line. He would remain patiently there, inspirited by the salt breeze, listening to the to see, plainly before him, nature itself wrangled and re-formed into his own image? joyous song of the sea as the ground swells reared and dashed upon the rocks with a mighty shouting…It seemed to lull him. It was mighty. It belonged to him. It was his sea. It was his father fshing.”26 Fascinated with his father’s virile body, Sullivan eschews prose that might suggest he was fxated on it, imagining it instead as linked to natural powers. Te rural geographies of his childhood, incomplete without his father’s bodily presence—indeed his mastery over the landscape—informed his reading of the urban environs in which he spent much of his adult life, perhaps leading him to follow many urban boosters and historians in associating Chicago, that city of commercial dominance, with nature.27

23 Rachel McBride Lindsey has recently commented on the importance of photography in shaping American consciousness and culture in the nineteenth century in her book Te Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 24 Robert Twombly, art historian and biographer of Sullivan, has suggested that Sullivan himself was a closeted homosexual. For Twombly, this is the hidden source behind Sullivan’s masculine architectural language as well as his admiration for Whitman. If true, Twombly’s theory would also lend credibility to a Freudian reading of Sullivan’s preoccupation, in Chats and in the last pages of Autobiography, with the tall ofce building. See Twombly, Louis Sullivan: His Life and Works, 399-400. 25 Sullivan, Autobiography, 14. 26 Ibid., 22-3 (emphasis in original). its not taking the right forms. 27 Chicago’s ofcial motto is “urbs in horto”—the city in the garden. See William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the 28 See John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: Te White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991); see also Peter A. Coclanis, “Urbs in Horto,” Reviews in American History 20(1) York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); (March 1992): 14-20, for a brash and snarky review of Cronon’s book. Coclanis wrangles with Cronon over his “(Birken-)stock con- Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfguration of the Victorian Body (Ann Arbor: University of Mich- demnations of accumulation” that harbor resentment of “man’s need for cities” as well as apparent ignorance with respect to Marxian igan Press, 2015). renderings of the town-and-country narrative. For me, this debate rings true in terms of Sullivan, who never faced up to his own 29 Sullivan, “Is Our Art a Betrayal Rather than an Expression of American Life? (1909),” in Louis Sullivan: Te Public Papers, 199. contributions to capitalist accumulations and socially-violent urban development, but rather presumed to condemn it on the basis of Te essay originally appeared in Te Craftsman Vol. 15 (January 1909): 402-4.