Did Sullivan design anything but buildings?
Wright did some furniture and lamps and stained glass and so forth. Did Sulllivan?
More importantly, I've looked at his buildings in pictures and looked at a few older architecture history books and I think Mr. Sullivan is not sufficiently well understood or appreciated, at least from what little I've read. I know he his held in considerable regard and is always noted in primers on American architecture. But the appreciation of him often stops short of calling him brilliant. More often books and articles about him leave one thinking well, he created a vocabulary for buildings with elevators and the buildings were professional, but not virtuosic. I kind of think it may have been.
There was a time when Sullivan building vocabulary was so widely emulated in every large city and medium sized town that the originality of what he did and the skill with which he did it seems to have gotten lost. Has any architectural critic ever dug deeply into Sullivan and explained why his vocabulary became so prevalent? It takes a certain kind of genius to get everyone humming the same sophisticated tune.
Part of Wright's fame hinges on the inability of architects to emulate what he did with much success; i.e., his distinction, beyond his towering talent, is in no small degree a function of his uniqueness. His buildings didn't become the model of most of what was built in America. Sullivan's vocabulary, on the other hand, came to dominate the commercial neighborhoods of cities and towns across America.
It seems to me that Louis Sullivan largely developed the vocabulary of American commercial architecture and, peculiarly enough, it combined, to my eye, anyway, a kind of ur modernism (what he is often recognized for), but also more surprisingly a kind of ur postmodernism (i.e., his buildings had complexity and contradiction, too).
I see Sullivan getting credit for foreshadowing modernism, but not postmodernism. I think he should get both.
It would
be a stretch to identify any pre-1900 designer with postmodernism, as the Modernism that would lead to that stage, 70 years hence, was barely under way ! Still, there's "nothing new under the sun," and certain parallels might be found, somewhere. . .
The difficulty we have in seeing how radical certain accomplishments really were, 100 years ago, is due to the wide dissemination of those accomplishments in subsequent decades. One of Sullivan's most forward-looking buildings, the Carson, Pirie, Scott (originally, Schlesinger and Mayer) store of 1899-1904 presented a highly unusual proportion of the principal openings, long and wide in reflection of the steel frame beneath them; today there is nothing unusual at all about this appearance, but is was more than a few years before Mandelsohn and others began to repeat this forward step.
In reading Kenneth Frampton ("Modern Architecture," 1980) one sees that Sullivan's principal influences on Wright may have been his insistence on "a new architecture for a new nation" and on the principle that the form and decoration of a building are properly seen as the result of its function and its 'inner life"; the curved and circular windows and carvings at the attic level of the Guaranty Building (Buffalo, 1895) coincide with the novel internal mechanicals at that level, "making its grand turn, ascending nd descending" as Sullivan described it.
SDR..
If we define postmodernism as achieving complexity and contradiction through introduction of ornamentation and other features like varied window forms integrated into a basically modernist building form and space program, then it would seem to me no more reaching to say sullivan anticipates post modernism than to say he anticipates modernism.
If on the other hand, we insist on including in the post modern definition above the notion that post modernism refers back ironically to modernism, then, it is an impossible reach to say Sullivan anticipates post modernism.
But here's the thing: we do not dismiss Sullivan as a foreshadower of the modern, because his work lacks modernist references and reactions backwards to whatever modernism was a reference and reaction to.
We say Sullivan's buildings anticipate modernism, because some of his building vocabulary is rather closer to what came after him in modernism than what other architects before him had done.
But if we concede this, then if we take an unfettered look at Sullivan's buildings we see, IMHO, something much closer to post modernist interpretations of the office building than, any of the modernist, international style office buildings that came between.
I am not trying to be argumentative here, nor am I trying to be abstract in my thinking. I am looking at a picture of a Sullivan building, comparing it to a Mies high rise, and then comparing that to say, Michael Graves post office in Portland and saying, Sullivan's buildings seemingly have more in common with Graves buildings than with Mies' buildings...at least to me.
Put another way, postmodernists have a recent formal predecessor and Robert Venturi did not need to go all the way back to Michaelangelo's building on the square in Florence to find it, though I'm grateful that he did that too. Perhaps Venturi discussed Sullivan in "Complexity and Contradiction," but I don't recall it now.
Anyway, I'll stop. 🙂
I admit
to not having read Venturi's book -- I've always been strong on practice and weak on theory in my favorite subject (have fun designing and let others do the Monday-morning quarterbacking ?). But that ducks the question(s).
Maybe Sullivan occupied some alternate achitectural universe and was going "the other way" in time ? I do see what you are getting at. . .
doing it ALWAYS beats reading about it...
I just appreciate that you're willing to talk about it with a layman like me.
FWIW, I think professionals should read these books, because it is the professionals experienced comments that often can debunk the academic masturbation that is an ever present risk of such scholarship.
Sorry I do not see the contradiction.
Sullivan, much like his teacher Jenny and there frencH equivalent Violet Le Duc were the fathers of functionalism. Looking at Violet Le Duc's free intrepretation in the restauration of the Notre Dame in Paris, or at Chicago's Carson, Pirie, Scott, most people would not see it as "functional" architecture. The reason is simple we have come to identify "rational" architecture as "functional" architecture, and rational architecture post dates functional architecture by decades. Unfortunately most people know Lois Sullivan's: "Form follows function" but less people have read the full text wer Sullivan clearly explains that following the function also means following the symbolic function. When after decades of "rational" architecture ("A house is a machine to live in") and design post-modernism discovered that buildings as well as objects had other functions than the strict rational ones, of course they returned to notions expressed and developed prior to "rational" architecture. I know...I am oversimplifying, but there is nothing surprising in the fact that pre-modern is so close to post modern. It is in fact one of the reasons why Post modernism is such a disaster. Not because of the manierisms it generatyed so generously, not becaus eof the use over and overt again of the same formal clichés, but because in claiming that it was taking historical architectural language in consideration it ignored the past by considering itself original and not a return to earlier expressed values. Post modernism only makes sense as a critical reminder that Louis Sullivan was more "hollistic" (as it is called know), in his approach to function than any of the modernist architects. Unfortunatrely they were far more ambitious and...re-inveted the architectural wheel.
Ha ! Beautiful. . .
First, DC, my apologies -- of course you are right. Ya can't tell the score if you haven't watched the game. . .! I am surely no more qualified to discuss these things than you (I assure you) -- and I agree it is up to any of us to question everything that has appeared in print, if only because the "experts" so often have differing views.
Koen brings us back to reality (again). My thoughts: Were some of the postmodernist architects using the "style" ironically -- to call atention to the very things you mention ? If we can't recall the moment (I probably wasn't paying sufficient attention myself, as a long-time Modernist having only recently discovered the Arts & Crafts movement !) we could consult what was said by and about the work when it was new. Venturi, Graves, Bofill and Stern would be just a few of the highlighted names ?
Then again, some would call many of the practitioners of the time "postmodernists" just because they were doing original work then, while others may think of the Postmodernists as a much more specific group ?
Now that 100 years have passed (shouldn't we be having almost continual centenary celebrations for the wonders of that time ?) doesn't it seem to you that what distinguishes Modern from everything that came before, is that at its purest (?) it wanted to be something OTHER than a Style -- that it aimed to supercede such things as "styles" ? Wright certainly played it that way. . . And now that it has run its first course (taking something like 80 years to do so, if we begin in the 1880's with the earliest fruits of the writers you mention) and we are both looking back and trying to carry on, isn't Modernism both a Style AND an Idea Always New (for want of a better name) ?
[Not having kept up with the literature, I am in constant danger of proposing what has already been put forth, digested and (probably) discarded !]
SDR
SDR...
You ask many wonderful questions. Alas, most I cannot answer because of knowledge deficiency. 🙂 So: I'll focus on one point you make where I may have just enough insight to cast light.
I suspect you are right that modernists wanted the modern to be more than a style. They reached back to classical antiquity in most of the arts looking for forms to rescusitate and standards to aspire to. They sought to rationalize everything they touched and approached doing so with a highly abstract vocabulary. Through abstraction, they rationalized the subject matter of art, design, architecture and literature. They had dicta like "make it new," and "not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself." They also evolved into wanting their work to have a social message, as Koen has pointed out.
But I also suspect that post modernists would say they wanted postmodernism to be much more than a style. Venturi wanted to return the complexity and contradiction to architecture in order to return a humanity to architecture, and reduce the alienation of humanity from its to rationalized modernist artifacts, arts and buildings; that certainly is seeking to accomplish something more than a style.
And functionalists before them both, like Sullivan, based on Koen's comments, wanted functionalism to be more than a style, also. They wanted buildings to "function" in every dimension and they had a dictum. They wanted form to follow function(s).
And before all three of them, Michaelangelo and his Florentine peers sought more than a style. I know this from from reading a book analysing Michaelangelo's writings. As it turns out, Michaelangelo was something of a diarist who often expressed his daily thoughts in poetic fragments. It seems that Michelangelo wanted both his art and architecture in Florence and Rome to be much more than a style. And one can infer from the writings that collegues of Michaelangelo's time did, likewise. Michaelangelo and his colleagues were keenly focused on classical antiquity, especially the Greecians, if I recall correctly, as the standard to borrow from and aspire to exceed. They wanted to do this not just to get a style, but to seek a new architecutural and artistic vocabulary robust enough to embody/express what they and their patrons--the Medicis--perceived (rightly it turns out) was happening to Florence--an enlightment of epic proportions coupled with the rise of Florence as a secular mercantile-military power capable of eclipsing the theocracy-dominated middle ages.
My point here is, of course, that modernism probably cannot be meaningfully distinguised from others movements based on wanting to be something more than a style.
So what does distinguish modernists (at least the early generations of them)?
I think what distinguishes them is another thing you mention...wanting always to make it new. With this dictum, there is no end to modernism, as there maybe with other -isms I've mentioned.
Part of the puzzle is created by.....
....human nature. I agree with dcwilson that very few movements in arts were motivated by the sudden urge to create a "style" If we ever came close to that point it would be now because intensive communication seems to prefer image over substance. The problem both for the renaissance architect, the modern and post modern is that no matter the toughts and the intentions behinf the building, at the end the building takes on a particular shape. That particular shape and the idiology behind it is so convincing that it begins a life on it's own. Actually two lives, one as an ideology or a school of thought, one as a form language. Closely followed by the pioneering generation, we always see a multiplication factor created by people that adopt swiftly and sometimes with great skill one of the two ways. The second one is the one that will eventually lead to the dismise of the mouvement because by only paying attention to form it will turn the new thoughts into a style. A style that can easely be popularized, easely be copied, easely be promoted but that will always lack the substance of the original mouvement. By not being supported by the original motivation it will turn hollow and superficial and eventually it will be replaced by a new mouvement. If all the post modern buildings had the quality of the AT&T (Sony) of Philip Johnson, or Venturi's lyric and indeed humane qualities etc. there would not be a Post-modern crisis but the same can be said about the modernists and their faceless followers.
Koen and Movement Process Dynamics...Pt.1
This is a remarkably concise revealing of the evolutionary process of movements. Not only should designers read and learn this, everyone in any field who is trying to understand whence their field cometh, and where it may goeth, would find from looking through this lens.
Your postulate is: connection of a movement to a profound, robust, and durable philosophy and aesthetics allows the movement to readapt itself as times and technologies and competing alternative movements change and fall away.
Alternatively, other movements connected to more superficial philosophies and aesthetics tend to decay into styles or even self-parodies, and eventual irrelevance.
You also seem to asserting a dynamic based on that postulate. The dynamic appears to be: action, reaction, competition, selection. I would call this a selective evolution model. It says the movement with the most deeply and durably connected ethos tends to adapt and survive. This really caused me to think.
What I thought about was some dialectical dynamics that I have observed in the movements already discussed here and in movements in other fields: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
I suspect there are other dynamics at work, as well; ones that I am too uninformed to recognize.
What to make of these competing dynamics shaping the evolution of movements? Are some real and some false, or are there simply multiple dynamics involved?
I beg to take the easy way out here (that is not do the hard thinking of getting down with intellectual petrie dishes and centrifuge and empirically separating which dynamics may be real, or of greater primacy) and default to cribbing from modern evolutionary biology approach when confronted with a similar situation.
Koen and Movement Process Dynamics...Pt.2
Evolutionary biology (EV) has elaborated upon Darwin's theory focused chiefly on natural selection by competitive context; i.e., by whether a creature has attributes that allow him to compete, survive and evolve in context, or become extinct. EV now has strategic dynamics (cooperative as well as competitive behaviors) shaping selection, they have contexts with parametric features and variable features, they have not only random genetic mutation, but genetic drift dynamics and so forth. In short, EB has embraced that several dynamics act as drivers of the phenomenon of evolution.
I think if we step back a moment from the brilliant incisiveness of your insight (that there is a competitive selection dynamic tied to profoundness of philosophy driving the life and death of movements in design and architecture) that we see it may allow us to elaborate upon it usefully; to include still other dynamics (like dialectics, etc.) the way EB has bundled its dynamics.
And I do not really think this is entirely an intellectual or academic exercise either. It would seem to me that certain kinds of producers of and investors in design and architecture could be influenced by this theory., if our rudimentary evolutionary theory of movements were sufficiently rationalized, and documented with historical case studies. Why? Producers and investors are like everyone else: they are looking for useful tools for surviving. In business, survival is solvency with profit, despite the periodic sprees of economic piracy and predation. Survival with solvency and profit, what we might call sustainable enterprise, dare not overlook any tools for attaining solvency with profit. For the last 20 years, business has looked increasingly at the short term bottom line for profit and ignored or given less weight to pursuit of long term solvency. The causes of this are many and beyond the scope of this discussion. But what is within the scope of this discussion is that there ARE three ways to run a business: eyes on the short term, eyes on the long term, and eyes on both.
Koen and Movement Process Dynamics...Pt.3
I would argue that producers and investors in either of the latter two categories would be very interested an indicator of which movements are most likely to persist, or adapt, or otherwise survive, for the sake of helping them place bets in their short, mid and long term capital deployments. The trouble is most people who think about design and architecture in terms of profundity of philosophy, etc., tend to speak of it in a purely philosophical, or "feeling" way that does not connnect down to the epistemological ladder to where the producers and investors are making capital deployment decisions. Imagine if two people entered your office asking you to back products/buildings--each pressing for a different one of two popular idioms. Next imagine that one presented you with a bunch of sophisticated QA about the feelings and preferences of consumers now (survey research) and the other presented some undocumented "philosophical hunches" about which architectural movement is likely to survive, adapt or otherwise prevail over time. Which one would you listen to if you knew sometime you might have to prove your fiduciary due diligence to a board, regulatory body or court? You'd choose the QA supported alternative and you'd choose it even if you knew that the hunch was possibly a more accurate forecast, because you'd want to CYA as an executive must do for his own survival.
But if an executive had some QA rationalizing the movement selection hypothesis/theory we've been talking about as being yet another valid predictor, well, then he/she would have some reason to follow their better judgement and humanity concerning which movement's work to select from.
Such research would seem feasible to pursue and generate in certain academic settings, particularly those seeking to advance their own philosophical agenda. And of course if one did, then their competitors would have to counter. And by this path might a systematic consideration of movement philosophies begin to be part of the criteria of choice made by executives at all levels about the production of and investment in artifacts and buildings. Could this process be abused and skewed? of course. All processes can be. The current one most certainly is. But even with the abuses, at least it would reintroduce at least some consideration of the philosophically profound in our choice of artifacts and architecture once again.
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