“Review of *Louis Sullivan and the Polemics of Modern Architecture: The Present against the Past*, by David S. Andrew”

AboutMartin Donougho critically reviews David S. Andrew's revisionist study, which rejects the standard heroic narrative of Sullivan as a prophet of Modernism, portraying his career instead as an allegory of selfish aggrandizement rooted in personal failings (drink, an unsociable temperament, discomfort with domestic architecture) rather than tragic historical necessity. Donougho outlines Andrew's dual interpretive strategy — reading Sullivan's architecture as an expression of his psychology and, separately, as an instrument of capitalist interests — and finds both approaches unconvincing: he argues Andrew overstates the case by linking Sullivan too closely to "high capitalism" when many of his patrons (Wainwright in St. Louis, midwestern rural bank clients) were provincial rather than metropolitan financiers, and that Andrew conflates Sullivan's symbolic use of "function" with a narrowly utilitarian one. Donougho credits Andrew for close attention to Sullivan's prose but finds the book less illuminating than Narciso Menocal's 1981 study, concluding that Andrew has produced an exposé of the Sullivan myth rather than a balanced account of the architecture itself. (Note: the extracted page also contains the tail end of an unrelated review, by Albert William Levi, of an anthology on urban planning, and the start of a review of a Howard Hawks book, both bracketing the Sullivan review in the same journal issue.)

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8510%28198823%2922%3A3%3C114%3ALSATPO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A