“The Chicago Fair and the Myth of the 'Lost Cause.'”

AboutDimitri Tselos challenges the enduring narrative that the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 represented architecture's "Lost Cause" — the idea that a Chicago School triumph, embodied in the Neo-Romanesque style of Louis Sullivan, John Wellborn Root, and Henry Hobson Richardson, was thwarted by the Fair's classical Court of Honor. Reconstructing the Fair's planning and the limited stylistic options realistically available to its architects, Tselos argues Richardson's death and Root's own uneven, retrogressive late work make the counterfactual implausible, and that even Sullivan later admitted no American architect was equal to inventing a wholly new style for the Fair on short notice. He offers a detailed formal analysis of Sullivan's Transportation Building, arguing — against admirers who cite it as evidence of what might have been — that it is itself an eclectic pastiche of Roman basilican form, Gothic nave articulation drawn from Notre Dame, and an ornamental "Golden Gate" and cupola derived from Islamic and North African precedents, also traceable in Sullivan's Wainwright Tomb. Tselos further faults the Transportation Building's interior, comparing it unfavorably to George B. Post's Manufactures Building, for failing to advance the century's engineering achievements in glass-and-metal exhibition sheds. He concludes that Sullivan's own evolution toward a rationalized classicism undercuts the notion that his 1900s attacks on academic eclecticism were driven by principle rather than declining fortunes.

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