“Aesthetics of the Skyscraper: The Views of Sullivan, James and Wright”

AboutPeter Buitenhuis compares the aesthetic responses of Louis Sullivan, Henry James, and Frank Lloyd Wright to the skyscraper, the distinctively American building form enabled by steel-frame construction from the mid-1880s onward. He opens with Sullivan's 1896 essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," in which Sullivan rejected historical ornament in favor of a form derived from the repeated office-floor module and summarized in his maxim "form follows function," realized architecturally in buildings such as the Wainwright Building, the Reliance Building, and the Carson Pirie Scott Store. Buitenhuis then turns to Henry James's 1904–5 observations in *The American Scene*, contrasting James's distaste for New York's crowded, historically rootless "towers of glass" — which he found driven by naked commercial motive and lacking the settled beauty of Giotto's bell tower — with Sullivan's more sympathetic, functionally grounded aesthetic. Finally he examines Frank Lloyd Wright's 1930 Princeton lecture "The Tyranny of the Skyscraper," in which Wright, trained under Sullivan, echoes James's condemnation of New York's set-back towers as dishonest and congested while remaining more optimistic than James about the form's redemptive possibilities, as demonstrated in Wright's own Johnson Wax Building. Buitenhuis concludes all three figures recognized the skyscraper as a peculiarly American symbol whose meaning could not be separated from the surrounding city's planning.

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