“Louis Sullivan's Architectural Ornament: A Brief Note concerning Humanist Design in the Age of Force”

AboutA formal defense of Louis Sullivan's later architectural ornament against Philip Johnson's contemporary charge that it undermined Sullivan's buildings after the Wainwright Building of 1891. Scully closely reads the ornament of the Guaranty (Prudential) Building, the Bayard-Condict Building, the Gage Building, and the Carson Pirie Scott Store as expressing physical forces of compression and tension in "humanist," empathetic terms, tracing sources in Islamic ornament and Irish manuscript illumination and situating Sullivan's aesthetic against Geoffrey Scott's *The Architecture of Humanism*. Contrasts Sullivan's sculptural, force-laden buildings with Frank Lloyd Wright's more earth-bound, spatially "destroyed-box" architecture, and closes by citing Le Corbusier's regard for Sullivan as a precursor.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281959%295%3C73%3ALSAOAB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23