“Philadelphia Functionalism and Sullivan”

AboutArgues that Louis Sullivan's characteristic "functionalist" vertical-pier commercial facades — the Wainwright, Guaranty, and other skyscrapers — had direct forerunners in a little-known group of mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia commercial buildings, especially William L. Johnston's Jayne Building (1849–51), first identified by Charles Peterson in 1951. Weisman surveys three categories of Philadelphia commercial facade design from 1849–1859 — structural glass-and-stone skeleton fronts, vertically articulated palazzo variants, and the structural-vertical synthesis exemplified by the Jayne Building — tracing their sources back to Boston (Isaiah Rogers, Alexander Parris) and to German and Lombard Romanesque revivalism (Schinkel, Thomas Tefft). Through newspaper research (the Philadelphia Ledger) and building-by-building comparison, he shows that Sullivan, who worked in Philadelphia for the firm of Furness and Hewitt in 1873 in the immediate vicinity of the Jayne Building, plausibly absorbed this local tradition of projecting piers and recessed spandrels directly, and argues for a reassessment both of Sullivan's originality and of Philadelphia's overlooked contribution to the prehistory of the Chicago School.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196103%2920%3A1%3C3%3APFAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1