“Architecture and the Romantic Tradition: Coleridge to Wright”

AboutRichard P. Adams traces the philosophical lineage of "organic" architectural theory—epitomized in Louis Sullivan's dictum "form follows function" and Frank Lloyd Wright's variant "form and function are one"—back through nineteenth-century romantic literature and criticism, beginning with Coleridge's 1818 distinction between "mechanic" and "organic" form and its embodiment in the Lyrical Ballads. Adams argues the doctrine reached America chiefly through Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horatio Greenough's 1843 essay "American Architecture," and Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman's subsequent elaborations, and probably reached Sullivan and Wright directly via Frank Furness, the eccentric Philadelphia architect in whose office Sullivan apprenticed in 1873-74. He examines Furness's Provident Life and Trust Company and other Philadelphia buildings as an underappreciated transmission point for organic design principles, and documents at length the devotion of both Sullivan and Wright to Walt Whitman—including the full text of Sullivan's 1887 fan letter to the poet—as evidence of a shared understanding of the union of "soul" and "materials" in a building, concluding that romantic literary theory decisively though gradually shaped the emergence of a genuinely organic American architecture.

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