“Louis Christian Mullgardt and the Court of the Ages”

AboutRobert J. Clark presents a biographical and design study of architect Louis Christian Mullgardt (1866-1942) centered on his Court of the Ages (originally Festal Court, officially renamed the Court of Abundance), his major contribution to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Clark traces Mullgardt's early training under H. H. Richardson's successor firm, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, in Boston, and in the Chicago office of Henry Ives Cobb, where Mullgardt is credited as the largely uncredited principal designer of the ornament for Cobb's Fisheries Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition—work praised, alongside Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building at the same fair, for its inventive naturalistic ornament. The article details the Court of the Ages's evolution from an extravagant "Oriental" fantasy involving a giant pipe organ and golden-calf monuments into a more restrained arcaded court whose reliefs narrated an evolutionary "sermon in stone" from plant to animal to human life, describes its construction in plaster staff over a wood frame under sculptor collaborators including Chester Beach, Albert Weinert, and Leo Lentelli, and situates Mullgardt within a lineage that Louis Skidmore later invoked, alongside Sullivan's Transportation Building, as a rare instance of American exposition architecture breaking from academic classicism.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196212%2921%3A4%3C171%3ALCMATC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3