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Louis Sullivan - What’s the Big Idea? My view is that readers of Rand have much to gain by reading this autobiography of one of America’s finest-but-forgotten architects – enjoyment that will last beyond just the title. Opening its pages should give the reader much of real value. Sullivan writes his autobiography in the third person, with the hero himself cast as ‘Louis.’ Young Louis is depicted in all his intensity as he explores and attempts to elucidate the Idea that was to inform his life’s works. We read of his early struggles to formulate the Idea (with Sullivan, the Idea is always capitalised) and of his eventual working out of the Idea in his buildings. It is fair to say that he saw as his life’s great achievement the formulation and application of the IDEA. In true Sullivanian fashion however, we are not given the Idea from the start. Sadly, that is not the way the man’s mind works! Louis Sullivan’s writing is often long-winded – even by the standards of his day - although in the wind is almost always something of true value; Sullivan was also a student of Rousseau, and in the manner of Rousseau’s Emile he invites us, his readers, to be our own Sherlock, with Sullivan as our able Watson. We are presented with the salient data from which Sullivan derived the Idea and asked to inductively derive it for ourselves; for guidance we are entrusted with the task that Sullivan set for himself, one derived from his Parisian mathematics instructor Christian-Victor Clopet. Clopet had asserted that his mathematical demonstrations were ‘so broad as to admit of no exception!’ A startled Sullivan took on Clopet’s assertion as the leitmotif of his own life’s work: ‘Look for the rule so broad that admits of no exception!’ A unique and subtle exercise it is to be sure, and one largely unsuited to today’s reader more attuned to the positivism, pragmatism and post-modern cynicism of today. So this idea, then. What of that? What is the big Idea? Worry not, gentle reader, for in textbook fashion the answer is in the back of the book! (page 290, to be precise – at least in my edition). For convenience I have reproduced it here (and for those readers who would like to perform the induction themselves, I suggest they cover their eyes as they read the words below): And amid the immense number and variety of living forms, he noted that invariably the form expressed the function, as, for instance, the oak tree expressed the function oak, the pine tree expressed the function pine, and so on through the amazing series. And, inquiring more deeply, he discovered that in truth it was not simply a matter of form expressing function, but the vital idea was this: That the function created or organised its form… Hence, Louis began to regard all functions in nature as powers, manifestations of the all-power of Life, and thus man‘s power came into direct relationship with all other powers. The application of the idea to the Architectural art was manifest enough, namely, that the function of a building must predetermine and organise its form. But it was the application to man‘s thoughts and deeds; to his inherent powers and the results of the application of these powers, mental, moral, physical, that thrilled Louis to the depths as he realized that, as one stumbling upon a treasure, he has found that of which he had dreamed in Paris, and had promised himself to discover, - a universal law admitting of no exception in any phase or application whatsoever.This idea, that form follows function, was to revolutionise architecture. As we see here, Sullivan by no means intended the simple mechanistic approach to form adopted by the ‘glass-box boys’ who followed him – his was a much richer, much more organic conception. Once the Idea has been discovered and elucidated for us (and hopefully by us, as Sullivan intended), and in the all-too-few pages left in the autobiography once the Idea has been revealed, Louis tells us of a crucially important corollary he developed from this Idea. Corollary the First: ‘That every problem contains its own solution, and the task lies in the accurate statement of the nature of the problem.’ From the accounts of Frank Lloyd Wright (who in his younger days working for Sullivan called himself ‘the pencil in Lieber Meister’s hand’) we know that this became one of the starting points for both Sullivan and Wright in the creation of their architectural masterpieces. The chief application of this Idea in Sullivan’s own career was his development of the tall office building. The tall building was his metier; in many respects he could be said to have ‘invented’ it. Certain it is that he was the first to develop the honest architectural expression of the tall building, and by doing so brought into existence a new thing under the sun: the skyscraper! This truly was his chief achievement. For the architects of Sullivan’s generation, the successful architectural expression of the tall building confronted them as a real problem. Here was this new thing for which they had no predecessor from which to borrow! How was one to proceed? Readers of The Fountainhead will be familiar with some of the cockeyed approaches to the solution of this problem. Sullivan it was who realised that the ‘problem’ of the tall building was not to be solved by copying architectural models from the past that were entirely unsuited to express this new thing – Greek temple piled upon Renaissance palazzo upon Gothic cathedral, etc. Nor was it to be solved by an outré application of whimsical confectionery to the robust and rational steel frame of the tall building. The tall building should instead be expressed in the same manner as ‘the oak tree expressed the function oak’: by being itself! What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building?...it is lofty. The loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect… It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from top to bottom it is a unit without a single dissenting line…Sullivan’s autobiography really is one of an idea, not of himself. The book gives us an all-too brief overview of his mature architectural career - included here almost as a footnote to the record of his earlier struggle to bring the Idea into existence - and the remainder of the book is largely taken up with the ‘white cloud from the East’ that appeared on the architectural horizons in the form of the 1893 Columbian Exposition - an architectural orgy of inept classical revivalism that forced the sun to set on Sullivan’s otherwise blooming career, and which ‘doomed American architecture for fifty years.’ This stodgy yet newly-fashionable classicism he found utterly inappropriate for a burgeoning young America, associating it in the autobiography with all the symptoms of advanced cerebral meningitis! It is evident, even writing some thirty years after the event, that Sullivan was still deeply hurt by the aftermath of the Exposition and by his rejection by both the American public and his profession. Organic Architecture - of which Louis’s paean above is perhaps the first theoretical underpinning - would not begin to flourish until Frank Lloyd Wright’s career reached early maturity, only to see it again dumped on by another cloud from the East, this time in the form of Bauhaus architectural refugees from Nazi Germany bringing with them a suffocating Protestantism; the resulting ‘International Style’ zealotry set back Organic Architecture, and arguably architecture itself, for a further fifty years! The tree, as Rand relates in The Fountainhead, had broken clear of the forest. The fungus crept out to reclaim it. Fifty years of architectural fungus then followed, culminating in the ‘Gehry virus’ released into the environment in Bilbao so influentially a decade ago. Sullivan - like Henry Cameron - died a broken man, but not before completing this book, a hymn to the human promise of which his early career was a noble example. He remained always in awe of what he called ‘man’s powers’ – a passion first given life for him when as an impressionable youngster he stared open-mouthed at the awe-inspiring figures created by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ‘Here is Man’s Power evident in these figures!’ he wrote joyfully in his student’s journal. Chapter XIV is in many ways the heart of the book - here Louis breaks his narrative for the first and only time, and asks and answers the question: “Wherefore we may now inquire: What are these powers, and what is the reality we affirm to be man?” Sullivan, in one of the great affirmations of nineteenth century optimism, sees man as a ‘container of powers’, the most important being the power of the Worker and the power of Curiosity: the powers to inquire and to create. “The result of inquiry we call knowledge; its high objective we call science. The objective of science is more knowledge, more power; more inquiry, more power. Now if to the power to do we added the power to inquire, Man, the worker, grows visibly more compact in power, more potent to change situations and to make new situations for himself… He reverses the dictum ‘I think: Therefore I am.’ It becomes in him, ‘I am: Therefore I’ll inquire and do!’ It is this affirmative ‘I AM’ that is man’s reality.” Late nineteenth century Chicago was the crucible in which the forging of Louis’s Idea was taking shape; for Sullivan, the raw energy pulsing through the Chicago of his day was the manifestation of Man’s long awaited transition from feudalism to democracy; latent energies suppressed for millennia were finally being released to transform the Globe and were nowhere pulsing more than here in ‘the world’s great slaughterhouse’. Power then was the subject of Louis’s worship, the power of transformation and creation, and this was his true ‘faith’: ‘It is of the essence of this philosophy that man’s needs are balanced by his powers. That as the needs increase the powers increase - that is one reason why they are herein called powers.’ Man’s powers are the source of freedom,’ Louis wrote. ‘He saw, with inward glowing, that true freedom could come only through discipline of power, and he translated the master’s word of discipline into its true intent: Self Discipline of self power. ‘(Italics and capitalisations are Sullivan’s own.) Sullivan’s prose is florid and romantic - a style with which today’s reader sometimes needs some patience in order to penetrate to its meaning. Frank Lloyd Wright, a long-serving enthusiast for his mentor and Lieber Meister, still admitted that much of Sullivan’s writing could be ‘like a kind of baying at the moon’ - and Wright himself could sometimes be loquacious enough when the full moon was out! Sullivan knew this himself; he laughingly recounts the tale of sending his Essay on Inspiration to a ‘member of the higher culture’, a Professor at the University of Michigan. The essay played on ‘the two great rhythms discernible alike in nature and human affairs, as of the same essence... [ these] he called Growth and Decadence.’ The learned Professor responded: “The language is beautiful, but what on earth you are talking about I have not the faintest idea.” Sullivan is not easy reading - although his autobiography is amongst the easiest of his offerings - and what he says may be easily dismissed by the cynical modern mind. That would however be a mistake. Like his contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom he shares so many common ideas and characteristics, Sullivan is also an enthusiastic devotee of German philosophy, including philosopher F.W. Hegel. Hegel’s dictum of the Organic that ‘the truth is in the whole’ has been as enthusiastically embraced by Leonard Peikoff as it was by the school of Organic Architecture that Sullivan and Wright inadvertently founded. Many of Hegel’s other insights are far less compelling, but fortunately Sullivan’s grasp of Hegel is more on a poetic than a literal level and is evident more in his style of writing and thinking than in his thought itself. Sullivan offers important insights for both architecture and for life – for aren’t the two inextricably linked? – insights that were widely misunderstood and misinterpreted even by the positivist world that received them, and which in today’s world might seem like so much fodder for facile greeting cards. His insights – His Ideas! - formed the basis for an Organic Architecture of life-affirming power as practised by a road range of architects. His writings, read in conjunction with a study of his buildings and his ornament, offer important insight to the nature and formulation of the Organic idea, and offer those who would read an understand them a way out of the hole of Post-Modern Deconstructive Scholasticism that architecture has fallen into. Recommended further reading: Genius & the Mobocracy, by Frank Lloyd Wright – an insightful and impassioned discussion of Wright’s own mentor, and in particular of the style of architectural ornament created by Sullivan that Wright found so inspiring. ‘It is here,’ considered Wright, ‘that we can best see his true genius.’ Includes many reproductions of Sullivan’s own wonderful drawings. The Function of Ornament, by David van Zanten – sumptuous colour photographs of Sullivan’s architectural ornament and his main buildings, accompanied by insightful commentary. Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work, Robert Twombly – controversial, though very readable biography of the man. The Idea of Louis Sullivan, by John Szarkowski – the book from the fifties that began to make Sullivan fashionable once again. Contains the most comprehensive collection of photographs of his work – sadly, only black and white – and a serviceable discussion of his work
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