Louis H. Sullivan: System of Architectural Ornament

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan

ARCHITECTURE VIEW; HOW A GENIUS FUSED ADORNMENT AND MODERNITY

By Paul Goldberger

It was Louis Sullivan's sad fate not only to have been insufficiently appreciated in his time - he died in 1924, broke and without work -- but also to have been misunderstood later on. For even when there was no doubt about his status as one of the greatest architects America has ever produced, Sullivan was too often thought of as having had one crucial flaw -- he was a brilliant modern polemicist who filled his buildings with lavish ornament. 

A generation ago, Sullivan tended to be revered almost in spite of his ornament; though no scholar dared put it so crassly, there was a sense that Sullivan's tall buildings, like the Wainwright in St. Louis or the Guaranty in Buffalo, which were truly the beginning of the mature American skyscraper esthetic, would have been better still had they only been simpler, starker, free of so many curls and swirls.

It says much about the sensibility of today that we see Sullivan's ornament not as a frivolous error, but as a starting point for an understanding of his work. 

And so it is with ''Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament,'' a splendid exhibition on view at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 2 East 91st Street. Happily, the exhibition, its title notwithstanding, does not make the error opposite to that committed by modernist scholars, and assume that ornament is everything. The curators here understood that Sullivan's idea was to integrate ornament with modernist structural expression, not to see it as a thing apart, applied after the fact, like the decoration on a cake. To Sullivan, ornament was a means to heighten perception of a building's fundamental structural and sensual aspects, and the exhibition acknowledges this viewpoint.

Sullivan's passionate quest was to evolve a fundamentally American architecture, freed from the constraints of historical, European style which so bound most of his contemporaries. He is known to readers of Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography as the architect whom Wright called his master. But the sad decline of Sullivan's career and his relatively limited output have left him -- at least in the layman's eye -- very much in his protege's shadow. 

The exception may be in Chicago, where Sullivan lived for most of his life and where he has always occupied his deserved position in the pantheon of architecture. In most other cities, unfortunately, despite the enormity of Sullivan's reputation among architects, his work is too little known to the public.

So this exhibition is particularly welcome, both as a general introduction to Sullivan and as a way of correcting the all-too-frequent misreading of him as a modernist whose career was compromised by a weak spot for decoration, which to some modernist historians was akin to having a weakness for alcohol.

The exhibition, which was organized by the Chicago Historical Society and the St. Louis Art Museum and assembled by Wim de Wit of the historical society, begins by tracing the origins of Sullivan's highly personal ornamental style in French Neo-Grec and English Victorian Gothic architecture. Sullivan added to this the critical ingredient of his own deep fascination with natural forms and his commitment to the idea of seeing buildings as metaphors for natural processes. But the sources of Sullivan's style are only the beginning of this exhibition, which moves quickly to Sullivan's own efforts. This work is presented in a spectacular array of actual architectural fragments, drawings, color photographs and several models built specifically for the exhibition.

Here it is worth digressing for a moment to say something about the manner in which this collection of some 180 pieces of material is presented. Sullivan's architecture deals in surface more than space, which means that it should translate well into the form of an exhibition. But it did not look particularly good at the Chicago Historical Society, where the exhibition was first presented last autumn; indeed, I found the exhibition then a major disappointment. Mr. de Wit, who is curator of the architecture collections at the historical society, did a heroic job in gathering material, but the dreary galleries and pedestrian installation at the historical society prevented most of the show from coming across even half as well as it should have. The ornamental fragments tended to be hung forlornly like little decorations in themselves, some of them floating disconnectedly, far too high on the walls.

As a result the excellent color photographs by Cervin Robinson, which were intended to supplement the rare, original material, virtually overwhelmed it. The installation lacked a sense that these fragments of architectural ornament were part of something larger. There was no suggestion of their relationship to the buildings.

The Cooper-Hewitt, however, has managed to capture the crucial fact of Sullivan's architecture, which is not the existence of ornament but its integration into structure. Dealing with the same material as the Chicago exhibition - there is a piece or two omitted and a piece or two added, but it is essentially the same - the Cooper-Hewitt's own curator, Dorothy Twining Globus, and its designer, Todd Zwigard of UKZ Architects, have transformed this show into one of the best architectural exhibitions of the year. ''Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament'' could be a textbook lesson in museology - I have rarely seen installation make so dramatic a difference in the quality of an exhibition.

At the Cooper-Hewitt, fragments do not float by themselves on the wall. They are set into new, wooden frames that place each piece precisely as it would have been seen in its original form. A teller's cage from a Sullivan bank, for example, is set within a wooden framework that echoes the shape of the original counter and overhead structure of the tellers' area; a balustrade is set into a mock-stairway on the wall; a piece of terra-cotta molding from around a window is set into a new window frame of wood. In each case the added structures are of stark, unfinished wood, so that there is no possibility that they could be considered anything but tools of display. But their presence makes all of this material seem sharper, crisper, richer and more handsome.

It is a question of appropriateness, of understanding the essential qualities of an architectural object and letting these qualities determine the nature of an installation. One of the triumphs of Mr. de Wit's curatorial effort was his assembling, from pieces owned by 11 separate collections, a full pair of elevator cages from Sullivan's great Chicago Stock Exchange, demolished in 1972. But in Chicago this splendid re-assemblage was placed right on an axis with the entrance to the exhibition, like an altar, whereas at the Cooper-Hewitt it is in a small room by itself, designed to resemble much more closely the tight little space of the actual elevator lobbies in the stock exchange.

These ornamental pieces and architectural fragments are but the beginning; the exhibition is rich in drawings, Mr. Robinson's photographs, and good models of three skyscrapers: Sullivan's beloved Wainwright and Guaranty buildings and a model of his never-built Fraternity Temple for Chicago. This last structure, in which a slender central tower rises from a complex base, was hitherto known only through sketches. Now, thanks to this model, it can be clearly understood in its mass and shape, and it is easy to see that this would have been a key structure in the history of the skyscraper.

Virtually everything here is worth seeing. There is only one mystery amid this wealth of material - a very bizarre portrait of Sullivan, in which the suited, bespectacled architect looks for all the world like a banker. This is not the intense, driven Sullivan one sees elsewhere or, indeed, the presence one expects to see by looking about the galleries of the Cooper-Hewitt, where everything bespeaks passion and artistic genius.