Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Louis Sullivan
American; 19th-century, 20th-century
Algona, IA: 123 E State Street
95%
Henry Adams Building. 1912
Much of what I’ve seen of Sullivan’s late work makes me want to say that this was his MO: to place variously slight, mostly rectilinear masses around the inside perimeter of his structures, cutting into their otherwise expansive-feeling and unified interiors to suggest both the boundedness and enfolded, infinite complexity of architectural space. In other words, the man liked to sculpt the negative with the positive. It works oppositely in the Henry Adams Building, though, which has a big central kaaba accented by a variety of portals. It’s the least spacious Sullivan interior I’ve seen, but also the most forwardly sculptural. (This is exaggerated by the presence of a crazy amount of original, integral fixtures: chandeliers, lamps, desks, chairs, windows.) The exterior is almost painterly with its integration of brick and terracotta features; its nine windows give it a staggering rhythm. (2024)
Chicago, IL: Graceland Cemetery
91%
Getty Tomb. 1890
The Getty Tomb makes it clearer than any Sullivan I've seen that, in his designs, ornamentation works insofar as it is set off — allowed for — by flatness and inarticulate space, by the lack of ornamentation. This isn't just to say that Sullivan creates rhythms by playing decoration off of its absence (though he does do this, of course). Rather, I mean that there's, like, an ontology of ornament going on in his buildings: he demonstrates that the power of a pattern encrusting some cornice will derive from (for instance) the band of blank stone that slides along just above it; that a facade without any portals will transform its abutting windowed walls into fonts spilling complexity. Differentiation, in other words, was a principle for Sullivan and the necessity of his buildings. In the Getty Tomb, this principle is manifest most obviously in the structure's blank bottom half that bursts into floral octagons above, but also in how the three concave curves that crest its molding on two sides are justified by the firm horizontality of that molding at each of the structure’s other two ends. This is at once Sullivan's fullest and most quiet design. (2025)
St. Louis, MO: Bellefontaine Cemetery
91%
Wainwright Tomb. 1892
Sullivan might be the greatest American artist. The Wainwright Tomb is among the greatest things he did. It's almost squat with its sphinx-arms digging out into earth from its grounded cubic gut, but also airy, a dome atop a song of tan smooth swathes. Its inside is a play of planes that set off soaring curves; it's hardly real how flat the floor feels, how huge the dome's negative space. The carved exterior ornament and the tiles inside are exact and unbridled in equal measure. Seldom did Sullivan use color to such an effect as within this near-perfect structure. (2024)
Chicago, IL: Graceland Cemetery
86%
Ryerson Tomb. 1889
If not the greatest then certainly the most extreme thing Louis ever did. You'll hear it called "Egyptian Revival" but there's none of that movement's corny Victorian historicism at play (even if it does blend two key Egyptian forms, the mastaba and the pyramid). There's not even any of Sullivan's characteristic ornamentation. Instead it's bare — barren — and slow to make its moves. Its essence is in that push and pull between the slow inward slope of its sides and the outward jut of the area around its entryway (this form is mirrored on the backside). Any gesture out into space — even slight, timid ones like that front step or the mantel before those three slots — is negated by some bolder countermove back into the structure's center. Not just because they're neighbors, Ryerson for this reason is like the nega-Getty: if the later tomb is about how liveliness is a matter of differentiating a formless world, this one meditates on returns back to Nothing. There's more immediate deathliness in Ryerson. (2025)
Cedar Rapids, IA: 101 3rd Avenue SW
84%
People’s Savings Bank. 1911
Now a restaurant, this is certainly the most adventuresome of Sullivan’s late designs. Its interior has been corrupted by a major flood and several tenants over the years who’ve each adapted it for various uses, but a top-notch preservationist community in Cedar Rapids has made sure that the essential spatial character of the erstwhile bank — and much of its ornamentation — has been upkept. As with all of Sullivan’s provincial buildings of the 1910s, this one has an interior distinguished by slight contractions and bold expansions of space, as well precise left-right asymmetries. The ornamentation on the inside is present but imperfectly maintained, while the delicacy with which the exterior surfaces were designed — there are some dozen shades of bricks all sensitively arranged and variously inset — suggests that in its prime this was as fully realized a composition as the master ever made. (2024
Cedar Rapids, IA: 1340 3rd Avenue SE
62%
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. 1914 (with W.C. Jones)
Famously, Sullivan overshot his budget on this commission by some astronomical amount, forcing the church to boot him and hire some lesser guy — W.C. Jones — to simplify and execute his original designs. The resulting structure is a curio: a true Sullivan idea in terms of massing and space, but with basically arbitrary ornamentation and very little of it… the stained glass windows are mass-market and installed upside down! Things like the main stairwell and the education wing’s hallway include the expressive juxtapositions of closed and open spaces that make any Sullivan building what it is. But the prevailing decorative sparseness — and how it makes the building feel almost hollow — proves that ornament isn’t subordinate to whatever’s great about what Sullivan was up to, but an integral part of how space works in his buildings. (2024)
Clinton, IA: 226 4th Avenue S
54%
Van Allen and Company Department Store. 1913
As far as I could tell, this building’s been ruined by retrofits over its century of life, nor is it likely that it was an entirely major work of Sullivan’s even when it was new. Its brick upper portion sits a little too massively on its marble base, and the rhythmic order which its windows create seems interrupted, rather than accented, by the tall mullions on its front side. (Given how sensitive are the relations between ornamental parts and structural wholes in Sullivan’s designs, however, it’s possible that my judgment is unduly influenced by all the little violences that have been done to the building over the years.) Still, Sullivan’s genius at decorative organicism is palpable in, for instance, the terracotta banding. (2024)