Art: Master’s Master

Few of the faddists who go in for cork & chicken wire interiors and applaud any edifice devoid of decoration as an example of “modern” architecture realize that “modern” architecture is more than a half century old, has possibly already entered its senescence. So old is “modernism,” in fact, that its first master died eleven years ago. Last week his first biography was in the hands of students and a few others interested in the life and works of Louis Henry Sullivan. A professor of art and archeology at Dartmouth, Hugh Morrison, author of Louis Sullivan,* was naturally more interested in Sullivan’s work than his life. As it happened, both were equally full of tragedy, triumph and despair. Son of an Irish dancing master, Louis Sullivan, at 16, was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At 17 he was a draftsman in the office of one of the hundreds of fledging architectural firms which were building not by the house but by the mile, after the Chicago fire. At 18 he had passed, after six weeks’ cramming, the rigorous entrance examinations of L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At 24 he was back in Chicago, a partner with Dankmar Adler in one of the rising firms of the West. Adler, the businessman, and Sullivan, the delicate-fingered designer, took as one of their first jobs what is still an extraordinary architectural achievement: Chicago’s Auditorium, comprising a theatre, a recital hall, a hotel and offices, the biggest edifice ever to be set on floating piles. They built offices, warehouses, hotels and theatres all over the Midwest and in 1890 ran up one of the few architectural monuments in the U. S. It sits on the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets, St. Louis, and is called the Wainwright Building.

The Wainwright Building, of Missouri granite, sandstone, brick and terra cotta, was the world’s first skyscraper to be treated artistically for what it really was: a cellular arrangement of business offices. Working in an age of romantic eclecticism when Chicago boasted “an Italo-Byzantine-French-Venetian structure with Norman windows,” when no other architect knew what to do with a tall façade except to break down its height with a series of small horizontal units, Louis Sullivan’s Wainwright Building, in his own words, was and is “every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation . . . from bottom to top … a unit without a single dissenting line.” Many a disciple of the “International Style” prefers to think of Louis Sullivan as the designer of the Carson Pirie Scott store in the heart of Chicago’s Loop. It has a curvilinear corner entrance, great windows and very little on its upper façade except for the terra cotta bands following the bare outlines of the building’s steel skeleton. It was begun in 1899. It might have been run up last year. Louis Sullivan had no truck with arid, literal structuralism. He was not afraid to use decoration, loaded many a building with rich, vital, original design which he drew from the illustrations of plant morphology in Gray’s Botany, a book he usually carried in his pocket. He was also a voluble theoretician, writing and speaking lyrically about the esthetics of building. He was constantly in search of the “law that will admit of no exceptions.” But if he found it, he never set it down. A rapt listener to “the Master” in the drafting room at night was a young cub named Frank Lloyd Wright. The panic of 1893 smashed the partnership of Adler & Sullivan. Like Gilbert & Sullivan, neither did as well after disunion. From 1880 to 1895 Sullivan designed more than 100 buildings. In the 29 years left of his life, he built only some 20 more. One reason given is liquor. Another is that he could not compromise himself artistically for a client. He built a Methodist Episcopal Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Just before the War he began putting up small banks in the Corn Belt. They remain among the finest things from his drafting board. The one at Sidney, Ohio, erected in 1917, had airconditioning.

To the end of his days, Frank Lloyd Wright, a Master of Modernism in his own right, called Sullivan “the Master.” During Sullivan’s last years the two would meet at the Cliff Dwellers Club in Chicago, talk bitterly about a world which neither found sufficiently appreciative. In 1924 Louis Henry Sullivan died in Chicago of heart disease.

*Museum of Modern Art & W. W. Norton & Co. ($4).