The Universe Unveiled: Instruments and Images Through History (review)

Two-thirds of the life of the American architect Louis Henri Sullivan was spent in the nineteenth century, one-third in the twentieth; thus, as a stylist, he predictably straddled the boundary between Victorianism and Modernism. Today, he is usually credited with the phrase "form follows function" (which he did not originate), with designing some of the first skyscrapers in Chicago and, as the mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, with having been partly responsible for the emergence of Prairie School architecture. Already prominent by the mid-1890s, he apparently suffered a breakdown, turned to alcohol, squabbled with Wright and others, and lost nearly all of his major accounts in downtown Chicago. He turned instead to planning banks and other office structures in small remote Midwestern towns. These buildings, which still exist and are said to be among his finest, include little gem-like banks in Cedar Rapids and Grinnell, Iowa, and in Owatonna, Minnesota; a church in Cedar Rapids; and a department store in Clinton, Iowa. Unusually vivid and colorful scenes of these buildings (taken by the architectural photographer Cervin Robinson) are among the highlights of this book, along with a series of beautiful views of the Wainwright Building (St. Louis), the Carson Pirie Scott Store (Chicago), the Guaranty Building (Buffalo) and others. Reproduced also are Sullivan's intricate renderings of ornamental inventions, made 2 years before he died. In a thoughtful and well-written essay, Van Zanten argues that, as Sullivan aged, his architectural decoration became even more elaborate, not less. Perhaps it was a final stand against his inevitable obsolescence. "Whatever he did," writes Van Zanten, "could he but turn it into ornament, he was peerless in his authority."

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter 2000-2001.)