Louis Sullivan Prophet Of Modern Architecture

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Although the world famous architect Louis Sullivan praised John Edelmann at length as a friend, philosopher, gifted draftsman and above all as his "benefactor" in his The Autobiography of an Idea, he avoided any mention of having worked for two years as an apprentice in Edelmann's architectural office and the influence that experience obviously had on his future work. This book corrects that deficiency in Sullivan's narrative. Through a comparison of their buildings and ornamental designs, the differences in the approaches of these two men to architectural planning and the debt Sullivan owed to Edelmann's unique ornamental style in the development of his own world renowned ornament is demonstrated. Edelmann is also revealed as the young architect who not only took Sullivan on as an apprentice, but in time introduced him to his future partner Dankmar Adler, only to be betrayed in the end by Sullivan for having done so..

For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry..

Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor is the most famous American architect of the 19th century. The architecture of Chicago and the Midwest were shaped by his distinctive style..

The Tender Detail tells a story about the repression of sentimentality through architectural ornament. The protagonists are Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, two of the most important architects and designers of ornament in American history. Interweaving close readings of their architecture and writings with wide-ranging discussions about sexuality, gender, and philosophy, the book explores how both men worked to solve the problem of late nineteenth-century ornamentation. It suggests that their solutions, while widely different, were both intimately rooted in the tender emotions of sentimentality. Viewing ornament in this way reveals much, not only about Sullivan and Wright's artistic intentions, but also about the role of affect, the value of beauty, and the agency and ontology of objects. Illuminated by personal stories from their respective autobiographies, which add a level of human interest unusual in an academic work, The Tender Detail is a readable, scholarly study which sheds fresh light on Sullivan and Wright's relationship, their work, and on the nature of ornament itself..

"This project is the first comprehensive study of a phenomenon that not only dominated the American arts of the 1870s and 1880s, but also helped set the course of such later developments in the United States as the Arts and Crafts movement, the indigenous interpretation of Art Nouveau, and even the rise of modernism. In fact, the early history of the Metropolitan--its founding, its sponsorship of a school of industrial design, and its display of decorative works--is inextricably tied to the Aesthetic movement and its educational goals. "In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement" comprised some 175 objects including furniture, metalwork, stained glass, ceramics, textiles, wallpaper, painting, and sculpture. Some of these had rarely been displayed; others, although familiar, were being shown in new and even startling contexts. The exhibition and catalogue are arranged thematically to illustrate both the major styles of a visually rich movement and the ideas that generated its diversity"--From publisher's description..

Architectural Theory of Modernism presents an overview of the discourse on function-form concepts from the beginnings, in the eighteenth century, to its peak in High Modernism. Functionalist thinking and its postmodern criticism during the second half of the twentieth century is explored, as well as today's functionalism in the context of systems theory, sustainability, digital design, and the information society. The book covers, among others, the theories of Carlo Lodoli, Gottfried Semper, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hannes Meyer, Adolf Behne, CIAM, Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Charles Jencks, William Mitchell, and Manuel Castells..

By analyzing ten examples of buildings that embody the human experience at an extraordinary level, this book clarifies the central importance of the role of function in architecture as a generative force in determining built form. Using familiar twentieth-century buildings as case studies, the authors present these from a new perspective, based on their functional design concepts. Here Grabow and Spreckelmeyer expand the definition of human use to that of an art form by re-evaluating these buildings from an aesthetic and ecological view of function. Each building is described from the point of view of a major functional concept or idea of human use which then spreads out and influences the spatial organization, built form and structure. In doing so each building is presented as an exemplar that reaches beyond the pragmatic concerns of a narrow program and demonstrates how functional concepts can inspire great design, evoke archetypal human experience and help us to understand how architecture embodies the deeper purposes and meanings of everyday life..

How did writers and artists view the intersection of architecture and race in the modernist era? Winner of the MSA First Book Prize of the Modernist Studies Association With the development of the first skyscrapers in the 1880s, urban built environments could expand vertically as well as horizontally. Tall buildings emerged in growing cities to house and manage the large and racially diverse populations of migrants and immigrants flocking to their centers following Reconstruction. Beginning with Chicago's early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 102-story Empire State Building, Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper provides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race. Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper's outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture's effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century. In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. From its distancing apex—reducing bodies to specks—to the shadowy mega-blocks it formed at street level, the skyscraper called attention, Brown argues, to the malleable nature of perception. A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race..

Examines the architectural philosophy of Louis Sullivan and argues that his contributions to the development of modern architecture have been overrated.

“A wonderfully readable account of Chicago’s early history” and the inspiration behind PBS’s American Experience (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Depicting its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics, to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its multitude of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last. The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews since its publication in 1996, and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life. “With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.” —John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times “Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of John Adams and Truman “An invaluable companion in my journey through Old Chicago.” —Erik Larson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Devil in the White City.

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The sketch is a window into the architects mind. As creative designers, architects are interested in how other architects, particularly successful ones, think through the use of drawings to approach their work. Historically designers have sought inspiration for their own work through an insight into the minds and workings of people they often regard as geniuses. This collection of sketches aims to provide this insight. Here for the first time, a wide range of world famous architects' sketches from the Renaissance to the present day can be seen in a single volume. The sketches have been selected to represent the concepts or philosophies of the key movements in architecture in order to develop an overall picture of the role of the sketch in the development of architecture. The book illustrates the work of designers as diverse as Andrea Palladio, Erich Mendelsohn, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Le Corbusier, Michelangelo, Alvar Aalto, Sir John Soane, Francesco Borromini, Walter Gropius, and contemporary architects Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry to name but a few. Each chronologically placed sketch is accompanied by text providing details about the architect’s life, a look at the sketch in context, and the connection to specific buildings where appropriate. Style, media and meaning are also discussed, developing an explanation of the architect’s thinking and intentions. As creative designers themselves, architects are interested in how other architects, particularly successful ones, think and draw and approach their work. Historically designers have sought inspiration for their own work through an insight into the minds and workings of people they often regard as geniuses. This collection of sketches aims to provide this insight. Listed chronologically each sketch will be accompanied by a text which provides: A short synopsis/history of the architect's life; a look at the sketch in this context; the connection to a specific building (where appropriate); techniques of the sketch: style and media; meaning - what the sketch shows about the architect's thinking and intentions followed by a select bibliography for each section..

Somewhere between 1910 and 1970, architecture changed. Now that modern architecture has become familiar (sometimes celebrated, sometimes vilified), it's hard to imagine how novel it once seemed. Expensive buildings were transformed from ornamental fancies which referred to the classical and medieval pasts into strikingly plain reflections of novel materials, functions, and technologies. Modern architecture promised the transformation of cities from overcrowded conurbations characterized by packed slums and dirty industries to spacious realms of generous housing and clean mechanized production set in parkland. At certain times and in certain cultures, it stood for the liberation of the future from the past. This Very Short Introduction explores the technical innovations that opened up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen. Adam Sharr shows how the invention of steel and reinforced concrete radically altered possibilities for shaping buildings, transforming what architects were able to imagine, as did new systems for air conditioning and lighting. While architects weren't responsible for these innovations, they were among the first to appreciate how they could make the world look and feel different, in connection with imagery from other spheres like modern art and industrial design. Focusing on a selection of modern buildings that also symbolize bigger cultural ideas, Sharr discusses what modern architecture was like, why it was like that, and how it was imagined. Considering the work of some of the historians and critics who helped to shape modern architecture, he demonstrates how the field owes as much to its storytellers as to its buildings. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable..

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company..

This profusely illustrated work offers abundant insights into the early development of the skyscraper and the influence of two master builders who played key roles in its evolution. Rare photos, floor plans, and renderings document such influential structures as Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Wright's Larkin building in Buffalo and many others..

Discusses the individual and collective achievements of three noted American architects.