The influence of Louis Sullivan’s architectural ornamentation work is readily apparent in the book design of Chris Ware. Louis Sullivan 1856-1924 Education 1872 MIT at the age of 16 1873 Apprentice to Frank Furness 1874 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris Key buildings Wainwright Building, St Louis (1891) Guaranty Building, Buffalo (1895) Carson, Pirie, Scott, & Co Department Store, Chicago (1904) Key essay ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ (1896) Quote Courtesy Art Institue Chicago Archives. Hugh Morrison, author of Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (1935), disavowed the "overwrought lyricism of his ornament." Louis Sullivan's central tenet, "form follows function," went on to guide the development of modern architecture and design in the United States. His formal education was erratic, but its scope and variety laid the foundation for Sullivan’s monumental presence on the American urban landscape. Sullivan (1856-1924) forever changed American architecture with his designs for Chicago's Auditorium Building, the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Mo., and many other public structures. Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, p1899 4. The years around 1890 still stand out as the period when the modern skyscraper was born in the cities of Chicago and St. Louis. Ibid, 189 5. Owen … This book is the great American architect's final, definitive statement of his philosophy and faith. Sullivan's influence is most obvious in his pioneering and perfecting of the skyscraper as a form but can also be felt in the development of ornament. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London): Day and Son 1856, p156 3. He wanted pedestrians to crane their necks and marvel at buildings that towered above the city skyline. As being one of the leading actors during the years when functionalism was still flourishing, Louis Sullivan 22 had suggested that ornament added liveliness and individuality to buildings. Sullivan’s sketch from System of Architectural Ornament: Plate 17, titled “A Geometrical Play-Ground” (c. 1922). In 1872, at the age of sixteen, Sullivan enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study architecture. Wainwright Building When financier Ellis Wainwright asked Louis Sullivan to design a new, tall office building in St. Louis, it wasn’t the very first skyscraper ever built.
According to the most referred criteria, ornament is an essential part of architecture which creates a firm bonding with its carrier and often fulfills functions more than aesthetic one .It is mostly made up of transformed motifs and evokes natural forces that originate deeply beyond or within the body of building. Ornament, in architecture, any element added to an otherwise merely structural form, usually for purposes of decoration or embellishment.
Louis Sullivan, Ornament in Architecture, The Engineering Magazine, August 1892. Combining new technology and capital, the firm of Adler and Sullivan revolutionized architecture in the years between two great commissions: Chicago’s 1889 Auditorium Building and St. Louis’s 1891 Wainwright Building. Architecture may actually be defined as an activity of ornament. Ware says this of Sullivan… Louis H. Sullivan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 3, 1856. Owen Jones has endeavoured to read ornament within cultural and stylistic categories, approaching it as having gone through a cultural, stylistic and natural evolution. Reprinted in Kindergarten Chats and other Writing (New York, George Wittenburn Inc, 147) p187 2.
Intricate, detailed designs and text, with previously unpublished drawings for the Farmers' and Merchants' Union Bank, and a Note by Ada Louise Huxtable.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Genius and the Mobocracy, p74 6. the most remarkable problem for those wishing to cast sullivan exclusively in the camp of proto-modernist designers is his steadfast and adroit insistence to ornament his buildings. Its meaning is not at its height, but its elegant facade, which substantially increased the area of … Introduction Built just east of Broadway St, about 65 Bleecker St. Bayard-Condict Building, it is the only work of the architect of Chicago, Louis Sullivan to New York and its first job alone.
The covers of Quimby the Mouse and Acme Novelty Library Annual Report to Shareholders exemplify Ware’s interest in utilizing architectural ornament and patterning.