Form Follows Function?

...or

A reason why it is important to read the original work of Architects (via wikipedia)

The following is an excerpt from a book review for a book on Louis Sullivan's ornament. I think the article summarises the difficulties I have had with his work. The images are from a series of ornamented banks he designed in the northwest of America in the 1920's (an amazing road trip in the making??)



Sullivan's City - The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan & Louis Sullivan - The Poetry of Architecture. . - Ornament isn't Crime - book review

"...All three authors insist that decoration was completely integral with Sullivan's architectural ideas. The highly controlled contrast between architectural mass expressed by plain materials, such as brick or stone, and the organic, often polychromatic complexity of the iconographic schemes is not accidental or wilful.


Not only are such schemes impressive when well photographed (as they certainly are in both these volumes) but they also shed considerable light on Sullivan's struggle to synthesize in his work a range of ideas drawn from such varied sources as Swedenborg and Herbert Spencer. An example of this kind of analysis is Twombley's discussion of the social and democratic ideas that Sullivan used to underpin the decoration, inside and out, of the exquisite series of bank buildings he designed in small towns in Ohio and Iowa between 1905 and 19-20. Narciso Menocal's more complete analysis of the meaning of Sullivan's iconography from the Getty Tomb (1890) onwards describes the architect's attempts to create a new, organic and developing architecture, in which for him the process of resolving deep human and psychological conflicts was as important as the thing designed.




These impressive books illuminate not only a very important, complex and sophisticated body of work but also something of the context within which it was created. It certainly isn't true to say that Sullivan has ever been forgotten but it may very well be the case that the colourful and tragic surface of his rollercoaster career -- and perhaps a certain condescension on the part of his successors" and critics -- have obscured for almost a century his full significance as an architect and intellectual."