Louis Sullivan

Architecture.

Skyscraper developed by Louis Henry Sullivan, Irish-French, German.

Fenoya Hall, Boston, designed by John Smilbert, Scott.

Vieux Carre, New Orleans, laid out by Adrien de Poget, French.

Exactly.

I think we've all internalized that old architectural adage coined by Louis Sullivan.

You know, form follows function.

Oh, yeah.

At the same time that or just before the Bauhaus was revolutionizing thought about design, It's not as if they were the only source of innovation in the world.

Frank Lloyd Wright was stepping away from Louis Sullivan's studio and branching out on his own.

He produced a series of buildings which you can't identify as being Bauhaus buildings.

They're not at all conditioned on what came out of the Bauhaus.

not to mention falling water and all kinds of other buildings that he did.

Wright

famously came from the studio of Louis Sullivan, and we talked at the beginning of this conversation about the phrase which is most identified with the Bauhaus, which came from Mies van der Rohe, and that phrase being, less is more.

But There are two other aphorisms about architecture, which we learned in architecture school and are repeated to this day.

architecture,

right? Some guy named Louis Sullivan.

He's known for bold geometric brick facades, large arched showroom windows and structured vertical columns, early elements of prairie school design, things like that.

Very wild.

It seemed huge at that time.

The other one is Louis H. Sullivan.

He invented the steel frame.

That obviously took skyscrapers to a whole other level.

And one more.

Louis Sullivan, American architect and father of the skyscraper, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1856.

It is amazing what they sort of could put up, build.

Louis Sullivan, first coin, third form for us, actually.

Form follows function.

Who said that?

Louis Sullivan.

Okay.

Charles Atwood took over as designer-in-chief.

Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, and the singular difficult genius of Louis Sullivan all contributed buildings.

Frederick Law Olmsted, already famous for having designed Central Park in New York, was given command of the grounds themselves, the lagoons and wooded islands and formal courts that would knit Burnham's buildings into a single coherent vision.

Burnham was known to tell the men working under him that timid planning had no power to move anyone, that a city built from small ambitions would never be remembered.

And by the way, I remember reading somewhere, I can't cite this particularly, Tom, maybe I'll Google it quickly, but I believe there's actually more brutalist architecture in the United States than there is in the old Soviet Union.

Tom goes on to say, however, the modernism in the United States, stemming from Louis Sullivan through Frank Lloyd Wright, was less about conforming to industrial production and very much more to be a poetic expression of the organic spirit of America as a nation.

The ideals of this come directly from Emerson and Whitman.

In my older age, I picked up Emerson and Whitman for the first time.