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David van Zanten Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. 179 pp. Cloth $60.00 (0393730387)
A temptation with formal analysis is to detach the object of study from larger life, to concentrate on its properties that inhere in similar objects, and to restrict art's importance to art itself. Analysis of form is David Van Zanten's strength, but by narrowing his perspective, it leads to questionable conclusions. For example, the point where this stimulating book begins to unravel is when the authors claims that "Sullivan's Houses are as Important as His Banks," almost the title of Chapter 4. Sullivan's houses are as important as his banks only if we regard them as primarily design exercises, which is Van Zanten's wish. But if we examine them as real or realizable habitations, their importance lies in the question they raise: Why were they such failures?
The six houses Van Zanten discusses include (with one exception) the eight Sullivan designed from 1898 to 1912, of which five were rejected, two were erected but later demolished; and one that has been a fraternity house since the 1950s. Sullivan realized all nine of his bank commissions, one of which was a remodeling job, between 1906 and 1919. Of these, seven remain banks and the other two still stand--one as an ice cream parlor and the other empty. Common sense suggests that the houses were less important than the banks because they were less successful; unlike the banks, they did not work. But it is not success or failure, nor synchronization of plan and program, that interests Van Zanten. What interests him is the significance a form may have for other forms.
The houses are important, he argues, because in them Sullivan was able, as never before or in any other genre, to assemble complex interrelated spaces based on "right angle and 45-degree axes and grids" radiating outward from centering points through thick-walled, cubical, volumetric outlines--the planning "strategy" he had been taught at the École des Beaux-Arts--and because, with that assemblage, he perfected his "design system," which Van Zanten so nicely reconstructs in Chapter 3. The houses thus become the architectural acme of Sullivan's career. It matters not that most of them...