Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Louis Sullivan
American; 19th-century, 20th-century
Owatonna, MN: 101 N Cedar Avenue
95%
National Farmers' Bank. 1908
This is Louis Sullivan's masterpiece, the building where every strand of his thought — each element of his rather diverse and copious style — seems present and to cohere absolutely. It's there in the way the front of the building and its right side are faithful copies of each other, except for the base of the structure where the necessity of windows and a door facilitates an arrhythmia of portals of different sizes which, though oddly unresolved, is nevertheless perfectly ordered. It's there, too, in the enormous open gut of the building's interior, which is articulated, as was Sullivan's wont, by faint asymmetries and low-slung horizontals shouldering unthinkable amounts of empty space above them — but then also (and this is atypical) there are these giant gauche chandeliers depending from each corner, macerating the void without (somehow) sapping it of any of its sublimity. Sullivan's brilliance was always a matter of his ability to play the presence and the absence of decoration off of each other while refusing ever to hierarchize, reminding you in a deep and incontrovertible way that the one relies on the other, mutually. (TFS, 2025)
Algona, IA: 123 E State Street
93%
Henry Adams Building. 1912
Much of what I’ve seen of Sullivan’s late work makes me want to say that this was his MO: to place variously slight, mostly rectilinear masses around the inside perimeter of his structures, cutting into their otherwise expansive-feeling and unified interiors to suggest both the boundedness and enfolded, infinite complexity of architectural space. In other words, the man liked to sculpt the negative with the positive. It works oppositely in the Henry Adams Building, though, which has a big central kaaba accented by a variety of portals. It’s the least spacious Sullivan interior I’ve seen, but also the most forwardly sculptural. (This is exaggerated by the presence of a crazy amount of original, integral fixtures: chandeliers, lamps, desks, chairs, windows.) The exterior is almost painterly with its integration of brick and terracotta features; its nine windows give it a staggering rhythm. (TFS, 2024)
Grinnell, IA: 833 Fourth Avenue
93%
Merchants' National Bank. 1914
While not quite the chiefest achievement among Sullivan's late banks, Merchants' National is far and away the most striking of them. That's mostly due to the oculus on its front side, domineering and even more massively, encompassingly adorned than anything else the architect composed (except perhaps his final project, the Krause Music Store). It's not this portal itself, however, that constitutes the high aesthetic quality of the building, but rather how brazenly it hovers there to leave the whole rest of the exterior unspoiled. Apart from an inset bay of windows on its street-facing long side and an iterating floral terracotta pattern at the roofline, the structure is plain, unblemished. It is therefore both Sullivan's most and his least ornate design. It's not quite a tension, but rather a flux that results from this polarity, which, when you enter the building through a small entryway beneath that cyclopic hole, continues inside as a song of crossbeams and left-right asymmetrical massings that accentuate the rectangular space of the interior without, somehow, making it feel less massive. (TFS, 2025)
Chicago, IL: Graceland Cemetery
91%
Getty Tomb. 1890
The Getty Tomb makes it clearer than any Sullivan I've seen that, in his designs, ornamentation works insofar as it is set off — allowed for — by flatness and inarticulate space, by the lack of ornamentation. This isn't just to say that Sullivan creates rhythms by playing decoration off of its absence (though he does do this, of course). Rather, I mean that there's, like, an ontology of ornament going on in his buildings: he demonstrates that the power of a pattern encrusting some cornice will derive from (for instance) the band of blank stone that slides along just above it; that a facade without any portals will transform its abutting windowed walls into fonts spilling complexity. Differentiation, in other words, was a principle for Sullivan and the necessity of his buildings. In the Getty Tomb, this principle is manifest most obviously in the structure's blank bottom half that bursts into floral octagons above, but also in how the three concave curves that crest its molding on two sides are justified by the firm horizontality of that molding at each of the structure’s other two ends. This is at once Sullivan's fullest and most quiet design. (TFS, 2025)
St. Louis, MO: Bellefontaine Cemetery
91%
Wainwright Tomb. 1892
Sullivan might be the greatest American artist. The Wainwright Tomb is among the greatest things he did. It's almost squat with its sphinx-arms digging out into earth from its grounded cubic gut, but also airy, a dome atop a song of tan smooth swathes. Its inside is a play of planes that set off soaring curves; it's hardly real how flat the floor feels, how huge the dome's negative space. The carved exterior ornament and the tiles inside are exact and unbridled in equal measure. Seldom did Sullivan use color to such an effect as within this near-perfect structure. (TFS, 2024)
Sidney, OH: 1 N 3rd Street
86%
People's Federal Savings and Loan Building. 1917
Though arresting, there is an extravagance to the exterior of this building — its admonitory mosaic, arch-ensconced above the front door, reading "THRIFT" in lapis blues; the row of tall windows that run down its flank, made to seem the taller by the reaching floral crests above them — that feels almost pictorial, which is to its slight aesthetic detriment as a work of architecture. (Sullivan was typically more able to make the lavishness of his ornamentation seem inevitable to the structure of his buildings. I'm nitpicking, though, and it's undeniable the way the clean tones of the stone and tile elements mingle with the earthiness of the terra cotta and brick.) Where this building really shines is in its interior, which demonstrates Sullivan's mastery of balance and selective irregularity. The tellers' window and the offices on the opposite side are close analogues of each other, but the latter is closed while the former opens onto the rest of the structure's cavernous interior, giving the space overall a sort of churned and circular aspect. At the far corner of the offices is perhaps the greatest isolated space in any Sullivan building, which is a small corridor leading to the back of the building. It's hardly big enough to fit two people inside, and it's lopsided and the ways in and out are tight. But it lacks a ceiling, such that all of the constricted energy you feel when you're inside explodes out into the rest of the interior's emptiness. (TFS, 2025)
Chicago, IL: Graceland Cemetery
86%
Ryerson Tomb. 1889
If not the greatest then certainly the most extreme thing Louis ever did. You'll hear it called "Egyptian Revival" but there's none of that movement's corny Victorian historicism at play (even if it does blend two key Egyptian forms, the mastaba and the pyramid). There's not even any of Sullivan's characteristic ornamentation. Instead it's bare — barren — and slow to make its moves. Its essence is in that push and pull between the slow inward slope of its sides and the outward jut of the area around its entryway (this form is mirrored on the backside). Any gesture out into space — even slight, timid ones like that front step or the mantel before those three slots — is negated by some bolder countermove back into the structure's center. Not just because they're neighbors, Ryerson for this reason is like the nega-Getty: if the later tomb is about how liveliness is a matter of differentiating a formless world, this one meditates on returns back to Nothing. There's more immediate deathliness in Ryerson. (TFS, 2025)
Cedar Rapids, IA: 101 3rd Avenue SW
84%
People’s Savings Bank. 1911
Now a restaurant, this is certainly the most adventuresome of Sullivan’s late designs. Its interior has been corrupted by a major flood and several tenants over the years who’ve each adapted it for various uses, but a top-notch preservationist community in Cedar Rapids has made sure that the essential spatial character of the erstwhile bank — and much of its ornamentation — has been upkept. As with all of Sullivan’s provincial buildings of the 1910s, this one has an interior distinguished by slight contractions and bold expansions of space, as well precise left-right asymmetries. The ornamentation on the inside is present but imperfectly maintained, while the delicacy with which the exterior surfaces were designed — there are some dozen shades of bricks all sensitively arranged and variously inset — suggests that in its prime this was as fully realized a composition as the master ever made. (TFS, 2024)
Columbus, WI: 159 W James Street
82%
Farmers and Merchants Union Bank. 1919
Along with the Purdue State Bank in Indiana, Farmers and Merchants is rare among Sullivan's late "jewel box" buildings for its asymmetry: the front door isn't centered, but set off in a recess on the right side, with a bay containing a window at its left. Typically, asymmetries in Sullivan emerge as accents to an otherwise staunchly symmetrical organizational system; here, it works oppositely, with the imbalance of the door/window diptych grounding the rest of the facade's arrangement. Sullivan, it seems, compensated for this asymmetry (or, rather, sought to justify it) by emphasizing the balance of the decorative features that floresce above it. An enormous, symmetrical marble lintel in three parts spans almost the entirety of the front of the building, overpowering the difference in the depths of the two bays beneath it. If this dynamic — which touches not only the composition of the building's front face but also the particular expansions and contractions of space in its interior — fails completely to resolve itself, it nevertheless invests every visual feature of this building with a productive intransigency which is not common in Sullivan's work. (TFS, 2025)
Newark, OH: 1 N 3rd Street
81%
The Home Building Association Company. 1914
This is the most "pictorial" of Sullivan's banks, which is to say that the effect of its exterior — which ramifies into the building's interior, as well — is primarily optical, not spatial. This is an effect of the tallness of the building and its uncorrupted rectangular shape. These work together to turn its front and side facades (it's on a corner lot) into something like big imagistic planes: though the ornamental banding is, of course, literally three-dimensional, and though several sections of the stonework are set back in handsome relief, the imposing regularity of the structure's form overall turns these depth effects into something analogous to the figure-ground relationships that take place on a canvas. (There's even an apparent preoccupation with "framing" here, which can be seen in the composition's variously nested rectangles.) This pictoriality is similar to that of Sullivan's later design for the exterior of Chicago's Krause Music Store, which, perhaps not coincidentally, was done in the same greenish limestone. On its own terms, the optical nature of this building is successful — there are numerous little interruptions to the borders of any form that vivify what might have been a fairly staid arrangement of squares — but it is nevertheless on the lower end of Sullivan's late designs. Comparison to the Getty Tomb from a couple decades earlier will clarify this. That building is likewise staunch, self-similar, and ultimately primarily visual, but there is a sense in which its entire physical structure doesn't merely facilitate, but moreover expresses, its tendency towards optical over phenomenological expressiveness. (TFS, 2025)
West Lafayette, IN: 210 W State Street
74%
Purdue State Bank. 1914
Unfortunately the interior's been ruined by renovation, which is a special shame because this is far and away the smallest of Sullivan's late banks and the only one on a non-rectangular plot. So, it doesn't strain credulity to say that the exigencies of this design would've demanded from the architect a level of spatial deliberateness surpassing even what led to the most precise of his bigger buildings. Still, what remains of Purdue State — the exterior, albeit with an ATM where the front door used to be — is a subtle knockout. This is palpable most of all in the way the decorative banding that wraps around the whole of the structure's upper eighth, in concert with the arrangement of windows beneath it on the two long sides, alludes to the building's asymmetrical footprint but then resolves this asymmetricality into a tight abstract regularity. (The structure is a scalene triangle whose small angle has been lopped off acutely to make the whole into an unseemly quadrilateral.) Namely, the building's short side has five terracotta plaques in the banding above and four brick mullions between the windows below; the long side has six and five, and on the front face of the building there's a single plaque with a single opening beneath it (the entryway). It's like the strange lean that the structure's been forced into by its site is given numerical expression by the ornamental elements on each of its two long sides, but then this rationalism congeals into something even cleaner and wholer — a singularity, the oneness of the one plaque and one portal — on the front face. This is Sullivan managing chaos, which he's not exactly by bringing it to order, but rather by showing that order and disorder are predicates of each other. (TFS, 2025)
Cedar Rapids, IA: 1340 3rd Avenue SE
62%
St. Paul’s United Methodist Church. 1914 (with W.C. Jones)
Famously, Sullivan overshot his budget on this commission by some astronomical amount, forcing the church to boot him and hire some lesser guy — W.C. Jones — to simplify and execute his original designs. The resulting structure is a curio: a true Sullivan idea in terms of massing and space, but with basically arbitrary ornamentation and very little of it… the stained glass windows are mass-market and installed upside down! Things like the main stairwell and the education wing’s hallway include the expressive juxtapositions of closed and open spaces that make any Sullivan building what it is. But the prevailing decorative sparseness — and how it makes the building feel almost hollow — proves that ornament isn’t subordinate to whatever’s great about what Sullivan was up to, but an integral part of how space works in his buildings. (TFS, 2024)
Clinton, IA: 226 4th Avenue S
54%
Van Allen and Company Department Store. 1913
As far as I could tell, this building’s been ruined by retrofits over its century of life, nor is it likely that it was an entirely major work of Sullivan’s even when it was new. Its brick upper portion sits a little too massively on its marble base, and the rhythmic order which its windows create seems interrupted, rather than accented, by the tall mullions on its front side. (Given how sensitive are the relations between ornamental parts and structural wholes in Sullivan’s designs, however, it’s possible that my judgment is unduly influenced by all the little violences that have been done to the building over the years.) Still, Sullivan’s genius at decorative organicism is palpable in, for instance, the terracotta banding. (TFS, 2024)