Refinding, Losing - and abusing- Louis Sullivan (Again) - Buildings Burn, Landmarks are Reborn, and an Essential Monograph goes Out-of-Print

Louis Sullivan - clicks images for larger view

It was supposed to be a celebratory year.  2006 was the 150th birthday anniversary of Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.  With his partner Dankmar Adler, he had created some of the most striking masterpieces of the first Chicago School.  Sullivan split with Adler after the economic crash that followed the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, but even as his career entered a long, tragic decline, he continued to create astonishing works such as a series of small Midwestern banks, and the Krause Music store on Lincoln Avenue.

And there were a number of celebratory events, including the Chicago History Museum's Louis Sullivan at 150 website.  You could still see the restored spectacular theater of Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building . . .

and you could still shop at Louis Sulivan's Carson Pirie Scott . . .

But perhaps the most striking way Chicago choose to celebrate Louis Sullivan was to burn down three of his buildings in just a eleven-month span of 2006.

On January 6, Adler and Sullivan's 1890 Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv Synagogue, which, as Thomas Dorsey's Pilgrim Baptist Church became known as the birthplace of Gospel Music, burned to the bare walls in a fire set off by a construction worker using an acetylene torch on the roof.

Then, on October 24th, a worker using an acetylene torch to take apart a boiler in the basement started another blaze that destroyed Adler and Sullivan's Wirt Dexter Building on Wabash.

The following month, one of the firm's last surviving residences, the George Harvey House, whose owner was reported to have wanted it demolished for a new condo development, burned to the ground in a suspicious middle-of-the-night fire.

Today, seven years after that trifecta of disaster, the Auditorium still stands, although its tower's backdrop is no longer the blue sky, but the blue of VOA's new dorm for Roosevelt University.

Carson Pirie Scott has almost received a major and welcome update.  Celebrating the death of the department store, Carson's shut its doors early in 2007 after over a century of doing business in Sullivan's landmark.   In 2001, Carson's had sold the building to developer Joseph Freed, and before running aground against the disaster that is Block 37, Freed had made Sullivan's building their calling card, with a $190 million investment that included Harboe Architects leading a team that restored Sullivan's intricate cast-iron ornament . . .

. . . and uncovering the ornament designing by Sullivan for an early 20th-century remodeling of 22 South Wabash . . .

Now renamed Sullivan Center, the former Carson's store has become something of a magnet for architecture and design.  It's currently the home for both Gensler Chicago and the School of the Art Institute and its Sullivan Galleries on the 7th floor.  Last year, the building was reborn as a handsome, two-level flagship for a flagship City Target, the retailer's concept for expanding beyond suburban malls into the center city.

Photographer Richard Nickel lost his life photographing another Adler and Sullivan masterpiece, the 1894 Chicago Stock Exchange Building, while it was being demolished in 1972.  The trading room, lovingly restored by John Vinci, was reconstructed at the Art Institute.  The great entrance arch was also saved and erected within a charming park at Monroe and Columbus, where you could actually walk through it . . .

. . . until 2009, when with the construction of Renzo Piano's Modern Wing, the Stock Exchange arch was left like a garden gnome, stranded and inaccessible in the middle of a ditch-like flowerbed.

2010: The Year of Louis Sullivan

Then, four years after the official 150th birthday anniversary, four seminal events finally gave Louis Sullivan his due.

First, here was Louis Sullivan's Idea, Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson's masterful overview of the life and architecture of the great architect.  Designed by graphic artist Chris Ware, it made full use of the Chicago Cultural Center galleries with a a display of carbon filament lighting and supersize photos that gave you a real feel of what it must have been like to encounter the vanished buildings.  Unfortunately, Cultural Center shows don't get catalogs, so the only thing left of this great show are the memories and this eccentrically shot video . . .

At about the same time, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted Looking after Louis Sullivan, a striking collection of photographs by John Szarkowski,  Aaron Siskind and Richard Nickel.

April saw the debut of Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture, Mark Richard Smith's labor-of-love documentary on the architects life and art.

To top it all off, in September of the year, we really hit pay dirt with the publication of The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan, a landmark book that was an epic of scholarship and storytelling by Ward Miller, John Vinci and Tim Samuelson.  First the first time, there was a catalogue raisonné of every project Adler and Sullivan worked on, lavishly illustrated, including a large number of eye-opening color photographs.

Finally, the legacy of Louis Sullivan was here for everyone to see, for all time.

Well, not really.  Quite understandably, the first edition of The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan sold out quickly.  It is now out-of-print.  Amazon.com lists copies from $450 to $1218.  Another dealer will sell you one for $3508.  2010 ended with the book being acquired, along with the other assets of The Richard Nickel Committee, by The Art Institute of Chicago.  There has been no second edition, and, so far, none has been announced.

Louis Sullivan: the Rodney Dangerfield of great architects.

Refinding, Losing (and abusing) Louis:

• Kaddish for a Legendary Church - Fire destroys Pilgrim Baptist
• Massive Fire Claims Adler and Sullivan's landmark Wirt Dexter Building 
• Phantoms - Richard Nickel's Chicago (also out-of-print)
• Adler and Sullivan's Last Frame House on Hit List?
• Happy 150th Birthday Louis Sullivan - We've Burned Down Your Third Building This Year!
• Aftermath 
• Louis Sullivan at 150 - a new website and six-week celebration
• Louis Sullivan's Idea - a must-see exhibition
• Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture
• The architectural book of the year:  The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan
• White and Red and Louis all Over: Target opens in Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott

Wright's Roots are Showing: Garrick Theater colors seen for first time in over a century

click images for larger view

It's always difficult to imagine the architecture of the past as it actually appeared to people in its time.  When it comes to the Chicago of the late 19th century, that past, now mostly wiped from the cityscape, passes through the desaturating black-and-white photographic record.   Later photos may be more plentiful, but they usually depict buildings substantially altered from their original design.

We also see architecture of that time through the backward lenses of mid-century modernism, which emphasizes the simplicity of the commercial architecture of what has now been classified as the first Chicago School, seeing it as a precursor to the minimalist modernism of the International Style and the Second Chicago School of Mies van der Rohe and his followers.

But Louis Sullivan won't let you get away with it.  The beautiful simplicity of his Carson Pirie Scott store is anchored by an entrance floor marked by huge shop windows enveloped by the rich, foliate ornament for which Sullivan was famous.  His interiors, especially, were anything but austere, rich with stenciling, often designed with collaborators Louis J. Millet and George Healy, some of which, in a not uncontroversial restoration, was on display at a Crown Hall exhibition at few years back.

Adler and Sullivan's 1891 Schiller/Garrick Theater is a case in point.  Not only was the building itself tragically demolished in 1961, it's original interior design was painted over just seven years after the theater's opening.

As part of the new exhibition Wright's Roots, at the Expo 72 Gallery at 72 East Randolph through September 30th, 2012. curator and Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson endeavored to reveal, for the first time in over a century, the original color scheme of the ornament above the balcony, on the underside of the gallery.

Architectural finishes analyst Robert Furhoff was provided a rescued sample of the ornament, on which he burrowed down all the later paint jobs to document the original color palette.

Erin McNamara executed a sculptural repair of the original, made a mold of the repair and cast new pieces.  Anthony  Kartsonas  of Historic Surfaces LLC, who you see with Samuelson in the video below, then recreated the original paint pattern, using Furnoff's analysis.  And last Friday, Tim Samuelson was kind enough to let us be a witness as, for the first time in nearly 114 years, the original colors were again revealed.

The walls on which Wright's Roots is mounted are painted in the colors of that palette.

Of course, the Victorian palette can take some getting used to - one observer at Friday's unveiling commented it wasn't a palette they would want to paint any part of their home with - but to truly get a feeling of what the experience of an Adler and Sullivan building was like, it's invaluable to be able to imagine being immersed in the colors of the original design.

A substantial part of Wright's Roots traces the early, formative years when young Frank Lloyd Wright worked under the direction of Louis Sullivan, the man for whom he never lost his deep admiration and affection.    Wright's hand can still be seen in many of Adler and Sullivan's buildings of that period, and Samuelson  painstakingly lays out key examples.

The decorative panel you see above came from a Chicago apartment building built for Adolph and William Loeb in 1892.  It was rescued by Samuelson, hanging upside-down from the roof, just before the structure was demolished. The apartments were attributed,  rightly, to Adler and Sullivan, but as Samuelson relates . . .

When shown a photograph of the this long-forgotten project by architectural historian Richard Nickel in 1957, the ninety-year-old Frank grew momentarily quiet and then said, "So . . . you found THAT one, did you?"  After another pause, he said the design was his.

Another piece of ornament that didn't make it into Wright's Roots documents the different route Frank Lloyd Wright would take from that of his mentor Louis Sullivan.

In the above photo from the Chuckman Collection of the Garrick Theater under demolition, notice the large rectangular lozenges forming the outermost part of the arch.  (The flat, white interior surfaces of the rectangles were originally a nine-part stencil.)  Notice the border around each lozenge.  It was designed by young Frank Lloyd Wright, and this is what it looked like . . .

This is about as far from Sullivan's style of ornament as you can get.  Rigidly geometric, it has a vaguely Mayan feel that seems to anticipate Wright's later work.

There are a lot more fascinating stories in Wright's Roots, which we hope to write about in more detail (famous last words) soon.    Needless to say, it's a don't-miss event.  See it, and let your own imagination run free.