Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture

Louis Sullivan's designs stand today as leading exemplars of Chicago School architecture. Having spent much of his career in a late Victorian world that bristled with fussy ornament for ornament's sake, Sullivan (American, 1856-1924) refuted this style with the now famous dictum Form follows function. This break from tradition is perhaps most evident in Sullivan's strides to reimagine the commercial space--from America's earliest skyscrapers to the small-town banks that populated the architect's commissions in the second half of his career.

In Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture, nearly 200 photographs with descriptive captions document Sullivan's genius for modern design. Patrick Cannon introduces each chapter and discusses the influences that shaped Sullivan's illustrious career. Rare historical photographs chronicle those buildings that, sadly, have since been destroyed, while James Caulfield's contemporary photography captures those still standing.

Cannon, author of several books on Chicago architecture, presents a pictorial survey of the works of Louis Henry Sullivan, who was mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, creator of the skyscraper, and famously expressed the modernist credo "Form follows function." While he precedes each section with biographical detail, Cannon maintains the focus on Sullivan's work, including contemporary photography of each of his extant buildings in Chicago and several outside the city, as well as period photographs of important demolished sites such as the Schiller Building. James Caulfield's rich and detailed photography captures the Art Nouveau grace and Prairie School simplicity of skyscrapers, warehouses, churches and temples, banks and private homes, and salvaged fragments of dismantled buildings including the Chicago Stock Exchange. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)