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Article: Louis Sullivan after functionalism.(architect)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- September 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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[W]hat is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. ... It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.
--Louis Sullivan
Ah, that supreme, erotic, high adventure of the mind that was his ornament.
--Frank Lloyd Wright
Was ever a genre of art scorned as much as was architectural ornament during the heyday of modernism? Decorative carving, panels, and friezes became abominations: excrescences lathered over otherwise honest brick boxes, and all in the service of corrupt social display. To purge ...