Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright: Master and Apprentice Louis Sullivan It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building. -Louis Sullivan Perhaps the most important figure of Chicago architecture; Louis Sullivan is one of the key figures of American architecture and the precursor of architectural modernism. He became famous for his distinct style of designing architecture which went against the prevailing neoclassical style. He is also responsible for articulating the concept of “Form follows function”; words which have had a profound impact in the architectural practice. Sullivan’s organic architecture consists of a marriage of the physical and the poetic.1 You see, Sullivan was an idealist, a firm believer in Democracy. He believed that architecture was a product of society and that society is informed by the people. “The People” constitute a social organism in which architecture is one of the many activities which they partake in.2 He extended Ruskin’s view that a building could reflect the character of the people who built it. In the article “Louis Sullivan’s System of Architectural Ornament” by Lauren Weingarden, Sullivan states that; “architects make the inorganic (building materials) into organic through the use of articulation of lifeless material.”3 Louis Sullivan was renowned for his articulation of his buildings through ornament. The essential meaning of structure could manifest itself through its decoration. While the inclusion of ornament may seem contradictory to “form follows function”, Sullivan argued that ornament with purpose improved the quality of buildings. According to Sullivan, “Ornament should be designed at the beginning. It should not be just an additive. Ornament and building form must enhance the value of each other.”4 Sullivan was notorious for his particular style of ornamentation which involved deriving plant life compositions out of geometry. He goes over this process more in-depth over in his Treatise on Ornament. In essence, he believed in an organic synthesis between structure and ornament. Ornament was Sullivan’s primary tool for articulating his style of organic architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you. -Frank Lloyd Wright
Another of the great American architects, Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovative style made him a key figure during the first half of the 20th century. Wright considered Sullivan his mentor in the ways of architectural form-making.5 Frank Lloyd Wright’s five years working in Adler & Sullivan’s had a huge impact on his architectural practice. Frank Lloyd Wright made it known that he was a practitioner of organic architecture. He wrote down a list of design parameters which he guided his design by. Wright was very concerned with the relationship of the entirety of the building to its components.6 Unlike his modernist contemporaries, he was also emphatic about creating harmony between his architecture and the surrounding context. “A building should appear to grow easily from its site and be shaped to harmonize with its surroundings. It should be as organic and quiet as Nature.”7 Wright also believed that a building should bring out the true nature of materials. While both Sullivan and Wright sought to create and American style of architecture, Wright’s emphasis was geared more towards the individual versus Sullivan who sought to promote a collective. Unlike Sullivan, who pursued a balance of geometrical composition and ornamentation as a means of recreating what he thought to be a pristine act of architectural design, Wright conceived organicism in architecture in geometrical terms that clarified and resulted from a “cosmic structural order”.8 Wright’s unique style of architecture has perjured through time
Diagrams showing how Sullican derived his ornament from pure geometries
Falling Water by FLW. One of his masterpieces of organic architecturecreated a marriage between landscape and architecture
Master and Apprentice Both practitioners of organic architecture, Sullivan’s influence ribbed off on Wright’s design clear in his design style in his subsequent projects. But to what extent did Sullivan’s influence rub off on Wright? While working for Adler & Sullivan, Wright was in charge of residential commissions and the best known project during this time is the Charnley house, now known as the Charnley-Persky house completed in 1892 in Chicago, Illinois. This collaboration between Sullivan and Wright yielded one of the greatest interiors in all of Chicago. Some features of the House are unmistakably modern but there is certain uncertainty involving the house. The exact degree of involvement of Sullivan and Wright is unclear as there is no sufficient documentation along with a limited number of drawings of the house.9 Although a collaboration with Sullivan, the house has many Frank Lloyd Wright-esque features. The project was an important stepping stone in Wright’s life before beginning his solo career. After leaving the firm, Wright became famous by employing his organic style in his prairie house designs; houses which were designed to complement the land around Chicago. These houses featured narrow, long building with overhangs and sloping roofs; all using unfinished materials. They were his first implementation of the “open plan”. The Robie House, completed in 1909 in Chicago has been considered as one of the exemplars of the prairie style houses and has set the bar for comparison amongst his other houses.10 Its success is partly due to the involvement of the client and the incorporation of technological elements into the design. Through a careful comparison of these two domestic buildings we can hopefully begin to discern what elements are particular to each architect and perhaps gather some ways in which Frank Lloyd Wight was influenced by Sullivan.
Charnley House Plans
Robie House Plans
The Comparison Both the Charnley House and the Robie House employ similar design mindset while responding to each project’s particular demands and context. Let’s begin our analysis by looking at the formal treatment of each building. The formal character of the Charnley house is quite different than that of the Robie House; and most prairie houses, due to the surrounding context. The prairie houses were generally found in the suburbs or outskirts of the city which have comparatively more open space, whereas the Charnley House is nested in a corner of the bustling city of Chicago, surrounded by relativelytall utilitarian buildings. A major difference between Sullivan and Wright is each architects treatment of the plan. For Wright, the plan was a generator of form.11 An orchestrated arrangement of spaces was a key element in Wright’s works. The plan of the Robie house is designed as two rectangles sliding past each other; seen most clearly in the plan of the second floor. In the Robie House, the entrance has a strange relationship with the whole of the house. Rather than being celebrated, the entry is relegated to the upper edge, of the main celebrated means of circulation. The Robie house demonstrates Wright’s emphasis of the open plan in the oval-like arrangement of living spaces both on the second and first floor; tied together in the center by the main staircase. Wright relegates the bedrooms to the third floor for maximum privacy in an entirely new volume in which the vertical circulation is separate from that of the main stair. Wright it very conscious about how he chooses to articulate space. Apart from his openness of living spaces and his separation of bedrooms, he also relegates the servants quarters to the rear of the upper rectangular volume on the second floor behind the kitchen, separated completely from any main area of the house. This is an expression of symbolic yet literal hierarchy. Whereas Sullivan was never known as a planner, rather known for his “super assertions of the primacy of structure.”12 The Charnley house employs a more compressed form. The Plan’s shape is essentially a rectangle with the exception of a subtle angular outward protrusion which covers two thirds of the right side. This form repeats itself on all levels with the only major alteration being the balcony on the second floor. The “rectangle” is divided into three sections; with the center holding the circulation and hallway space while the left and right extremities program and wall partitions are arranged in relatively tame orthogonal partitions. “Sullivan’s house plans usually establish linear sequences of public spaces and his upstairs halls are more stately than his downstairs ones. In a Sullivan house, floors are stacked one above the other with few or no major inter-core vertical elements to establish a unified, three dimensional architecture geometry.”13 In this aspect, the plan of the Charnley house seems to be quite Sullivanian.
Viw of the small atrium in the Robie House. One can see how Wright prioritized the celebration of the lighting rather than the vertical circulation
Screen and banister details in the Charnley House
The treatment of stairways in the Charnley House differs from the Robie house. In the Robie house, the stairs are not only a system of links but also a spatial architecture in themselves. The relationship between a massive form and a difficult, multilevel progression inside is Sullivanian, according to historian David Van Zanten.14 Whereas in the Robie house, the main and secondary stairs are treated as connectors and not nearly celebrated to the extent of the Charnley house. The stairs are adorned with decorated varnished wood and on the second and third level, a screen composed of vertical wooden slits frames the stairwell which suggests Wright’s hand. The relationship between a massive form and a difficult, multilevel progression inside is Sullivanian, according to Van Zanten.15 It might be fair to say that Sullivan is responsible for the spatial aspect of the stair whereas Wright was more involed in the stairs details. Treatment of material takes in both are a very similar attitude. They both utilize brick for the exterior, responding to specific aspects of contexts. Brick was a common material choice in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s and both employ a brick exterior and heavily utilize wood to create a warm, luminous atmosphere on the interior. For Wright, brick emphasized the horizontality with which he was so obsessed with and the frugal use of wood seemed to work in tandem with his ribbon windows in articulating light in the space; another of his trademarks. While attention to lighting can be seen in the Charnley house, there is nowhere near as much desire to exploit both natural and artificial lighting as there is in the Robie House. While material treatment in both homes overlaps, the treatment of ornament is quite particular to that of each architect. All of the Ornament in The Charnley House is done in Sullivan’s geometric plant-form style. The exterior of the building solely contains a somewhat reserved, in comparison to his other works, patterning on the balcony and a small orthogonal patterning on the overhangs. The interior on the other hand is much more frugal with more detailed ornamentations. Sullivan’s desire to express structure or emphasize certain elements through ornament is quite apparent in the Charnley House but not nearly to the extent of his public buildings; demonstrating reserve as to not over articulate in a domestic atmosphere. It is possible that Wright took part in some of the ornamentation, taking from Sullivan’s sketches in order to emulate his style as some critics argue that the ornamental compositions in some parts of the house do not resemble those of Sullivan.16 But there is insufficient documentation to make a concrete argument. Wright had his own way of articulating ornament. Unlike his master, Wright had stricter views on the application of ornamentation. Where Sullivan employed ornament to unify and emphasize Wright kept it to a minimum. His trademark ornamentation were his stained glass panels which were mainly used in, but not limited to, glazing. While his stained glass panels usually had a tree-like motif composed of simple geometries, the panels in the Robie House were not designed in this manner. The stained glass panels can be seen in the ribbon windows on all floors and on the dining table lamps. Despite the lack of explicit ornament, Wright does articulate other objects in the Robie house in order to give character to the space, similar to how Sullivan viewed ornament as a cohesive element in his own buildings. He designed all of the furniture in the house, believing that all of the parts should correspond to the whole and he even articulated the carpeting with color in order to demonstrate flow or placement of furniture.
Robie House Elevation
Robie House Section
Sectional model of an earlier Charnley House scheme. Notice the inclusion of a spiral staircase behind the main stair.
Stained glass windows in the Charnley House used in the ground level (above) and on upper levels (below)
Sullivanian ornament found throughout the Charnley House
Concluding Thoughts From this comparison, I could gather that from the era of Sullivan to the era of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was a shift in emphasis for the formal treatment of architecture. There is no doubt that both men were experts in their field. Both architects were responsible for seeking to create a democratic architectural style that reflected the American people, albeit with a slightly different emphasis. As seen in the two projects, the turn of the century seemed to bring a shift in emphasis from expressiveness and ornamentation to a preference for simpler geometries. Sullivan had always held a romantic view on how space could be emphasized, articulated and unified through the use of ornament. Ornamentation would soon disappear altogether with the coming of the modernist movement.The Charnley House, albeit a project done under Sullivan’s firm name, was a huge stepping stone prior to Frank Lloyd Wright’s career as a solo architect. There he began to employ, or at least collaborate in, some of the techniques which he would then utilize in his own career such as material treatment and the emphasis on horizontality. Wright was even more emphatic on spatial aspects of his organic architecture such as the open plan, and the relationship of the parts to the whole in order to create cohesion and logical spatial relationships. During this period of modernism, Wright thrived as his resultant work fit in with the emphatic geometries of the movement, yet his mentality was unlike that of his contemporaries; having Sullivan’s influence always present in his mind.
Figure Credits All Charnley House Images Longstreth, Richard W.. The Charnley House: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the making of Chicago's gold coast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Robie House Plans, Sections and Elevations and Windows details Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Robie House. Palos Park, Ill.: Prairie School Press, 1968. Robie House Window http://www.designlinesltd.com/blog/?p=4654 window black and white Robie House Exterior View http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frank_Lloyd_Wright_-_Robie_House_2.JPG robie house viewe Robie House interior Photograph http://news.cnet.com/2300-13576_3-10017430-11.html Falling Water http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wrightfallingwater.jpg Sullivan Ornament Diagrams Louis H. Sullivan, “Ornament in Architecture” (1892), in Louis Sullivan: The Public Papers, ed. Robert Twombly (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988), p80
Bibliography 1,3 Louis H. Sullivan, “Ornament in Architecture” (1892), in Louis Sullivan: The Public Papers, ed. Robert Twombly (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1988), 79-85 2 Lauren Weingarden, “Louis Sullivan’s System of Architectural Ornament,” in Louis H. Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament (New York: Rizzoli, 1990 [1924]), 11-42. 5 Frank Lloyd Wright, “In the Cause of Architecture,” Architectural Record 53:3 (March 1908), 155-165. 4,6 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Organic Architecture Looks at Modern Architecture,” Architectural Record 111 (May 1952), 148-154. 7-8 Frank Lloyd Wright, “In the Cause of Architecture,” Architectural Record 53:3 (March 1908), 155-165. 10 Larson, George A., and Jay Pridmore. Chicago architecture and design. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993. 9,11-15 Longstreth, Richard W.. The Charnley House: Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the making of Chicago's gold coast. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.