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Ornament as Architecture: The Work of Louis Sullivan
| Article
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12166 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1987 |
2,078 Words |
| Author
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Wim de Wit
Wim de Wit is curator of the Architectural Collection at the
Chicago Historical Society and in this capacity responsible
for the exhibition Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament. |
Although not as famous as the Paris cemetery Pere-Lachaise, Graceland Cemetery in Chicago attracts thousands of tourists every year. Some visitors go there to admire the monumental gravesites of Chicago's rich and famous, including Marshall Fields, the Armours, and the McCormicks, but most make the pilgrimage to see just one little structure: the Carrie Eliza Getty tomb. Designed by Louis H. Sullivan in 1890, this tomb is unlike any other at the cemetery. It has nothing of the bold pretention or ostentatiousness of some of its neighbors. On the contrary, the Getty tomb is small, delicate, and very elegant; in fact, one has to search carefully to find it amid all the pompous monuments that one can find at Graceland.
Why do so many people make an effort to see the tomb? No doubt visitors feel attracted to this little structure because of its beautiful ornament, an ornament that is neighter aggressive nor sad, but rather light and uplifting. On the front of the tomb, in the center of a bare field of smooth, gray limestone, are two copper doors, which attract immediate attention because of their blue-green color and intriguing ornament. Visually, the doors bind the bottom half of the structure with the top, which is of a strikingly different character. Here, in contrast to the plainness of the lower section, most of the stone is covered with a starlike ornament in low relief, while the arch in the center also retains a plain style. On the sides and back we find a similar composition.
System of Ornament
One glance at the rest of Sullivan's work - both what he designed with his partner Dankmar Adler between 1880 and 1895 and what he did after the two architects split up - tells us that ornament played an important role in all his buildings. What's more, we can perceive a system behind it.
Much has been written lately about the meaning of Sullivan's architectural ornament. In order to expose the public to these newly articulated views, the Chicago Historical Society, in collaboration with the St. Louis Art Museum, decided to mount an exhibition entitled Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament, which explores why he used ornament derived from motifs in nature and what goals he strove to accomplish. Numerous drawings, photographs, fragments of the actual buildings, and models testify to Sullivan's philosophy about architecture which was closely bound up with his conception of ornaments and which he consistently tried to realize in three-dimensional forms throughout his
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