By Patrick F. Cannon

My partner, photographer James Caulfield, and I are working on a major revision – really a transformation – of a book we did nearly 15 years ago on one of America’s greatest architects, Louis Sullivan. The photo above by Jim is of the 1899 Bayard-Condict Building in Manhattan. As you can see, minimalism wasn’t Sullivan’s forte. In fact, it would have been inconceivable to  him not to enhance his buildings through appropriate decoration.

            Those angels are no thoughtless addition. When built, the Bayard-Condict was meant to house tenants mostly related to printing and publishing, messengers of the word if you will. Since angels are considered the messengers of God, and similar messengers exist in other religions and cultures, their use here is meaningful. And it was  no accident that Sullivan almost always used Lions – symbols of strength and dignity – in his many bank designs.

            By the time he died in 1924, architecture had already started its transition from the decorative to the functional. In this and other countries, Art Deco was in the ascendency. While “Deco” was part of its name, its decorative flourishes were pared down, almost cubistic in form. In the 1930s, forms were further pared down, not only in architecture, but product design as well. The “streamlined” railroad trains – the New York Central’s 20^th Century Limited was typical – were good examples of what came to be known as Art Moderne, which encompassed not only trains, but buildings, coffee pots and toasters.

            Lurking in Weimar Germany during most of those years were young architects who would eventually make pure functionalism the dominant Western style – what has come to be known as the International Style after the 1932 exhibition of that name at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Among the architects exhibited,  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ended up in America, Mies (as he’s commonly known) in fact settled in Chicago, where he headed the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also, beginning in the late 1940s after construction resumed after World War II, transformed commercial and institutional architecture. As he was quoted as saying, “less is more.” (Frank Lloyd Wright was quoted as quipping “less is less.”)

But Mies meant it. His 1950 860-880 North Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago were copied over and over again, not only by Mies, but most of  America’s and Europe’s young architects. Alas, not all of them had the master’s genius for scale and detail. A perfect example is the soulless building that replaced Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange Building, needlessly torn down in 1972. No one goes out of the way to see its lobby, but people do travel to see the recreation of the Stock Exchange Trading Room at the Art Institute.

   There are signs that the rational sometimes gives way to the urge to decorate or at least enhance. Post-Modernism had its day, consciously resurrecting some of the shapes and symbols of the past. And it’s a rare blank wall in Chicago and other cities that hasn’t caught the attention of the graffiti tagger or muralist. While much of this is mediocre or blatantly political, there are always exceptions, and some works of real talent.

Then there is Frank Gehry and his copiers. While not strictly speaking decorative in the Sullivan sense, they are decorative in form. It took him awhile to get there. Much of his early work is either aggressively industrial (his own home) or miscarried, like his deconsructivist “Fred and Ginger” building in Prague, which is supposed to show a dancing couple. But I have always thought Gehry was really a frustrated sculptor, and his famous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is really a piece of sculpture enclosing a building (one of his actual sculptures, the Gold Fish, adorns the sea front in Barcelona).

Of course, his work is only possible because of complicated computer-assisted calculations, carried out by this dedicated staff. When people go out of their way to see his work, there must be something there that touches them, just as so many travel to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s works. Wright could never quite abandon decoration, no matter how simple it might seem. And most people stubbornly prefer brick and stone over steel and glass for their own homes, to the consternation of many architects.

The kind of molded terra cotta ornament that Sullivan produced isn’t coming back, but just the other day I passed a steel and glass apartment building with a colorful mosaic applied to one wall. Passersby who would normally have walked past the building without a second glance, instead stopped to study it, just as do those who unexpectedly come upon the Bayard-Condict in lower Manhattan.

Copyright 2023, Patrick F. Cannon; photo copyright 2023, James Caulfield