Naturalized Nationalism a Ruskinian Discourse on the Search for an American Style Of

Naturalized Nationalism: A Ruskinian Discourse on the Search for an American Style ofArchitectureAuthor(s): Lauren S. WeingardenSource: Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 43-68Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Henry Francis du Pont WinterthurMuseum, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1181216 .

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Naturalized Nationalism A Ruskinian Discourse on the Search for an American Style of Architecture

Lauren S. Weingarden

LTHOUGH modernist historians and critics identified Louis H. Sullivan (1856- 1924) as a "prophet" of twentieth-century

functionalism, his place in nineteenth-century architectural traditions is now being reassessed. In- deed, when Sullivan's own contemporaries praised his artistic originality, they discerned in his work an organic means of expression that raised architecture, as a practical art, and modern technology to the level of a fine art. Through these earlier assessments we can gain access to Sullivan's artistic procedures for creating a new American style, a style grounded in nature and the forces that shape it. In this paper modernist concerns will be sus- pended so as to take a retrospective rather than a prospective view of Sullivan's artistic choices and his formation of an innovative means of organic expression.'

From the start of his career Sullivan searched for a native style by aligning himself with both a distant and an immediate naturalistic past. On the one hand, he used medieval styles-Gothic ornament and Romanesque mass composition-as historical points of departure. On the other hand, he forged a more recent artistic link with Frank Furness (1839-1912), in whose office he appren- ticed in 1873, and with Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-86), whose designs he assimilated between 1885 and 1893.2

Sullivan's lineage with Furness and Richardson is not just a personal construct; rather, these three progressive American architects are joined by a cultural continuum. Each architect was guided in his search for an American style by the naturalistic connotations that John Ruskin (1819-1900oo) as- signed to medieval styles. Even more significant is that Ruskin's aesthetics were mediated to them through New England transcendentalism. The immediate reception in America of Ruskin's first 1849 edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture can be directly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson's earlier expectations for a new American art.3

Lauren S. Weingarden is associate professor, Department of Art History, Florida State University.

The author gratefully acknowledges support received for this study from the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History and the Humanities held at the University of Michigan, 1986/87, and from the American Philosophical Society Grant- in-Aid program.

An earlier version of this article was presented to the "John Ruskin: New Visions and Revisions" session of the 1987 College Art Association annual meeting. It also comprises part of the author's forthcoming Architecture and the Language of Nature: Louis H. Sullivan's Search for an American Style.

SThe idea of organic expression has traditionally been aligned with a twentieth-century functionalist or mechanistic aesthetic, making Sullivan the "prophet of modern architecture." See, for example, Donald Drew Egbert, "The Idea of Organic Expression in American Architecture," in Evolutionary Thought in America, ed. Stow Persons (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1950); and Hugh Morrison, Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (1935; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1962). Morrison inadvertently established the convention of evaluating Sullivan's formal development in his progressive ar- ticulation of the reality of the underlying steel cage of the skyscraper. More recently, however, scholars have begun to ap- preciate Sullivan's role as the artist-decorator in his partnership

? 1989 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved. oo84-o416/89/24o01-ooo3$o3.oo

with Dankmar Adler (1881-95) and during his independent practice. See, for example, Wim de Wit, ed., Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

2 For Sullivan's recollection of Furness, see Louis H. Sulli- van, The Autobiography of an Idea (1924; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1956), pp. 190o-95. In his design for the Transportation Building at the Chicago 1893 World's Colum- bian Exposition, Sullivan invoked Richardson as the native "primitive" of a new American style; see Lauren S. Weingar- den, "A Transcendentalist Discourse in the Poetics of Technol- ogy: Louis Sullivan's Transportation Building and Walt Whit- man's 'Passage to India,' " Word and Image 3 (April-June 1987): 202-21. By 1893 Sullivan had transposed Richardson's "Ameri- canized" Romanesque style into the realistic and abstract terms of his own naturalistic architectural imagery. After 1893 Sulli- van often made overt historicist references to Richardson, as in his repeated use of the low, broad "Richardsonian arch."

' For a seminal discussion of the impact of Ruskin's writings on New England transcendentalist aesthetics, see Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting,



44 Winterthur Portfolio

Written as part of his essays on nature, dating from 1836 on, Emerson's statements on the fine arts nurtured the Edenic myth of America as "Na- ture's nation." That is, America's primeval forests, lakes, and mountains'provided both a record of the nation's past and the setting for its future growth. To sustain this myth and thereby attain an indigenous art form, Emerson instructed artists in every medium to use the poet and poetic techniques as models for averting an imbalance between material gains and spiritual growth. As Emerson explained, the poet intuitively reads and translates all things natural and man-made as symbols of the divine mind. He thus wrote, "Nature offers all her creatures as a picture-language... because nature is a symbol in the whole and in every part." 4

For Emerson these symbolmaking procedures would not only ensure America's moral, spiritual, and cultural progress but also guarantee a spiritual-organic unity between the fine arts and the "applied," mechanical, and utilitarian arts. Emer- son admonished his nineteenth-century American audience for severing "beauty from use," a "divi- sion," he said, that "the laws of nature do not per- mit." But he added that rather than expect the poet-artist to repeat the unity of beauty and use that existed in the "old arts," our native genius "will find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and roadside, in the shop and mill." Emerson further prophesied, "Proceeding from a religious heart, [the poet-artist] will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint stock company, and . . . ['our great mechanical works'] in which we see now only an economical use.5

Because Emerson and his followers anticipated

that a truly American art would result from such a unity between the material and the divine, Ruskin's ideas about raising architecture to a fine art were especially well received. Ruskin also promoted an organic-spiritual unity among the arts. To this end he first pronounced: "No man can be an architect who is not a metaphysician." Later he added: "A great architect must be a great sculptor or painter.... If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder."6 According to these precepts, Ruskin formulated his architectural principles of design as consonant with a naturalistic and symbolic means of pictorial representation.

Furness's, Richardson's, and Sullivan's search for an American style emerged from this interartistic Ruskinian/transcendentalist discourse. In fact, Furness was first trained in the Ruskinian/ Emersonian tradition under the tutelage of his father, the Reverend William Furness, a Unitarian- cum-transcendentalist preacher and a lifelong friend of Emerson's. From 1859 to 1861 Furness received his professional training as an apprentice in Richard Morris Hunt's New York office located in his Tenth Street Studio Building. Here, living and working under the same roof with prominent landscape painters, many of whom were associated with the American Pre-Raphaelite, or "New Path," artists, Furness's practical involvement with Rus- kin's works was greatly enhanced.7

z825-z875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and for a less emphatic but no less suggestive account, see Roger B. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, z84o-z9oo00 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). For dis- cussions of Sullivan's intellectual involvement with transcendentalism, see Sherman Paul, Louis Sullivan: An Architect in Ameri- can Thought (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962); and Narciso G. Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist Idea of Louis Sullivan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet" (1841), in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-4), 3:13. The phrase "nature's nation" was attributed to Emerson by Perry Miller, "The Romantic Dilemma," in Nature's Nation, ed. Elizabeth W. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1967), p. 201.

5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Art" (1841), in Complete Works of Emerson, 2:366-68. For a discussion of how Sullivan translated the themes and techniques of transcendentalist poetry into his mature skyscraper compositions, see Lauren S. Weingarden, "Naturalized Technology: Louis H. Sullivan's Whitmanesque Skyscrapers," Centennial Review 30, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 480-96.

6 John Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture (1838; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971), p. i; John Ruskin, "Addenda to Lec- tures I and II," in Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 (New York: John Wiley, 1854), P- 93-

7 In 1849 Reverend Furness gave William, Jr., then an as- piring painter, the first American edition of The Seven Lamps. This book, inscribed by the father to his son, is now owned by Philadelphia architect-historian George Thomas. For an in- depth study of Furness, his family, and the Ruskinian references in Furness's early works, see Mark B. Orlowski, "Frank Furness: Architecture and the Heroic Ideal" (Ph.D. diss., Uni- versity of Michigan, 1986). Furness's works are catalogued in James F. O'Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness (Philadel- phia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1973). The full account of Hunt's studio is in Annette Blaugrund, "The Tenth Street Studio Building: A Roster, 1857-1895," American Art Journal 14 (Spring 1982): 64-71; and Annette Blaugrund, "The Tenth Street Studio," in Barbara Novak and Annette Blaugrund, Next to Nature (New York: National Academy of Design and Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 19-21. For a complete history of this Rus- kinian "brotherhood," see Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Schocken Books, 1985). The "New Path" artists were those patronized by the journal of that name and the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, the group that founded the New Path. While the heyday of the American Pre- Raphaelite painters lasted from 1857 through 1867, the journal was published only between 1863 and 1865. As founding member Peter Bonnett Wight made clear in his historical account of the society, architects who designed in a Ruskinian Venetian Gothic mode were also supported by the society and reviewed in the New Path. See Peter Bonnett Wight, "Develop-



Naturalized Nationalism 45

ow

Fig. 1. Frank Furness, Flower Study (detail), 1870-80. Pencil on paper in bound sketchbook; H. 9?16", W. 8". (Private collection: Photo, George E. Thomas.)

Furness, in turn, likely encouraged Sullivan to cultivate his own New England transcendentalist heritage using Ruskin's naturalistic aesthetics as a guide. As their realistic botanical studies suggest, both cultivated self-concepts as artist-architects by studying nature firsthand (figs. 1, 2). Given such self-concepts and personal alliances, we can now interpret Furness's and Sullivan's still-life botanical studies as conforming with a Ruskinian iconog- raphy developed by the New Path artists seeking an indigenous style in nature. For example, Henry R. Newman's Anemone (1884) illustrates the detailed close-up views and botanical specificity that these artists perfected as tools to record a deified nature's infinite creativity (fig. 3).8

Fig. 2. Louis H. Sullivan, Hand with a Leaf (detail), July 20, 1885. Pencil on paper; H. lo", W. 8". (The Art Insti- tute of Chicago.)

Fig. 3. Henry Roderick Newman, Anemone, 1884. Water- color and graphite on paper; H. 15", W. 11". (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, gift of Dr. Denman W. Ross.)

ment of New Phases of the Fine Arts in America," pt. 2, Inland Architect and Builder News 4 (December 1884): 63-65.

8 Ruskin's works do not appear on Sullivan's 19og9 auction list; however, since Sullivan frequently paraphrased Ruskin in his visual and written works, we can assume that he owned (and likely retained) complete editions of Ruskin's Seven Lamps, Stones of Venice, or edited selections of Ruskin's writings. For a partial list of Sullivan's personal library, see Auction Catalogue of the Household Effects, Library, Oriental Rugs, Paintings, etc. of Louis H. Sullivan, November 19, 19og9, Chicago (Burnham Li- brary). Although Newman's study postdates the New Path artists' formal collaboration, it typifies this group's mode of representation which many of the original members and their unaffiliated friends continued to use throughout their careers. See William H. Gerdts, "Through a Glass Brightly: The Ameri- can Pre-Raphaelites and Their Still Lifes and Nature Studies," in Ferber and Gerdts, New Path, pp. 39-78; and Novak, Nature and Culture, pt. 2, chaps. 4-6.




Although we cannot ascertain exactly how or when Richardson gained access to Ruskin, it seems likely that he was introduced to a Ruskinian aesthetic tradition, with its Emersonian underpin- nings, by his New England clients, colleagues, and friends. In particular, landscape architect Freder- ick Law Olmsted, Richardson's longtime neighbor and artistic collaborator, would have provided the most sustained impetus for translating Ruskin's ideas into the materials and forms of the American landscape. Olmsted himself claimed both Emerson and Ruskin as his lifelong "prophets." It comes as no surprise, then, that Richardson's first known reference to reading Ruskin appears in a sketchbook dated between 1872 and 1873, not long after he and Olmsted had become friends. Along with other books listed on a page of pencil sketches, Richardson included "Ruskin's Painting," probably referring to Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854), which he owned. Further evidence of Richardson's ongoing interest in Ruskin is signaled by the eleven other well-worn volumes of Ruskin's works on painting and architecture left in the architect's professional library at the time of his death.9

Graphic notations also testify to Richardson's artistic involvement with Ruskin's texts. Whether preliminary sketches came from his own or his assistants' hands, in these renderings Richardson fostered a Ruskinian mode of pictorial representation. For example, a pencil-and-wash study for a capital at the Oakes Ames Memorial Town Hall in North Easton, Massachusetts (188o-82), closely corresponds with Ruskin's rendering of a capital from Doge's Palace (figs. 4, 5, 6). Similarly, the combination of broad, curving, graphite strokes and bold chiaroscuro modeling recalls Ruskin's de-

9 Olmsted's Ruskinian aesthetic theories and his coterie of Ruskinian-transcendentalist friends are thoroughly inves- tigated in Irving D. Fisher, Frederick Law Olmsted and the City Planning Movement in the United States (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI

Research Press, 1986). Cultural chronicler Henry Adams and Olmsted, Richardson's close friends, are credited with introduc- ing him to the Ames family from North Easton, Mass., and to Ruskin respectively by James F. O'Gorman, H. H. Richardson: Architectural Forms for an American Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 95; and by Larry Homolka, "Henry Hobson Richardson and the 'Ames Memorial Buildings'" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976). Like the Ames family, the Trinity Church building committee cultivated Ruskin's aesthetic-cum-moral/religious ideals. These ideals were expressed by A. H. Vinton, "Consecration Services," and Phillips Brooks, "Historical Sermon," in Consecration Services, Trinity Church, Bos- ton, February 9, 1977 (Boston, 1877), pp. 5-22, 23-54. Books in Richardson's personal library are listed in James F. O'Gorman, "Documentation: An 1886 Inventory of H. H. Richardson's Library, and Other Gleanings from Probate," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41, no. 2 (May 1982): 150-55. Richardson's sketchbook is transcribed and annotated in James F. O'Gorman, Selected Drawings: H. H. Richardson and His Office (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), app.

i'

Fig. 4. Henry Hobson Richardson (or assistant), study for capital at Oakes Ames Memorial Town Hall, North Easton, Mass., 1879-81. Graphite and wash on paper; H. 37/8", W. 43/4". (Houghton Library, Harvard University.)




Fig. 5. Henry Hobson Richardson, capital (detail) from loggia of Oakes Ames Memorial Town Hall. (Photo, Lauren S. Weingarden.)

Fig. 6. John Ruskin, "Capital from the Lower Arcade of the Doge's Palace, Venice." From John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), pl. 5.




scriptions and views of the play of light and shadow on deeply recessed elevations, weathered stonework, and hand-carved reliefs. 10

In order to reconstruct further the architectural dimension of this interartistic Ruskinian discourse, we must avoid the tendency to confine Rus- kin's influence strictly to the Venetian Gothic revival style which Ruskin popularized and which flourished in American architecture during the 186os and 187os. Indeed, P. B. Wight's National Academy of Design, built in New York between 1863 and 1865, not only is a hallmark of that era but also was the New Path showpiece for "naturalistic" architecture at the time of its completion (figs. 7, 8). Notwithstanding the privileged position of this overtly Ruskinian statement, progressive architects of the next generation took the lamp of obedience in The Seven Lamps of Architecture as their article of faith. Here, and in the preface, Ruskin assumed a more liberal attitude, arguing for medieval principles of good design, rather than any one particular style. He therefore illustrated these principles using "Gothic styles" in the "broadest sense," but he also suggested for modern adaptation Norman French and Italian Roman- esque, "pure Italian Gothic," and Venetian Gothic "colored by Byzantine elements.""11

So as to restore the moral value of medieval design principles for modern times, Ruskin arranged The Seven Lamps of Architecture in seven chapters, or "Lamps," in which he correlated the concepts of "Sacrifice," "Truth," "Power," "Beauty," "Life," "Memory," and "Obedience" with naturalistic means of architectural representation. Whether describing overall views or the surface details of medieval buildings, Ruskin used the lamps to illuminate signs of the builder's or carver's direct responses to nature in expressing ultimate spiritual truths. Thus, throughout his treatise Ruskin suppressed problems of building technology to emphasize the process of rendering and reading architecture as records of human expression and organic change.'2

We can now consider how Furness and Richardson at once retained more overt fragments of Ruskin's preferred medieval styles and began to extract from his texts the abstract principles of design for a naturalistic architecture. Using Ruskin's analogies between painted or poetic landscape imagery and architectural massing, ornament, and surface materials, they produced an architectural idiom derived from America's mountains, fields, and woodlands. In doing so, both Furness and Richardson further nationalized, or "Ameri- canized," medieval modes. Sullivan subsequently completed this process. In his mature works, he formulated a naturalistic means of representation free of revival styles.

10 The majority of drawings from Richardson's office are unsigned, making attributions to the master particularly difficult, according to O'Gorman, Selected Drawings, pp. 18-20. Having personally surveyed many of these drawings, however, I believe that the study for the Ames Memorial Town Hall capital can be attributed to Richardson's hand. This will be elab- orated on in Lauren S. Weingarden, Architecture and the Lan- guage of Nature (forthcoming). Richardson not only adapted Ruskinian modes of graphic representation to his personal style but also fostered these techniques in his assistants' work. Conse- quently, a uniform office style can be discerned in the strong chiaroscuro modeling of solids and voids, carved ornament, textured surfaces, and boldly reductivist masses.

" John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; re-

print, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), PP. 7, 197. For a survey of a Ruskinian Gothic revival in America and a history of American imprints of Ruskin's architectural writings, see Henry-Russell Hitchcock, "Ruskin and American Architec- ture; or, Regeneration Long Delayed," in Concerning Architec- ture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. John Summerson (London: Alan Lane, Penguin Press, 1968). For a Ruskinian reading of Wight's design, see [Russell Sturgis], "An Important Gothic Building," New Path 2, no. 2 (June 1864): 17-22; "National Academy of Design-Fortieth Annual Exhibition: Introduction-Interior of the New Building," New Path 2, no. 6 (June 1865): 81-85; and [Charles Eliot Norton], review of Wight's National Academy of Design monograph (1866) in North American Review 53, no. 103 (October 1866): 586-89. Wight expressed his own Ruski- nian position while designing this building in "What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done," New Path 1, nos. 5, 6, 7, 10 (September, October, December 1863, February 1864): 52-59, 70-75, 80-84, 130-33; and ".Reminiscences of the Building of

the Academy of Design," New York Times, April 22, 1900, p. 25. These writers correlate naturalistic architectural features with the texture and color of natural facing materials and realisti- cally rendered, hand-carved materials of botanical ornament. Wight moved to Chicago in 1871 where he disseminated Rus- kin's naturalistic principles of design, especially in the pages of Chicago-based Inland Architect and Builder News (founded 1883). Wight's career is treated in Sarah Bradford Landau, P. B. Wight: Architect, Contractor, and Critic, 1838-1925 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1981).

12 For Ruskin the landscape and the emotions that landscape engenders unified poetry with painting and unified both, in turn, with architecture. He examined the correspondences between poetry and painting based on the landscape features of mountains, vegetation, clouds, and sea in his Modern Painters, 5 vols. (London, 1843-60). He presented these same landscape features as models for reading and rendering the naturalistic means of representation in medieval architecture in his Seven Lamps and Stones of Venice. For a discussion of the "ut pictura poesis" tradition that unifies Ruskin's aesthetic system, see George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). American landscape painters, especially the New Path artists, appropriated Ruskin's descriptions of landscape imagery, especially of mountains, botanical specimens, and forest interiors, to their own native surroundings. See Novak, Nature and Culture; and Ferber and Gertz, New Path.




Fig. 7. Peter Bonnett Wight, National Academy of Design, New York, 1863-65; demolished. (The Art Institute of Chicago.)

Fig. 8. Capitals at entrance of National Academy of De- sign. (The Art Institute of Chicago.)




Fig. 9. Frank Furness, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1871-76. (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: Photo, F. Gutekunst.)

This sequence of events may be demonstrated by using Ruskin's lamp metaphor, foregrounding the lamps of power and beauty, to illuminate the abstract and naturalistic principles of design that Sullivan extended from Furness and Richardson. From the outset, however, we can assume that each architect was guided by Ruskin's first lamp, the lamp of sacrifice. With this lamp Ruskin defined true architecture to be "that art which [impresses] on its form certain characters venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary." Consequently, he dismissed "the technical and constructive elements [of] Building" as simply "construction"-but not architecture.13 Thus, under the lamp of power Ruskin correlated the sublime and the infinite in

nature with reductivist mass composition, chiaroscuro effects, and solid and void patterns. With the lamp of beauty, he defined the pictorial methods of rendering botanical ornament as a metaphor for nature's vital essence and as a mark of a nation's unique organic presence.

It was in the design for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1871-76) that Furness most fully realized his skills as a Ruskinian artist- architect (fig. 9). Here Furness combined signs of the sublime from the lamp of power with signs of organic life from the lamp of beauty. This achieve- ment was timely: as Furness's apprentice, Sullivan likely worked on the preparatory drawings for this building or one similar to it.14 However, Sullivan

13 Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 15-16. For a discussion of Sulli- van's adaptation of Ruskin's tenets for converting medieval polychromatic materials and patterns into modern ones, see Lauren S. Weingarden, "The Colors of Nature: Louis Sullivan's Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth-Century Color The- ory," Winterthur Portfolio 20, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 243-60.

14 Sullivan also would have worked on the drawings for (or seen the beginning construction of) Guarantee Trust and Safe Deposit Co. building (1873-75), Furness's smaller, commercial version of the Pennsylvania Academy. See O'Gorman, Architec- ture of Furness, pp. 39, 41, 90-93 figs. 6-1-6-9; and Orlowski, "Frank Furness," pp. 271-75.




extended to his own mode of ornament the signs extracted by Furness from Ruskin's lamp of beauty.

Ruskin's lamp of beauty illuminates both close- up and more generalized views of "the image [architecture] bears of natural creation." In the first case, he probed the details of nature, focusing on flora and fauna and their counterparts in architecture (fig. io). Ruskin also extended the lamp of beauty to a more abstract view of nature. He claimed, "all perfectly beautiful forms must be composed of curves; since there is hardly any com- mon natural form in which it is possible to discover a straight line." In the first volume of The Stones of Venice (1851) he illustrated these abstract means of organic expression (fig. i i1), stating in "The Mate- rials of Ornament": "the essential character of Beauty depends on the expression of vital energy in organic things [found in] lines of changeful curve, . . . expressive of action, of force of some kind." Thus, for Ruskin, the curved, undulating, and spiraling line was not only a sign of beauty but also a symbolic means of expression for recording the patterns of growth and the incessant flux of nature, what he called the "vital truth" of nature representing "God's law." In "The Nature of Gothic," written for the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853), he labeled this means of expression "Naturalism," locating its original form in the medieval craftsman's creative process and executed works. As Ruskin explained, the medieval maker, aware of his human as well as material limits in rendering natural forms, perfected linear distortion as the "mental expression" of his

Fig. lo. John Ruskin, "Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy." From John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Ar- chitecture (1849; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), pl. 2.

Fig. 11. John Ruskin, "Abstract Lines." From John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (1851; reprint, Boston: Dana Estes, 1913), pl. 7.




sympathy with nature and humility before God's works. 15

Furness emulated Ruskin's formula for Gothic naturalism both in a written account of his process for designing ornament from nature and in his graphic record of this process. In his 1878 "Hints to Designers," he insisted that the novice begin by studying nature directly as opposed to studying popular handbooks on ornament. While Furness admitted that pattern books are useful to "cultivate the memory of the eye," he insisted that "in all cases the student must go for knowledge to the fountainhead, Nature." He further contended, "If the author of the best book upon ornamentation gives original designs, he went to nature for them: go and look for yourself, trust nobody's eyes but your own." To guide the student to this end, Furness advised, "start with nothing but paper and a free hand." Then, he instructed, "Take as a model some simple leaf or flower-plant-form is the clearest of all the numerous volumes that kind Nature offers to the student of ornamentation.... Place your model in any position you may fancy, and then try to draw the outline of petal and leaf in a firm, clean line." After repeating the same process again and again, the student will have extracted not a copy, but a "fair outline" of the model, thus gaining "the power to reproduce these forms [and to] bind them into patterns to suit certain spaces and places." Finally, in a Ruskinian voice, Furness claimed, "a design without action is merely a mechanical affair that might be produced by a mere machine." To avert these effects, he told the student to extract outlines of plant and flower forms as the means for preserving the "action" of the model's "present phase of existence."16

In prescribing such methods, Furness intoned the lessons Ruskin had set forth in The Elements of Drawing (1857), a text generally popular among American artists, but especially so among the

American Pre-Raphaelites. Here Ruskin explained that the student should first learn to draw from foliage because "its modes of growth present simple examples of the importance of leading or gov- erning lines," what he regarded as "a kind of vital truth [since] these chief lines are always expressive of the past history and present action of the thing."17

Furness followed Ruskin's drawing lessons in theory as well as in practice. Indeed, he filled his sketchbooks with freehand renderings of plant and flower forms (fig. 12). And still guided by Rus- kin's lamp of beauty, he paired them with spiraling and curving linear notations to depict vital action of some kind. Here too he demonstrated the stages by which realistic botanical motifs-transformed by opposition to and synthesis with abstract, dynamic configurations-converge with the symmet- rical, straightedge frames or insets of the surfaces to be adorned. These illustrations also match Rus- kin's graphic demonstrations of naturalism, show- ing how the natural form became progressively adjusted to both the obdurate matter and the geometric artifice of architecture (see fig. 10).18

The results of this graphic technique can be seen in the ornament for the interior and exterior of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Whether carved in stone or cast in bronze, scrolling botanical contours determine the order of growth and enclo- sure, or, alternatively, abstract curved contours provide a background against which the organic life of a flower unfolds (fig. 13).19

15 Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. Ioo, 104; E. T. Cook and Alex- ander Wedderburn, eds., The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols. (London: George Allen, 190o3-12), 9:270-71, 1o:189-91, 202-4, 215-17, 235-37. Here and elsewhere Ruskin identified linear distortion as a necessary but fortunate condition of progressive "living" schools of art in which craftsmen transpose motifs directly from nature as opposed to a priori artistic models. Cf. "Lamp of Life" in Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 142-53. "Naturalism" was renamed "Conventionalism," apparently to avoid the prevailing confusion of his theory of expressive symbolism with a theory of mimesis, or imitation (Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture, pp. 104-7).

16 Frank Furness, "Hints to Designers," Lippincott's 21 (May 1878): 612-14. The only published essay Furness is known to have written, this work reflects his experience as an accom- plished professional decorator. His aversion to "mechanical" effects also intones Ruskin's lamp of life.

17 "Letter II: Sketches from Nature" in John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing in Three Letters to Beginners (1857; reprint, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1885), pp. 92-93. For con- temporary views of the popularity of The Elements of Drawing, see Wight, Development of Phases, p. 53; and note to review of A. Ottin's Method elementaire du dessin in "A French Work on Elementary Drawing," American Architect and Building News 1 (February 5, 1876): 47. Furness, like Sullivan, would have found more formulaic approaches to abstracting ornament from nature among a variety of popular handbooks which he may have used, including those by Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, and V.-M.-C. Ruprich-Robert (cf. O'Gorman, Architec- ture of Furness, pp. 34-37; and David Van Zanten, "Sullivan to 1890," in de Wit, Louis Sullivan, pp. 20-23). Nevertheless, the repetition of curvilinear motifs dominates his sketchbooks, connoting just those artistic procedures and naturalistic associations that Ruskin correlated with naturalism in Gothic ornament.

18 These sketchbooks are undated, but those containing flower studies appear to coincide with his works of the 187os. 1 Furness used more conventionalized Gothic revival forms and more naturalistic motifs in the Pennsylvania Academy, reserving the conventional types for relief panels in the main elevations. For illustrations and renderings of the conventionalized motif over the main facade windows and the Cherry Street (students') entrance to the Pennsylvania Academy, see O'Gorman, Architecture of Furness, p. 81 figs. 3-2, 3-3, 3-4-




Fig. 12. Frank Furness, leaf study, 1870-8o0. Pencil on paper in bound sketchbook; H. 9VI/6", W. 8". (Private collection: Photo, George E. Thomas.)

In 1874 when Sullivan began his career as an ornament designer, he rehearsed Furness's personal repertoire of Gothic revival motifs. Increas- ingly, however, Sullivan organicized these forms with even more pronounced Ruskinian techniques. Between 1881 and 1884 Sullivan developed asym- metrical patterns of scrolling and undulating lines, thus intensifying a dynamic expansion between conventionalized botanical forms (fig. 14). At the end of this phase Sullivan submerged such Gothic revival motifs into abstract curvilinear patterns dominated by orbs with whiplash appendages radiating from their centers (fig. 15).20

Finally, in 1885 Sullivan retreated from the threshold of pure abstraction and turned more directly to nature. He now joined firsthand nature studies with a variety of curvilinear forms so as finally to free himself from historical styles (fig. 16). Yet in devising these schemes, and throughout the rest of his career, Sullivan continued to make

20 For an example of Sullivan's conventionalized Gothic revival style ornament derived from Furness, see his study for a fresco design, 1874, in Sprague, Drawings of Sullivan, figs. 8, 9. For an in-depth study of Sullivan's formal development of ornament, see Paul E. Sprague, "The Architectural Ornament of Louis Sullivan and His Chief Draftsmen" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1968); and Paul E. Sprague, Drawings of Louis Henry Sullivan: A Catalogue of the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection at the Avery Architectural Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Sullivan's ornament is treated in Lauren S. Wein- garden, "Louis H. Sullivan's Ornament and the Poetics of Ar- chitecture," in Chicago Architecture: 1872-1922, ed. John Zu- kowsky (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1987), pp. 229-50.

Fig. 13. Balustrade (detail), Grand Stair Hall, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Archives: Photo, Will Brown.)




Fig. 14. Louis H. Sullivan, ornamental design, May 6, 1884. Pencil on paper; H. 13"/16", W. 83/8". (Avery Ar- chitectural Library, Columbia University.)

Fig. 15. Relief panel manufactured by Northwestern Terra Cotta Works for the Scoville Building, Adler and Sullivan, architects, Chicago, 1884-85; demolished. Glazed red terra-cotta; H. 20o/2", W. 261/2", D. 6". (The St. Louis Art Museum).

Fig. 16. Relief panel from Samuel Stern residence, Adler and Sullivan, architects, Chicago, 1885; demolished. Carved butternut; H. 273/4", W. 28". (Louis H. Sullivan Architectural Ornament Collection, University of Il- linois at Edwardsville.)




reference to Furness and to Ruskin's medieval craftsmen. In his drawings, he either placed along- side or in sequence with a completed ornamental motif his original model from nature and its abstract linear order (fig. 17). Almost forty years later Sullivan further systematized this scheme in his System of Architectural Ornament According to a Phi- losophy of Man's Powers. In this treatise Sullivan repeated the sequential development between natural and geometric paradigms within a single plate as well as in a plate-by-plate exegesis. Whether geometricizing the natural model or organicizing a geometric figure, Sullivan restated in visual terms his rhetorical imperative: "Remember the Seed- Germ" (fig. 18).21

Sullivan's fully developed style of ornament first emerged in his 1886-89 interior designs for the Auditorium Building (figs. 19, 20). Here he created a wide range of motifs comprised of realistic plant imagery intertwined with or superim- posed on geometric structures. Significantly, these motifs are dominated by curving lines, and preem- inent among them is a combination of acanthus- like and scroll forms. However, this particular combination not only denotes Sullivan's innovative style but also signifies Richardson's artistic, albeit Ruskinian, prominence in Chicago marked by three commissions dating from 1885 to 1887: the Glessner house, the MacVeagh house, and the Marshall Field Wholesale Store (figs. 21, 22, 23).

Around 188o Richardson himself had appropriated from Byzantine carvings a combination of acanthus and spiral forms. This ornamental composite was one that Ruskin particularly admired, especially as it was more perfectly naturalized in Venetian and northern French Gothic carvings (figs. 24, 25). For practical and aesthetic reasons, Richardson avoided using this motif in the Field store. Instead, he projected boldly rendered, curving, bossy leaf forms from the cornice and de- lineated spiral reliefs in the capitals of attic-story piers. However, he did combine the acanthus and spiral forms in delicate, lacelike reliefs over the

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entrances to the MacVeagh and Glessner houses. In addition to these local examples, Sullivan would have been familiar with Richardson's Byzantine- and Venetian Gothic-inspired ornament through his personal copies of the photographic monographs on Austin Hall (built 1881-84 as Harvard Law School) and Ames Memorial Town Hall (fig. 26).22

21 Louis H. Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament Ac- cording to a Philosophy of Man's Powers (New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, 1924), pls. 2, 5. This treatise was commissioned by the American Institute of Architects in 1922 and published only days before Sullivan's death on April 14, 1924. Reprint editions have been issued by Prairie School Press (Park Forest, 1962) and Eakins Press (New York, 1967). Sullivan directed readers to scientific treatises-Asa Gray's School and Field Book of Botany and Beecher Wilson's Cell in Devel- opment and Heredity-but he could have just as well referred the reader to Ruskin's second "letter" on "Sketching from Nature" in Elements of Drawing.

22 Under the lamp of power, Ruskin traced a continuous line of development from the scrollwork of Byzantine acanthus capitals, derived from the classical Greek model, to the more foliated Venetian Gothic acanthus motif, derived from the natural model (see Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 87-88). The acanthus motifs at Doge's Palace, ranging from the early Gothic to the Renaissance periods, are illustrated in John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (1852; reprint, Boston: Dana Estes, 1913), pl. 2o. This plate, "Leafage of the Venetian Capitals," was particularly well worn in Richardson's own volume. In 188o Richard- son may have also taken note of Ruskin's naturalistic description of the ormanent at St. Mark's, in which Ruskin praised




Fig. 18. Louis H. Sullivan, "Manipulation of the Organic," 1922. Pencil on paper; H. 22"/4, W. 28'5/16". One of twenty finished drawings reproduced in Louis H. Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament According to a Philosophy of Man's Powers (New York: Press of the American Institute of Architects, 1924), pl. 2. (The Art Institute of Chicago.)

But just as Sullivan had earlier returned to Rus- kin to organicize Furness's ornament further, he now used Richardson's examples to review Rus- kin's textual demonstrations of naturalism and artistic instructions for studying the indigenous landscape. In the Auditorium Building reliefs, Sullivan transcribed the Richardsonian acanthus in two ways: he redefined the abstraction of the spiral, and he refined the realism of the botanical form.

In the latter instance, Sullivan recast the acanthus leaf to resemble the spikey-edge thistle leaf (fig. 27; see also fig. 24). He thus made reference to the commonplace vegetation of America's fields and woodlands and, by extension, to the primeval sources he shared with Ruskin's "Cis-Alpine," or northern, medieval stone carvers.23

While Richardson's domestic architecture inspired Sullivan to reexamine organic ornament under Ruskin's lamp of beauty, the Marshall Field Wholesale Store enabled him to study directly abstract mass composition under Ruskin's lamp of power. Indeed, the Field store represents a culmi- nation in Richardson's development of a Ruskinian

"those exquisite and lace-like sculptures of twined acanthus- every leaf edge as sharp and fine as if they were green weed fresh springing in the dew" ("Mr. Ruskin on St. Mark's," Ameri- can Architect and Building News 7, no. 216 [March 6, 188o]: 97). It is not surprising that this description could serve equally well for Richardson's acanthus motifs. "Austin Hall-Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass./H. H. Richardson Architect" and "The Ames Memorial Building, North Easton, Mass.," in Mono- graphs of American Architecture, nos. 1, 3 (Boston: Ticknow, 1886). For a catalogue raisonne of Richardson's works, see Jef- frey Karl Ochsner, H. H. Richardson: Complete Architectural Works (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).

23 Apparently, Ruskin here used "Cis-Alpine" to include the southern region of France with the northern region and thereby characterize the whole range of northern Gothic modes. He therefore located the counterpart to the indige- nously southern acanthus motif in the northern Gothic thistle- leaf motif. See Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 87-88.




Fig. 19. Hotel lobby, Auditorium Building, Adler and Sullivan, architects, Chicago, 1886-89. From Edward R. Garczynski, Auditorium (Chicago: Exhibit Publishing Co., 189o), p. 61.

Fig. 2o. Carved relief (detail) from elevator, hotel lobby, Auditorium Build- ing. Oak; H. 11", W. 14". (Collection of Crombie Taylor, FAIA.)




Fig. 21. Henry Hobson Richardson, Franklin MacVeagh house, Chicago, 1885-87; demolished. (Chicago Historical Society.)

Fig. 22. Main entrance, Franklin MacVeagh house. From Inland Architect and News Record i 1, no. 6 (May 1888): n.p.




Fig. 23. Henry Hobson Richardson, Marshall Field Wholesale Store, 1885-87; demolished. (Chicago Historical Society.)




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Fig. 25. John Ruskin, "Acanthus of Torcello." From John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (1853; reprint, Boston: Dana Estes, 1913), pl. 2.




Fig. 26. Henry Hobson Richardson, capitals from Austin Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass., 1881-84. From "Austin Hall-Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass./H. H. Richardson, Architect," in Monographs of American Architecture, no. 1 (Boston, 1886), pl. 5.

vocabulary of Americanized Romanesque forms, a process that began with his design for Trinity Church, Boston (1872-77). In his own description of this earlier work, Richardson invoked Ruskin's lamp of power to explain why he chose the French Romanesque as a point of departure. Under that lamp, Ruskin sanctioned the Romanesque style, delighting in the way "the wall is a confessed and honored member, and [how] the light is . .. al- lowed to fall on large areas of it, variously deco- rated." Rejoining Ruskin's notion of the sublime with his atectonic definition of architecture, Richardson reasoned that the French Romanesque style, free of classical influences, remained both "elegant" and "constructional," but he was quick to add, "although constructional, it could sacrifice something of mechanical dexterity for the sake of grandeur and repose." Richardson intoned Rus- kin's voice again to state that in designing Trinity Church (and all subsequent works), he sought to extract from the Romanesque style what he regarded to be its "distinguishing characteristic"- that is, "its treatment of massing."24

It was in this light emitted from Ruskin's lamp of power that Richardson conceived the mass composition of Trinity Church as "a pyramid; the apse, nave, and chapels forming only the base to the obelisk" (fig. 28). This lamp also facilitated the means of gaining monumentality for the Field store beyond its actual size. Ruskin had recom- mended primary geometric shapes-the pyramid, rectangle, and cube-as analogues of sublime imagery in nature, such as seemingly infinite ex- panses of mountain ranges and their precipitous foundations. Among these forms Ruskin preferred the cube, and, for that reason, he extolled the Palazzo Vecchio for achieving "vastness" with a simple mass "gathered up into a mighty square." Accordingly, when designing the Field store, Rich- ardson gathered up its rectangular mass into what appeared to some viewers as a boldly rendered monumental cube.25

24 "Lamp of Power" in Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 76-77; H. H. Richardson, "Description of the Church," in Consecration Services, p. 69. Trinity Church was Richardson's first comprehensive adaptation of the Romanesque style to Ruskinian aesthetics and native American conditions, which are immediately

evoked in the oak leaves and acorns carved into the capitals of the columns and the architrave enframing the main entrance doorways. For an unobstructed view of the pyramidal massing of Trinity Church, see Ochsner, H. H. Richardson, fig. 45c. This photograph first appeared in American Architect and Building News 2, no. 58 (February 3, 1877): n.p.

25 "Lamp of Power" in Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 72-75, 76. Cf. James F. O'Gorman, "The Marshall Field Wholesale Store: Materials toward a Monograph,"Journal of the Society of Architec- tural Historians 37, no. 3 (October 1978): 186.




Fig. 27. Relief panels (details) from Auditorium Build- ing. (Private collection: Composite photo, Richard Nickel.)

Fig. 28. [H. H. Richardson's draftsman], preparatory sketch for Trinity Church (unsigned), Boston, 1872-77. Graphite on paper; H. 12%/8", W. 9/4". (Houghton Li- brary, Harvard University.)




Fig. 29. Auditorium Building, Chicago, 1886-89. (Chicago Historical Society.)

Richardson also imparted a sense of the sublime by facing wall surfaces of simple mass compositions with rough-hewn quarried stone. Accord- ingly, he arranged layers of coarsely cut granite blocks to connote those sublime feelings Ruskin associated with close-up views of mountain foundations and cliffs.26 As a result, the Field store elevations, like those at Trinity Church and his other rock-face buildings, would have captured nature's incessant play of lights and shadows and recorded the formative process and infinite endurance of all geological matter.

Sullivan subsequently betrayed his Ruskinian perception of Richardson's Field store when he described the sublime traits of its mass composition

as "four square and brown . . . bespeak[ing] the largeness and the bounty of nature."27 Sullivan had earlier translated these sublime traits into his final scheme for the Auditorium Building (fig. 29), traits he further refined for the severely reductivist mass composition of the Walker Warehouse, Chicago (1888-89).

It was on the basis of these reductivist, geometric forms that viewers often compared Richardson's towers with the simple rectangular shafts of the Italian campaniles that Ruskin favored (figs. 30, 31, 32). Such observations cor-

26 Such associations were made in "Lamp of Memory" in Ruskin, Seven Lamps, p. 183.

27 Louis H. Sullivan, "Kindergarten Chats" (19go1; rev. 1918), in Louis H. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats (Revised z918) and Other Writings, ed. Isabella Athey (New York: George Wit- tenborn, 1947), P-. 30. The Field store was faced with red granite and sandstone, but as early as 1891 industrial smoke had turned it black; see O'Gorman, "Marshall Field Store," p. 186.




Fig. 30. John Ruskin, "Types of Towers." From John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 1 (1851; reprint, Boston: Dana Estes, 1913), pl. 6.

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Fig. 31. John Ruskin, "Lombardic Towers." From Lec- tures on Architecture and Painting, Delivered at Edinburgh in November I853 (New York: John Wiley, 1854), pl. 6.




Fig. 32. Henry Hobson Richardson, Albany City Hall, Albany, N.Y., 1880-83. (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.)




Fig. 33. Adler and Sullivan, Guaranty (now Prudential) Building, Buffalo, N.Y., 1894-96. (The Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.)




Fig. 34. Elevation (detail), Guaranty Build- ing. From a rental pamphlet printed by Mathews and Northrop Co., Buffalo, N.Y., n.d. (The Art Institute of Chicago.)

roborate Richardson's adherence to Ruskin's principles for designing towers with "one bounding line from base to coping," a scheme Ruskin admired in "the true vertical, or the vertical with a solemn frown or projection [of] the Palazzo Vec- chio." Sullivan responded to such a Ruskinian reading of Richardson's towers by raising a mono- lithic vertical office tower from the horizontal mass of the Auditorium Building. What is more important is that Sullivan's Ruskinian view of Richard- son's towers subsequently helped to shape his mature skyscraper compositions. In fact, in his Autobiography of an Idea (1924) Sullivan made his early, firsthand impressions of Richardson's Ruskinian Brattle Square Church tower, Boston (1869-73), crucial to his entire architectural development.28

This Ruskinian link between Richardson's towers and Sullivan's skyscrapers can be further sub- stantiated by the way Ruskin naturalized the medieval tower for modern use. For example, in Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Ruskin contended that while the first towers were built as "a species of aspiration," later societies constructed towers for the sheer "joy of height," ajoy we feel in viewing "a lofty tree or a peaked mountain." In concluding this passage, Ruskin delighted in the competition among medieval towns to build in- creasingly taller towers and hoped, in turn, that in the future "the citizens of Edinburgh and Glasgow inflamed with the same emulation, [might build] Gothic towers instead of manufactory chimneys."29

It was in just such a spirit of antiindustrial ur- ban growth that Sullivan naturalized the skyscraper (figs. 33, 34). In "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" (1896), Sullivan presented the skyscraper as a new species of aspiration which "the Lord of Nature in His Beneficence has.. offered to the proud spirit of man." In his executed works, as in his essay, Sullivan appealed directly to Ruskin's portrayal of the medieval Italian campanile as, in Ruskin's words, "four-square, rising high and without tapering into the air story above story, they stood like giants in the quiet fields beside the piles of basilica or the Lombardic church." As Sullivan put it, the skyscraper "must be tall, every inch tall.... Rising in sheer exultation

28 "Lamp of Power" in Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 75-76. Cf. descriptions of Richardson's towers at Brattle Square and Trin- ity churches in Mrs. [Mariana Griswold] Schuyler Van Rens- selaer, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works (1888; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1969), pp. 53, 65. For a contem- porary photograph of the Brattle Square Church tower and for Richardson's tower designs for the Allegheny County Buildings (Pittsburgh, i883-86), see Ochsner, H. H. Richardson, figs. 29b, 1 16d. Sullivan recounted that while enrolled as a "special" architectural student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (October 1872-June 1873), this tower distracted him from Wil- liam Ware's textbook lectures on the classical orders (Sullivan, Autobiography of an Idea, p. 188). Sullivan's ongoing esteem for Richardson's Ruskinian towers is marked by the first design for the Auditorium Building tower which includes a pyramid roof, a feature that Richardson repeatedly used and that corresponds with Ruskin's "Types of Towers"; see "Preliminary Design, 1886," in Morrison, Louis Sullivan, fig. 13. 29 Ruskin, Lectures, pp. 37-39-




.. from bottom to top..,. without a single dissent- ing line-that is the new, the unexpected, the elo- quent peroration of most bald, most sinister, most foreboding conditions."30

But when Sullivan actually made verticality the dominant feature of the skyscraper, he recom- bined Emerson's poetic model for naturalizing modern technology with Ruskin's pictorial methods for naturalizing medieval architectural forms. In his skyscrapers Sullivan suppressed rationalist concerns to address what he called "higher aspirations." By elevating and enframing closely set structural and nonstructural piers, he exaggerated the vertical dimension to direct the viewer's attention to the attic story. Here abstract rectilinear order dissolves into undulating curves and countercurves intertwining with organic motifs, an effect evoking foliated branching trees.

With this combination of reductivist architectural forms and an organic mode of ornament, Sullivan sought to re-present nature and nature's absolute force symbolically, what he called the "Infinite Creative Spirit," and its corollaries, the "objective" and the "subjective." He first conceived this comprehensive architectural symbolism in 1885 for his ornamental designs. In fact, Sullivan most overtly assumed a Ruskinian position as both a theorist and a designer of ornament. At the same time, he resumed Emerson's symbolmaking techniques. In "Ornament in Architecture" (1892) Sul- livan suggested how he synthesized Ruskin's lamps of power and beauty as symbols of the objective and subjective. Contending "that ornament is men- tally a luxury, not a necessary," he advised the architect first to realize the noble dignity of pure and simple masses and tectonic forms. Only then, Sulli- van asserted, will the artist-architect conceive orna-

ment as "a garment of poetic imagery." With this end in mind, Sullivan composed an organic mode of ornament to function in two ways: as a symbol of humanity's spiritual unity with nature and as a check on what he called the "pessimism" of practical and technological conditions.31

Thus, when Sullivan adapted the symbolic forms and functions of medieval architecture to the modern skyscraper and an innovative style of ornament, he reinfused architecture with a spiritual meaning that his predecessors had somewhat diffused. In so doing, Sullivan renewed a transcendentalist reading of Ruskin's texts, keeping the Emersonian/Ruskinian discourse intact. By reviewing the Furness/Richardson/Sullivan continuum within this Ruskinian line of development, we gain an alternative historical perspective for describing the idea of "organic expression" as it was articulated in nineteenth-century American architecture. While we cannot discount that nineteenth-century rationalist designers produced surface analogies between natural, architectural, and mechanical forms (analogies that induced twentieth-century functionalist norms), we must now recount how some artist-architects conflated architecture with both the form and the content of nature. These designers made their organic means of expression consistent with the artistic process and prospect of Ruskinian landscape painters. By translating pictorial into architectural naturalism, they sought to defer, rather than to define, the technological realism of the mechanic or the engineer.

30 Louis H. Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" (1896), reprinted in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, p. 206; Ruskin, Lectures, p. 40.

31 Louis H. Sullivan, "Ornament in Architecture" (1892), reprinted in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, p. 187; Sullivan, "Tall Office Building," p. 206. Sullivan made his most concise statement concerning his philosophical views in his "Emotional Ar- chitecture as Compared with Intellectual: A Study in Subjective and Objective" (1894), reprinted in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, pp. 191-201; see also his "Function and Form (i)... (2)" and "The Elements of Architecture: Objective and Subjective (I) Pier and Lintel . . . (II) The Arch" in Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, pp. 42-48, 120-25.



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Naturalized Nationalism a Ruskinian Discourse on the Search for an American Style Of

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