For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.

For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry.

"For most of the twentieth century, modernist viewers dismissed the architectural ornament of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) and the majority of his theoretical writings as emotional outbursts of an outmoded romanticism. In this study, Lauren Weingarden reveals Sullivan's eloquent articulation of nineteenth-century romantic practices - literary, linguistic, aesthetic, spiritual, and nationalistic - and thus rescues Sullivan and his legacy from the narrow role imposed on him as a pioneer of twentieth-century modernism. Using three interpretive models, discourse theory, poststructural semiotic analysis, and a pragmatic concept of sign-functions, she restores the integrity of Sullivan's artistic choices and his historical position as a culminating figure within nineteenth-century romanticism. By giving equal weight to Louis Sullivan's writings and designs, Weingarden shows how he translated both Ruskin's tenets of Gothic naturalism and Whitman's poetry of the American landscape into elemental structural forms and organic ornamentation. Viewed as a site where various romantic discourses converged, Sullivan's oeuvre demands a cross-disciplinary exploration of each discursive practice, and its "rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation." The overarching theme of this study is the interrogation and restitution of those Foucauldian rules that enabled Sullivan to articulate architecture as a pictorial mode of landscape art, which he considered co-equal with the spiritual and didactic functions of landscape poetry."--Provided by publisher.

The making of shadows is an act as old as architecture itself. From the gloom of the medieval hearth through to the masterworks of modernism, shadows have been an essential yet neglected presence in architectural history. Shadow-Makers tells for the first time the history of shadows in architecture. It weaves together a rich narrative – combining close readings of significant buildings both ancient and modern with architectural theory and art history – to reveal the key places and moments where shadows shaped architecture in distinctive and dynamic ways. It shows how shadows are used as an architectural instrument of form, composition, and visual effect, while also exploring the deeper cultural context – tracing differing conceptions of their meaning and symbolism, whether as places of refuge, devotion, terror, occult practice, sublime experience or as metaphors of the unconscious. Within a chronological framework encompassing medieval, baroque, enlightenment, sublime, picturesque, and modernist movements, a wide range of topics are explored, from Hawksmoor's London churches, Japanese temple complexes and the shade-patterns of Islamic cities, to Ruskin in Venice and Aldo Rossi and Louis Kahn in the 20th century. This beautifully-illustrated study seeks to understand the work of these shadow-makers through their drawings, their writings, and through the masterpieces they built.

The Tender Detail tells a story about the repression of sentimentality through architectural ornament. The protagonists are Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, two of the most important architects and designers of ornament in American history. Interweaving close readings of their architecture and writings with wide-ranging discussions about sexuality, gender, and philosophy, the book explores how both men worked to solve the problem of late nineteenth-century ornamentation. It suggests that their solutions, while widely different, were both intimately rooted in the tender emotions of sentimentality. Viewing ornament in this way reveals much, not only about Sullivan and Wright's artistic intentions, but also about the role of affect, the value of beauty, and the agency and ontology of objects. Illuminated by personal stories from their respective autobiographies, which add a level of human interest unusual in an academic work, The Tender Detail is a readable, scholarly study which sheds fresh light on Sullivan and Wright's relationship, their work, and on the nature of ornament itself.

How did writers and artists view the intersection of architecture and race in the modernist era? Winner of the MSA First Book Prize of the Modernist Studies Association With the development of the first skyscrapers in the 1880s, urban built environments could expand vertically as well as horizontally. Tall buildings emerged in growing cities to house and manage the large and racially diverse populations of migrants and immigrants flocking to their centers following Reconstruction. Beginning with Chicago's early 10-story towers and concluding with the 1931 erection of the 102-story Empire State Building, Adrienne Brown's The Black Skyscraper provides a detailed account of how scale and proximity shape our understanding of race. Over the next half-century, as city skylines grew, American writers imagined the new urban backdrop as an obstacle to racial differentiation. Examining works produced by writers, painters, architects, and laborers who grappled with the early skyscraper's outsized and disorienting dimensions, Brown explores this architecture's effects on how race was seen, read, and sensed at the turn of the twentieth century. In lesser-known works of apocalyptic science fiction, light romance, and Jazz Age melodrama, as well as in more canonical works by W. E. B. Du Bois, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aaron Douglas, and Nella Larsen, the skyscraper mediates the process of seeing and being seen as a racialized subject. From its distancing apex—reducing bodies to specks—to the shadowy mega-blocks it formed at street level, the skyscraper called attention, Brown argues, to the malleable nature of perception. A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.

Evolving Transcendentalism in Literature and Architecture: Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrates how American architects read literature and transformed abstract philosophy and literary form into physical substance. Furness, Sullivan, and Wright were inspired by such Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and attempted to embody the concepts of nature, American identity, and Universalism in their architecture. Notably, this book is the first attempt to concentrate on analyzing these architects’ works from the perspective of Transcendentalism. This is also the first time that reproductions of Wright’s copy of Leaves of Grass and several tape records of Wright’s Sunday morning talks, both held in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archive, have been published. Importantly, these Transcendentalist architects’ philosophy has been influential in the development of contemporary environmental architects all over the world, including Paolo Soleri (an Italian-American) and Glenn Murcutt (an Australian), both of whom are discussed in the final chapter of this book.