Tag Archives: Louis Sullivan

Sources of modern silliness

Posted on March 11, 2018 by David Brussat

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83) wrote some of the pathbreaking works of architectural history that form the belief system of modern architecture today. The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design is one, which I am reading again for the first time in … Continue reading →

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Rybczynski on concert halls

Posted on June 16, 2016 by David Brussat

I have not spared the architecture critic Witold Rybczynski my critique of his dithering on the greatest architectural questions of our time, but his latest piece, “The Concert Hall, Reimagined,” in Architect journal on the removal of concert halls from … Continue reading →

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Didn’t quite get Gaudi

Posted on March 9, 2016 by David Brussat

Ayesha Khan’s essay on the Spanish Catalan Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926) in the Wall Street Journal, “How a Gaudi Building Won Over a Strict Minimalist,” doesn’t quite live up to the headline. It is not clear that she really likes Gaudí … Continue reading →

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Still, his buildings were fine

Posted on January 2, 2016 by David Brussat

Reaching the end of Louis Sullivan’s Autobiography of an Idea, I could only wish that his place in architectural history was judged more by his buildings and less by what he wrote about architecture. Most of the book consists of … Continue reading →

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More on form and function

Posted on December 31, 2015 by David Brussat

Here is the first lengthy passage in which Louis Sullivan, writing in his Autobiography of an Idea, unpacks “form follows function,” which has become a mantra of the modernist movement. It had to be misinterpreted for that to occur. So … Continue reading →

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Sullivan on the classical

Posted on December 29, 2015 by David Brussat

About halfway through his Autobiography of an Idea, Louis Sullivan begins to discuss architecture. He is at MIT, circa 1872. He writes in the third person. Here he receives the received wisdom on classicism: Louis had gone at his studies … Continue reading →

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Form, function and Sullivan

Posted on December 24, 2015 by David Brussat

Am plunging into a 1956 softcover copy of Louis Sullivan’s The Autobiography of an Idea, first published in the early ’20s. The introduction to this edition by University of Illinois architecture professor Ralph Marlowe Line, written with the well-known forward … Continue reading →

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Movie news of the century!

Posted on August 12, 2015 by David Brussat

Return of the White City! World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 recaptured in celloid! Beaux Arts classical architecture writ large as the silver screen! Sex, violence, megalomania and beauty? That too! Nothing excites me more than news from Curbed.com that one … Continue reading →

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The satisfactions of Satie

Posted on July 27, 2015 by David Brussat

Erik Satie is a French composer of whom I know little, but am very familiar with one of his pieces, the first of his three “Gnossiennes,” which I suspect most readers will recognize as well. It is the first video … Continue reading →

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