Architexturez. wrote:
Chicago prepares to celebrate architect Louis Sullivan's 150th birthday
| is it a kind of a final turn? or affirmation
| sought by society that a tragic life must accompany a genius
| celebrated in death? almost as if one's belief is attested
| by his will to suffer for it! now who was talking
| about secular saints the other day?
The tragic tale of Louis Sullivan
September 3, 2006
BY KEVIN NANCE Architecture Critic
Society has a nasty way of turning its back on some of its greatest
artists at the zenith of their powers: Mozart buried in a pauper's grave
at the age of 35, Oscar Wilde sent to prison just as his plays were
dominating the West End. To these must be added the the tragic tale of
Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who was born 150 years ago today.
This week, as Chicago prepares to mark the occasion with a six-week
celebration culminating with a symposium at the Chicago History Museum,
it's worth remembering not just how Sullivan lived but how he died:
bitter, lonely and destitute in a dreary South Side hotel.
Although the architectural press continued to hail his creative genius
throughout his final two decades, the man who gave Chicago the
Auditorium and Carson Pirie Scott buildings, the Charnley-Persky House
and Pilgrim Baptist Church increasingly found himself shunned. By
Sullivan's death in 1924, he had been evicted from his office in the
Auditorium tower and forced to sell virtually all his possessions. At
the end he was a depressed, hard-drinking recluse, relying on handouts
from a few friends -- notably his protege, Frank Lloyd Wright -- to pay
for food and shelter; he died owing several weeks of back rent.
....
Wright, whose early deployment of ornament gradually fell away on the
journey toward the modernism of Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum,
saw which way the architectural winds were blowing. "It is better to die
of Ornaphobia by the wayside," he wrote, "than it is to build any more
'ornamental' buildings, as such, and die any more ignoble deaths of
'Ornamentia.' "
Sullivan's own death can only be described as ignoble. In the two
decades before he died alone in his sleep at the Hotel Warner on April
14, 1924, he had completed only a handful of small projects, including a
few banks -- their ornament as rich and sensuously "feminine" as ever --
in the rural Midwest, far from Chicago. He was 67 years old.
cont'd....
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/sho-sunday-sullivan03.html