[W]hat is the chief characteristic of the tall office building?
And at once we answer, it is lofty.
soaring thing, rising in sheer
exultation that from bottom to top it
is a unit without a single dissenting
line.
—Louis Sullivan
Ah, that
supreme, erotic, high adventure of
the mind that was his ornament.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
Was ever a genre of art scorned as much
as was architectural
ornament during the heyday of modernism? Decorative carving,
panels, and friezes became abominations: excrescences lathered
over otherwise honest brick boxes, and all in the service of
corrupt social display. To purge them was high moral duty. In
his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos famously compared the
ornament of a building to the tattoos of a criminal, thereby
giving a lofty anthropological basis to what might otherwise be
regarded as a matter of personal taste.
The goal, of course, was reform. A building should not derive
meaning and character from the historical motifs that cluttered
its skin, but from the direct, logical expression of its purpose
and materials. This was the edict of functionalism, that—as Louis Sullivan put
it—“form follows function.” Sullivan’s Wainwright Building in St.
Louis embodied this doctrine, winning him the status of a
prophet: the inventor of the skyscraper, the uncompromising sage
who chose principled poverty over worldly success, and the oracle
who passed on the functionalist gospel to his disciple Frank
Lloyd Wright, who carried it in turn
