Louis Sullivan

Chicago: the city that Louis Sullivan should have built. And now it turns out that what small parts of Chicago he did get to build are rapidly, and I think rather mysteriously, disappearing. This morning another Chicago Sullivan building burnt down. This is the third Sullivan building in Chicago to burn down in the past year. His house in Mississippi was destroyed by Katrina last September, adding up to a total of four Sullivan buildings that we have recently lost.

I don't know what to say except that three fires in a year is awfully coincidental. And this year is his 150th birthday, recently celebrated by the Chicago Historical Society. Some birthday present. I myself gave a talk yesterday that included a discussion of the right way to understand Sullivan's notion of the relationship between form and function (as opposed to Mies van der Rohe's understanding of this relationship). I assigned some pretty funny sections from Sullivan's "Kindergarten Chats" as background reading. I think it went pretty well.