Architecture; Architecture -- United States; Decoration and ornament; Sullivan, Louis H., 1856-1924
For the most part though, there is a difference of intention between
the engineer and the designer; they look two ways, and the result of
their collaboration is a flat and confused image of the thing that
should be, not such as is produced by truly binocular vision. This
difference of aim is largely the result of a difference of education.
Engineering science of the sort which the use of steel has required is
a thing unprecedented; the engineer cannot hark back to the past for
help, even if he would. The case is different with the architectural
designer; he is taught that all of the best songs have been sung, all
of the true words spoken. The Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeur
that was Rome, the romantic exuberance of Gothic, and the ordered
restraint of Renaissance are so drummed into him during his years of
training, and exercise so tyrannical a spell over his imagination that
he loses the power of clear and logical thought, and never becomes
truly creative. Free of this incubus the engineer has succeeded in
being straightforward and sensible, to say the least; subject to it
the man with a so-called architectural education is too often tortuous
and absurd.
The architect without any training in the essentials of design
produces horrors as a matter of course, for the reason that sin is the
result of ignorance; the architect trained in the false manner of the
current schools becomes a reconstructive archæologist, handicapped by
conditions with which he can deal only imperfectly, and imperfectly
control. Once in a blue moon a man arises who, with all the advantages
inherent in education, pierces through the past to the present, and
is able to use his brain as the architects of the past used theirs--to
deal simply and directly with his immediate problem.
Such a man is Louis Sullivan, though it must be admitted that not
always has he achieved success. That success was so marked, however,
in his treatment of the problem of the tall building, and exercised
subconsciously such a spell upon the minds even of his critics and
detractors, that it resulted in the emancipation of this type of
building from an absurd and impossible convention--the practice,
common before his time, of piling order upon order, like a house
of cards, or by a succession of strongly marked string courses
emphasizing the horizontal dimension of a vertical edifice, thus
vitiating the finest effect of which such a building is capable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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