Form Follows Function
I just read an interesting article:
"The tragic tale of Louis Sullivan"
http://www.suntimes.com/output/entertainment/sho-sunday-sullivan03.html
Kevin Nance
Chicago Sun Times
2006.09.03
The paragraph that brought the piece to my attention was this:
Whatever his sexuality, it's clear he subscribed to a philosophical binary put forth by the 18th century writer Emanuel Swedenborg, who posited types of creativity as male or female. In this way of thinking, the rational, logical aspects of architecture -- which is to say structure -- were masculine; the emotional, intuitive impulses behind Sullivan's ornament were feminine. For him, structural matters were secondary, leading him to produce buildings that were ever more elaborately encrusted with his signature ornament, much of it derived from flowers.
Louis Henri Sullivan was a famous architect. Frank Lloyd Wright was his protege. According to wikipedia, the extremely well-known phrase "form follows function" was first coined by sculptor Horatio Greenough. It was only after Sullivan adopted it that it became a mainstream aphorism. Interesting, given that Sullivan was at least a Swedenborgian, if not also a New Christian.
The references to his sexuality, by the way, stem from a new book that seems to be just one more in a long line of revisionist histories claiming to have spotted yet one more famous crypto-homosexual. I'm not prepared to comment on the merits of this particular case, but experience has taught me to take such claims with more than a grain of salt when they are not backed up by clear documentary evidence.
Anyway, Sullivan's "arch nemesis" apparently, was architect Daniel Hudson Burnham. Now this gets me to wondering, given the "family business" nature of the New Church in America: Burnham is an "old church name", and there are, for that matter, Sullivans in the church as well; is there any connection between the Sullivan and Burnham of the architectural world of a hundred years ago and the modern Sullivan and Burnham families in the church today?