Architecture and Democracy | Page 2

changed; so with precision have
their acts responsively changed; thus thoughts and acts have flowed and
are flowing ever onward, unceasingly onward, involved within the
impelling power of Life. Throughout this stream of human life, and
thought, and activity, men have ever felt the need to build; and from the
need arose the power to build. So, as they thought, they built; for,
strange as it may seem, they could build in no other way. As they built,
they made, used, and left behind them records of their thinking. Then,
as through the years new men came with changed thoughts, so arose
new buildings in consonance with the change of thought--the building
always the expression of the thinking. Whatever the character of the
thinking, just so was the character of the building.
What is Architecture? A Study in the American People of Today, by
LOUIS SULLIVAN.

Architecture and Democracy
I
BEFORE THE WAR
The world war represents not the triumph, but the birth of democracy.
The true ideal of democracy--the rule of a people by the demos, or
group soul--is a thing unrealized. How then is it possible to consider or
discuss an architecture of democracy--the shadow of a shade? It is not
possible to do so with any degree of finality, but by an intention of
consciousness upon this juxtaposition of ideas--architecture and
democracy--signs of the times may yield new meanings, relations may
emerge between things apparently unrelated, and the future, always
existent in every present moment, may be evoked by that strange magic
which resides in the human mind.
Architecture, at its worst as at its best, reflects always a true image of
the thing that produced it; a building is revealing even though it is false,
just as the face of a liar tells the thing his words endeavor to conceal.
This being so, let us make such architecture as is ours declare to us our

true estate.
The architecture of the United States, from the period of the Civil War,
up to the beginning of the present crisis, everywhere reflects a struggle
to be free of a vicious and depraved form of feudalism, grown strong
under the very ægis of democracy. The qualities that made feudalism
endeared and enduring; qualities written in beauty on the cathedral
cities of mediaeval Europe--faith, worship, loyalty, magnanimity--were
either vanished or banished from this pseudo-democratic, aridly
scientific feudalism, leaving an inheritance of strife and tyranny--a
strife grown mean, a tyranny grown prudent, but full of sinister power
the weight of which we have by no means ceased to feel.
Power, strangely mingled with timidity; ingenuity, frequently
misdirected; ugliness, the result of a false ideal of beauty--these in
general characterize the architecture of our immediate past; an
architecture "without ancestry or hope of posterity," an architecture
devoid of coherence or conviction; willing to lie, willing to steal. What
impression such a city as Chicago or Pittsburgh might have made upon
some denizen of those cathedral-crowned feudal cities of the past we do
not know. He would certainly have been amazed at its giant energy,
and probably revolted at its grimy dreariness. We are wont to pity the
mediaeval man for the dirt he lived in, even while smoke greys our sky
and dirt permeates the very air we breathe: we think of castles as grim
and cathedrals as dim, but they were beautiful and gay with color
compared with the grim, dim canyons of our city streets.
Lafcadio Hearn, in A Conservative, has sketched for us, with a
sympathy truly clairvoyant, the impression made by the cities of the
West upon the consciousness of a young Japanese samurai educated
under a feudalism not unlike that of the Middle Ages, wherein was
worship, reverence, poetry, loyalty--however strangely compounded
with the more sinister products of the feudal state.
Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to him,--a world of
giants; and that which depresses even the boldest Occidental who finds
himself, without means or friends, alone in a great city, must often have
depressed the Oriental exile: that vague uneasiness aroused by the
sense of being invisible to hurrying millions; by the ceaseless roar of
traffic drowning voices; by monstrosities of architecture without a soul;
by the dynamic display of wealth forcing mind and hand, as mere cheap

machinery, to the uttermost limits of the possible. Perhaps he saw such
cities as Doré saw London: sullen majesty of arched glooms, and
granite deeps opening into granite deeps beyond range of vision, and
mountains of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and
monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power
slow-gathering through centuries. Of beauty there was nothing to make
appeal to him between those endless cliffs of stone which walled out
the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the wind.