Architecture and Democracy | Page 5

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.
The problem of the tall building, with which his predecessors dealt
always with trepidation and equivocation, Mr. Sullivan approached
with confidence and joy. "What," he asked himself, "is the chief
characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. This loftiness is to
the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It must be tall. The force of altitude
must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in
sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a dissenting
line." The Prudential (Guaranty) building in Buffalo represents the
finest concrete embodiment of his idea achieved by Mr. Sullivan. It
marks his emancipation from what he calls his "masonry" period,
during which he tried, like so many other architects before and since, to
make a steel-framed structure look as though it were nothing but a
masonry wall perforated with openings--openings too many and too
great not to endanger its stability. The keen blade of Mr. Sullivan's

mind cut through this contradiction, and in the Prudential building he
carried out the idea of a protective casing so successfully that
Montgomery Schuyler said of it, "I know of no steel framed building in
which the metallic construction is more palpably felt through the
envelope of baked clay."
[Illustration: PLATE III. THE PRUDENTIAL BUILDING, BUFFALO
N.Y.]
The present author can speak with all humbleness of the general failure,
on the part of the architectural profession, to appreciate the importance
of this achievement, for he pleads guilty of day after day having passed
the Prudential building, then fresh in the majesty of its soaring lines,
and in the wonder of its fire-wrought casing, with eyes and admiration
only for the false romanticism of the Erie County Savings Bank, and
the empty bombast of the gigantic Ellicott Square. He had not at that
period of his life succeeded in living down his architectural training,
and as a result the most ignorant layman was in a better position to
appraise the relative merits of these three so different incarnations of
the building impulse than was he.
Since the Prudential building there have been other tall office buildings,
by other hands, truthful in the main, less rigid, less monotonous, more
superficially pleasing, yet they somehow fail to impart the feeling of
utter sincerity and fresh originality inspired by this building. One feels
that here democracy has at last found utterance in beauty; the American
spirit speaks, the spirit of the Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk
is uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these rows on rows of
windows, regularly spaced, and all of the same size, suggest the
equality and monotony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing
shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and aspirations, and the
unobtrusive, delicate ornament which covers the whole with a garment
of fresh beauty is like the very texture of their dreams. The building is
able to speak thus powerfully to the imagination because its creator is a
poet and prophet of democracy. In his own chosen language he declares,
as Whitman did in verse, his faith in the people of "these states"--"A
Nation announcing itself." Others will doubtless follow who will make
a richer music, commensurate with the future's richer life, but such
democracy as is ours stands here proclaimed, just as such feudalism as
is still ours stands proclaimed in the Erie County Bank just across the

way. The massive rough stone walls of this building, its pointed