A House For Louis Sullivan

A HOUSE FOR LOUIS SULLIVAN

On April 14^th, this year, there will be 100 years since the great American architect Louis Sullivan died.

Sullivan was a giant of modern architecture, truly a seminal figure, very complex and with a power that didn’t try to escape fragility.

In a certain way, perhaps, Sullivan was more complex than F.L. Wright and this very complexity weakened him.

But he attempted to unite the opposites like very few architects did or do.

He is considered “the father of Modernism” and “the father of the skyscraper.”

These categorical classifications are problematic, of course, but a certain truth does exist in this case.

But Sullivan was paradoxical. This “father of modernism” was also the creator of an exalted ornamentation, a hallucinating love for the superfluity of ornament, he, the alleged author of “form follows function."

He was misunderstood in relation with this saying, which many attribute to him, but he attributed it to Vitruvius.

Could we consider the creator of this exuberant ornamentation a functionalist ? It depends what we mean by “function”… perhaps ornament has its “function” too… maybe the same function the “useless” beauty of the peacock’s tail has, which Ruskin praised as illustrating perfectly that the most beautiful things in the world are also the most useless.

So we invite you to pay homage to Louis Sullivan by imagining a house for him… a house that would unite the opposites, structure and ornament, order and disorder, rule and caprice, permanence and ephemerality.

NATURE & CULTURE.

The masculine principle and the feminine principle.

Don’t be afraid of fragility. Fragility has its own power, well intuited by Lao Tze.

A HOUSE FOR LOUIS SULLIVAN.

A house for our time.

A modernity without arrogance.

A fragile modernity.

As fragile and beautiful as the wings of the butterfly.

Or the lilies…

Louis Sullivan continues to teach us: a mysterious lesson, as mysterious and beautiful as that of The Book of Kells.

Please send us your work, digitally, to [email protected] by April 14^th, 2024. Please use one board format A1, oriented horizontally, or vertically. You have complete freedom to formulate your ideas. If you have any question, please contact us.

Thank you,