Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture

Famous for the “form follows function” credo and one of the most revered urban architects in history (known as the father of the skyscraper), Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) was the last of a special breed of urban designer—the ultimate American nonconformist, rejecting European classical teaching and eventually sacrificing everything for pure self-expression. In this documentary, filmmaker Mark Richard Smith follows a quasi–Ken Burns template, combining voiceover narration, drawings, photos, and footage of Sullivan's works throughout the Midwest and East Coast, with the camera panning slowly over ornamental details on landmarks such as the Auditorium Building in Chicago and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, NY. Interviews with assorted experts and preservationists provide a scholarly but accessible interpretation of Sullivan's historic significance, as Smith charts the college dropout's rise to the top of his profession by the zenith of the Gilded Age in 1890. Sullivan made the visually bland city of Chicago his personal canvas, more or less attempting to remake it in his own architectural image (along the way inspiring America's great modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright). But for all his ambition, the hard-headed Sullivan ended up dying a penniless drunk. Telling a story just as quintessentially American as the Horatio Alger myth—albeit its dark inverse—this long overdue and worthy tribute to one of America's most original and visionary visual artists is recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)