Rand's Debt to Louis Sullivan


Francisco Ferrer

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Today Roderick Long posts an interesting piece about Rand's debt to architect Louis Sullivan. Passages in The Fountainhead closely parallel passages in Sullivan's autobiography. Even a well known line in Atlas Shrugged about thinking and existence is traced to Sullivan.

This is not to suggest plagiarism or a failure to acknowledge sources (Rand saluted Sullivan in print and NBI used to sell his book). It is only to call attention to how another author's ideas were uniquely reworked in Rand's distinctive prose.

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Long is right, but one could take the parallels further, using Rand's letters and journals and some of what FLlWright (a Sullivan employee in his youth) had to say about Lieber Meister. For example, she may have gotten her philosophical interest in units as a result of studying Sullivan, as I observed several years ago.

Let us decide once and for all what is a unit and what is to be only a part of the unit, subordinated to it. A building is a unit — all else in it, such as sculpture, murals, ornaments, are parts of the unit and to be subordinated to the will of the architect, as creator of the unit... . As to the rules about this — my job of the future (Journals, p. 147.)

Wright recalled the invention of the skyscraper in strikingly similar terms. The historical Sullivan, like the fictional Cameron, was not the first to build a high-rise but rather the first to design one. Sullivan realized — in one of those astonishing breakthroughs that seem obvious once they have occurred to somebody else — that a tall building ought to look tall; it ought to be a single, emphatically vertical entity rather than look like a stack of separate masonry structures. Wright wrote:

There it was, in delicately penciled elevation. I stared at it and sensed what had happened. It was the Wainwright Building — and there was the very first human expression of a tall steel office building as architecture. It was tall and consistently so — a unit, where all before had been one cornice building on top of another cornice building (Kahn Lectures, Collected Writings v 3, p. 61).

Or, equivalently:

Until Louis Sullivan showed the way tall buildings never had unity. They were built up in layers. They were all fighting tallness instead of accepting it. What unity those false masses that pile up toward the New York and Chicago sky have now is due to the master mind that first perceived the tall building as a harmonious unit — its height triumphant. (Autobiography, p. 300.)

The story of Sullivan's being ruined professionally and driven to drink by the malign influence of the 1893 Columbian Exposition has been around for a long time. Wright was one who promulgated it, and Rand is one who believed it. Not everybody does, though. Robert Twombly’s biography suggests (more plausibly, I think) that Sullivan’s drinking was one of the factors that wrecked his career. Erik Larson, in The Devil in the White City, points out that Sullivan got along fine with the neoclassicists at the Exposition and even built one of the buildings (albeit not in the official style); he only started complaining after his decline was underway.

I've never read Autobiography of an Idea. My understanding is that it deals mainly with Sullivan's childhood. Thus Rand probably got her specifically architectural knowledge of him from other sources, including Wright.

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