From Louis Sullivan, Prophet of Modern Architecture by Hugh Morrison, 1935
[T]he Roman Classic style, executed in plaster and staff on
temporary wood and steel frameworks, with the exteriors all of a pure and
chaste white, was agreed upon for all the major buildings. The disposition of
the buildings was determined along major axial lines, formally symmetrical, and
affording vistas along lagoons, the whole tied together by a uniform cornice
line at a height of sixty feet.
New-York Daily Tribune, October 22, 1893
The wonderful group of buildings, with their marvelous,
beautiful surroundings of land and water, created as if by magic, cannot
adequately be described or portrayed by either pen or pencil. The eminent
architects and artists to whom all this is due laid under tribute the
traditions and models of historic art, and all the ripe experience of the
distant and the past were combined with the present to form the most beautiful
and remarkable collection of architectural monuments that this world has ever
witnessed.
—Charles S. Smith, president of the New York Chamber of Commerce
—Charles S. Smith, president of the New York Chamber of Commerce
From The Autobiography of an Idea by Louis Sullivan, 1924
The crowds were astonished. They
beheld what was for them an amazing revelation of the architectural art, of
which previously they in comparison had known nothing. To them it was a
veritable Apocalypse, a message inspired from on high. Upon it their
imagination shaped new ideals. They went away, spreading again over the land,
returning to their homes, each one of them carrying in his soul the shadow of the
white cloud, each of them permeated by the most subtle and slow-acting of
poisons; an imperceptible miasm within the white shadow of a higher culture. .
. . The virus of the World’s Fair, after a period of incubation in the
architectural profession and in the population at large, especially the
influential, began to show unmistakable signs of the nature of the contagion.
There came a violent outbreak of the Classic and the Renaissance in the East,
which slowly spread westward, contaminating all that it touched, both at its
source and outward. . . .
The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated deep into the constitution of the American mind, effecting there lesions significant of dementia.
The damage wrought by the World’s Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated deep into the constitution of the American mind, effecting there lesions significant of dementia.
André Bouilhet, commissioner of the Central Union of Decorative Arts in Paris, 1894
It is a great city of palaces the architecture of which
awakens no novel sensations in Europeans for we find here again more or less
accomplished imitations of the monuments of Greece and Rome. With its domes,
with its colonnades, its porticoes, its terraces, its gardens filled with
statues, one might think he was looking at the realization of the dream of a
young architect in quest of a magnificent projet
which might open to him the portals of the Villa Medici. Only one of these
palaces, which struck me the first time that I entered Jackson Park, is truly
original; it is the work of a young American architect . . . Mr. Sullivan. I
refer to the Transportation Building. It is one of the most successful and
original buildings, well conceived and of fine proportions; and it has the
special merit of recalling no European building.