| © samantha krukowski Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats[or] Form really does follow Function 1993 |
This essay proposes an examination of Louis Sullivan's
Kindergarten Chats on a number of levels. First, as a text in and
of itself with an identifiable agenda, second as a "treatise"
about architecture, and third, as a title. My investigation entails a
close analysis of the text and of issues which spring directly from it.
While I have consulted both secondary sources and other texts by Sullivan
and related them to Kindergarten Chats, I am most interested in
how the text itself generates questions and in what order it does so.
There is no need here to repeat the work of a myriad of scholars who have
taken Sullivan as their subject and who have discussed, in a detailed
manner, his ideas and their probable sources, his architecture and its
particular characteristics, and his biography. Kindergarten Chats
is in effect, an index of all of these things, and a careful reading clarifies
how its structure is representative of them. My approach privileges a
"subjective" reading of Sullivan (if any approach can actually
be called objective) and it calls into question or refuses what might
be named "literal" interpretations of Sullivan's writing. By
proceeding in this manner, Kindergarten Chats can be regarded not
only as a text-in-history but also as a text-in-present which invites
(without a specified context) current perusal and response. This response
is not entirely guided by the content or progression of Sullivan's text,
nor is it necessarily related to the status of his voice as author and
that voice's ability to determine the text's reception. Barthes does not support either type of critical investigation in this essay, but more importantly he indicates that both of them are based on a "theme of authority": The author, it is believed, has certain rights over the reader, he constrains him to a certain meaning of the work, and this meaning is of course the right one, the real meaning: whence a critical morality of the right meaning (and of its defect, "misreading"): we try to establish what the author meant, and not at all what the reader understands.2 Barthes questions the degree that any authorial voice should be understood to constitute the sole meaning of a work. He demonstrates that texts are not objective and transparent containers and suggests that their character can be determined by the manner in which they are read. Content can thus be regarded as a subjective textual quantity and not the objective or factual one that is often assumed by readers or critics. This subjectivity constitutes the ideal text for Barthes which he labels "plural" in S/Z: In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritively declared to be the main one...3 For Barthes, texts exist on a scale of plurality. The more dogmatic, pointed and directed they appear, the less they seem to allow for the various readings that will, in the end, construct them anyway. No text can dictate a singular reading from all of its readers because of the infinite experiences and approaches that each reader brings to a text, but also because of the infinity of language. Barthes' comments can be brought to bear on any textual exploration, and in this case, on that of Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats. The structure of Sullivan's text is so obviously and specifically rigged to direct the reader in a particular way (it tries to offer the reader a specific map of meaning) that it paradoxically insists upon digressions. Kindergarten Chats is an uncomfortable read: it cannot be consumed like a cheap novel because of its verbosity, it cannot be followed smoothly because it is broken into fragments, it does not tell one story but is a consolidated multitude of ideas that may only seem to belong together because they are thus bound. Sullivan's ideas are not only repeated throughout Kindergarten Chats, but they appear ad infinitum in most of Sullivan's other written works as well. These themes, which often appear as dualities like democracy-feudalism, individualism-capitalism, education-childhood, poetry-dogmatism, are both part of Sullivan's standard repertoire and exemplars of late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates and concerns. Their character in Kindergarten Chats is affected by the author's evident dogmatism and self-consciousness, both of which place the curious reader in the advantageous position of wanting to leave the book while traveling beside it. Sullivan means for the text to be a working representation of its content but its program hardly works in such a monologic manner. The book's curriculum should be scrutinized not only in terms of how it presents itself, but more generally in terms of whether such an agenda is useful or believable in the form in which it is cast. To put this another way, it would seem prudent to notice the effects of the trip Sullivan offers as well as the things that he says. The standard microscopic and telescopic critical techniques to which Barthes refers have been commonly applied to Sullivan and his work, and they serve only as one type of guide here in my analysis of Kindergarten Chats. Kindergarten Chats was originally conceived as fifty-two separate articles that appeared weekly in the Interstate Architect and Builder from February 16, 1901 to February 8, 1902. Despite Sullivan's extensive revisions to these articles from June to October, 1918 and his evident desire to have them published in book form during his lifetime, Kindergarten Chats was not published as a single volume until 1934, ten years after Sullivan's death. For the purposes of this study, it was not possible to locate a copy of the 1934 edition which was edited by Claude Bragdon, nor was it possible to access the articles published serially in the Interstate Architect and Builder. According to Isabella Athey, the editor of the most recent edition of 1979, "the first version published serially in 1901 is available only in a few obscure files, and that edited by Claude Bragdon in 1934 is out of print."4 It is unfortunate that such items are not available, for the 1979 edition is based on Sullivan's carefully revised text of 1918 and not on the articles as they first appeared. While Athey contends that her edition, because it is based on Sullivan's revisions, "represents (their) definitive form"5, she also says that when Sullivan judiciously edited the work, "many words, phrases and sentences expressing emotion strong enough to convey prejudice (rather than conviction) (were) either cut or modified so as not to deflect the force of rational and organic exposition."6 Athey's editorial desire to position her text as the original bypasses any consideration of what may have been lost by not being able to access the articles from the Interstate Architect and Builder.7 Sullivan was hardly at the pinnacle of his success in 1918, and his revisions could have been strongly related to his career decline. Sullivan might have done anything to have Kindergarten Chats published, including omitting any passages that could have seemed particularly overbearing or unacceptable. At any rate, while it is clear that the 1979 edition of Kindergarten Chats can tell us much about what Sullivan had to say, the articles from 1901 would have been an interesting source for locating the prejudices that Athey contends were rightly omitted. Sullivan's edited version of Kindergarten Chats is constructed as a dialogue between a teacher (who appears to be Sullivan) and an unnamed architectural student who has come to him for a post-graduate course. A number of Sullivan's biographers have indicated that Sullivan modeled this teacher after Moses Woolson, Sullivan's teacher at The Boston English High School, and John Edelmann, the foreman at the office of William Le Baron Jenney where Sullivan was first employed in 1873.8 Woolson apparently provided Sullivan with discipline9 (as the teacher in Kindergarten Chats does this for his student) and Edelmann introduced Sullivan to subjects as diverse as philosophy, psychology and social theory10 (as the teacher in Kindergarten Chats broadens his student's knowledge base.) Kindergarten Chats is nearly a two-hundred page conversation which is divided into fifty-two "chats" or chapters, reflecting the original format of the work. Sullivan's choice of a dialogue form did more than serve the purposes of presentation for the Interstate Architect and Builder. There is some speculation that the text's dialogic method could have been inspired by Sullivan's late-night conversations between 1888 and 1893 with Frank Lloyd Wright, to whom the essays may be indirectly addressed.11 Additionally, Narciso Menocal points out that Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc published a novelistic treatise in 1879 entitled Histoire d'un Dessinateur that may have influenced Sullivan.12 Viollet-Le-Duc's book focused on the education of a young architect, and he, like Sullivan, invented a teacher (Monsieur Majorin) and a student (Petit Jean) to narrate the work. Menocal recalls that by the end of Viollet-Le-Duc's treatise, Petit Jean becomes a superb designer; he has been taught how to think logically and how to search always for the relation between cause and effect. His creations are useful as well as beautiful. He understands the workings of each part in relation to the whole, and gives each the proper expression demanded by its function.13 The evolution that Petit Jean experiences is very similar to that of Sullivan's student in Kindergarten Chats. While Menocal clarifies that Viollet-Le-Duc's interests differ markedly from Sullivan's, and that his ideas were shaped by a more scientific and positivistic context, both the format and some of the content of Viollet-Le-Duc's writing provides a convincing precedent for Kindergarten Chats and some of its themes. It is worthwhile to consider not only how Sullivan arrived at this dialogue form but also how he employs it in his text. A dialogue is, first of all, a form of common, sometimes mutual, linguistic exchange. Conversations between people can be heard almost everywhere; people do not have to go to special places to have conversations. While there are assuredly private and exclusive conversations, dialogues have a populist quality; they are a form with which most people are familiar and which most people can employ in order to communicate. One does not need to be a specific kind of person to enjoy casual discourse. Sullivan uses a dialogic structure to underscore the democratic nature of his text. The intended audience for Kindergarten Chats was, perhaps unexpectedly, not an architectural one. Instead, Sullivan conceived of his writing as directed towards "the common man," a phrase he repeats and infers throughout. Sullivan clarifies in his letters that "It is among the people that we want to work"14 (emphasis his) and asks his editor to "try to spread (the "Kindergarten Chats") as far as you can among the laity, for they will be free from technicalities. I am writing for the people, not for architects."15 Sullivan may have wanted to write a book that would appeal to a wide audience, but his desire to reach "the people" may also be linked to his seeming inability to influence architects or architecture towards the end of his life. Additionally, the early twentieth century was rife with this kind of attitude that almost always indicated an oppositional stance towards authority, institutions and capitalism. Secondly, dialogues are characterized by an informal quality in that they reflect the pauses and rhythms of spoken thought. They seem spontaneous in comparison to the prepared and presentational character of a speech, lecture or structured piece of writing. Dialogues also have a particular developmental nature. Rather than proceeding in a coherent and systematic progression, they often work in a circular manner. Poignant ideas and images are often repeated. Observations and realizations change when spoken out loud. They gain a testing ground in which to expand or contract, steep or leak, sidestep or turn around. Those who allow their reflections flexibility in conversations are usually termed open-minded, for they are willing to share their beliefs but also offer them up for inspection and/or modification. I do not mean to suggest by these observations that Sullivan's text is impromptu in nature because it is in the form of a conversation--as I have noted, its structure is quite deliberate. What I mean to infer is that Sullivan uses the dialogue form with an understanding of the machinations of conversation. Kindergarten Chats is not only a dialogue in that it is a discussion between a teacher and his imaginary student, or between Sullivan and his audience. It is a dialogue in that it does what dialogues do. The prose changes form, moving from the jocular to the pedantic to the poetic (and sometimes badly poetic.) The ideological repetition previously mentioined is mirrored by a stylistic one that can make an examination of the text tedious and frustrating. Kindergarten Chats is not the kind of book that can be read in a single sitting, nor was it meant to be. The "chats" are arranged as separate parts of a whole: Small conversations that occur at different moments over an extended period of time, but which reflect back on eachother and in that reflection contribute to a larger narrative project.16 A third characteristic of dialogues is that they are invested with a certain kind of authenticity. They depend on people talking, and the more believable the characters having the conversation are, the more believable or truthful the conversation and its content is. Novelists often use dialogues to punctuate, emphasize and bring to the present narratives that are otherwise told in the passive voice. Writers make this technique even more effective when they invent a dialogue between historical or recognizable characters whose names carry the weight of certain attitudes or actions (as in the Realist novels of the late nineteenth century). Sullivan has capitalized on the dialogue's ability to lend authority to the content of his text. He presents his readers with a narrative between a teacher (whose voice is easily assumed to be his own since he puts no distance between himself as author and narrator) and a student. We are thus not presented with an unnamed professor of architecture or someone who is merely interested in architecture, but with someone who speaks if not as Sullivan himself, than with the weight of his words. In addition, the nature of the exhange is believable. It could easily have occurred during Sullivan's lifetime, and because of this possibility there is a tendency to see Kindergarten Chats as a record of actual events rather than a scrupulously edited fiction. As unassuming readers, we delve into the text in order to learn from Sullivan and the dialogue form not only gives us Sullivan's ideas as if he is speaking directly to us, it places us in the same position as his unnamed student. There is thus a curious distortion and dehistoricization that Sullivan would have hoped for in any reading of Kindergarten Chats, a displacement that places Sullivan in the very room where we read with his student next to us. As readers, we are meant to learn from Sullivan's teaching and from his student's mistakes (which are one and the same) and thus we should become the real object of his attention. Sullivan's construction of the teacher-student relationship is premised on a metaphorical extension: Sullivan wants to teach the world, and in this sense his book is a utopian call-to-arms. Sullivan was overly idealistic about the possible influence and reception of Kindergarten Chats. Not only did Kindergarten Chats never see publication as a volume during Sullivan's lifetime, its early publication in the Interstate Architect and Builder garnered little recognition. Robert Twombly, one of Sullivan's biographers, indicates that Sullivan was so energized by the thought of writing for the general public that he finished twenty-seven of the chats in only two months. Despite these efforts, Twombly reports that: Very little was said in the contemporary press...that generally treated him kindly. Only one reader wrote in, to complain that Sullivan was too hard on architects. Even his league supporters took little notice.17 Quoting historian Sherman Paul, Twombly goes on to say: What might have been the educational manual of the League and a genuine primer on architecture and society," Sherman Paul concluded, "had for the most part gone unnoticed...Sullivan was hurt. 'I am amazed to note how insignificant...is the effect produced in comparison to the cost, in vitality, to me,' he wrote...'I shall never again make so great a sacrifice for the younger generation'.18 Sullivan's optimism about his text's reception was apparently misguided. When Sullivan wrote for the Interstate Architect and Builder, Narciso Menocal points out that it was a recent and relatively unknown journal with a limited audience. He writes that Sullivan's decision to publish Kindergarten Chats in this periodical was (a) mistake. The weekly was only one year old when Sullivan began writing for it...Furthermore, it circulated mostly among people primarily interested in the technical problems of construction...whose concern with esthetics and philosophy in general was limited.19 Sullivan may have considered his writing a heroic, necessary and candid
discussion with the potential to transform his audience, but he failed
to procure for it the possibility of widespread dissemination. This failure
is probably as indicative of Sullivan as the book's content, and Menocal
supposes that Sullivan's Sullivan's delusion seems somewhat uncharacteristic of the man his biographers have portrayed, someone who "was at his best on formal occasions, for which he prepared laboriously, and in...encounters when he controlled the situation or knew exactly what to expect."21 It would seem that this detail-oriented individual, especially given his publishing record and previous architectural successes, could have prepared the path for Kindergarten Chats with more political finesse. That he did not or could not do so underscores the evidence that Sullivan's miscalculation about the text's importance extends beyond his hopes for its public success to its content and the way that it has been or continues to be read. Kindergarten Chats is Sullivan's serious attempt to address educational,
societal and architectural reform. The text is most assuredly about architecture,
but it treats architecture as a part of a much larger framework. Sullivan
never understood architecture to be something that could be discussed
in and of itself. Instead of investigating architecture from an iconoclastic
viewpoint, Sullivan clarifies that I would argue that Kindergarten Chats attempts to be the epitomy
of the deceptively simple phrase "form follows function" with
which Sullivan is almost always associated. It is formally structured
to educate, but also to represent a certain kind of education. The book
is a kind of building for Sullivan, its form (a teaching dialogue) does
follow its function (to teach) and at the same time it represents Sullivan
himself. By comparing the text's method to Sullivan's description of a
successful building, the relationship between his building and writing
philsophies may be made clear. Sullivan indicates that a good building
will physically dictate its function. It will describe what it houses
and what it is used for. The building will also represent its maker and
act as a sign of that architect's character and vision. Sullivan writes: What Sullivan expects from a building he creates in Kindergarten Chats. It is a representation of Sullivan's courage, for he is calling for serious reforms on a national, if not an international level. It is evidence, too, that Sullivan has something to say, even at a time when he might have been forgotten by his peers and his profession. That Sullivan has carefully constructed the text to symbolize "form follows function" is not surprising, especially since he is sometimes considered equivalent to this phrase and apparently liked the identification. Sherman Paul noted that Sullivan took the term and virtually "arrogated (it) to himself."25 It is probable, even, that all of Sullivan's judicious editing of Kindergarten Chats was based on his desire to make the book conform, as specifically as possible, to the phrase which identified him and with which he identified himself. The structure of Kindergarten Chats has not really been considered
in an analogical relationship to Sullivan's building method. Most writers
who have commented on it have done so systematically and have been mostly
interested in how it relates his specific ideas or how it can be compared
to Sullivan's milieu. This oversight may be due in part to the fact that
"form follows function" has been arrogated to describing Sullivan's
architectural, and not his written, endeavors. But the phrase has been
generally misunderstood on other levels, in terms of its complexity and
historicity. Sherman Paul indicates that "form follows function"
was "the common property of the Chicago School," and that it
was part of an organic tradition in American architecture that was championed
by the spokesmen of the Western Association of Architects.26 In more formal
terms, Hugh Morrison has carefully pointed out that the message of "form
follows function" is more complex than it sounds. He argues that
first, it means that "architectural form will express the purpose
of the building which it clothes"27 and second that "architectural
form will express the structural nature of a building".28 These theses
then suggest that "architecture should be first of all honest and
truthful."29 But Morrison quickly demonstrates that these deductions
are limited by questioning the terms by which they are constructed. He
clarifies that as far as use-value is concerned, a building is certainly
"more than 'a machine to live in'," and says that to Sullivan
"'function' meant...the whole life that would go on in a building."30
Additionally, Morrison argues, Sullivan's concern for structure should
not be understood only in physical terms, since it also "has imaginative
and emotional qualities."31 Morrison sums his argument up when he
notes that With "form follows function" in mind, it is easier to understand that Kindergarten Chats itself can be seen as a building, and that the student within it is in the process of being built (educated) so that his form will eventually express his function. The student undergoes an evolution that is laced with metaphors of nature and organic growth. The development of the student determines the development of the book. Certainly it was Sullivan's hope that the text be understood in its structure as a gradual elaboration. In a letter to a friend and editor, he warned "Don't let a certain flippancy of treatment mislead you...The key to (the "Kindergarten Chats"), you will find, (is that) the development proceeds, slowly but elaborately,--in the development of the character and artistic nature of the young man, from within (emphasis his)."33 Sullivan sees the student's education as equivalent to a method of building, beginning with the internal structure and working outward. At the beginning of the text, the student is presented as dependent on his teacher to reveal information and ideas, and he is rebellious and indignant. As the text proceeds, the student gains independence: he begins to think for himself and reflect on the experiences to which he is exposed. He gains a sense of himself and of the world around him through visual and verbal exposure, and is gradually better able to make judgements towards which his teacher no longer leads him. He learns mostly through confrontation: he must face up to his own visual and intellectual assumptions. While some of his education takes place in cities and involves an experiential examination of architecture, the student undergoes the most severe transformations when he is exposed to nature. The student's educational evolution is revealed, in part, in the way the teacher and student address eachother throughout the text. In the early chapters, the teacher's comments range from the merely corrective to the absolutely denigrating. The student has an "untrained, untried judgment (and a) too-confiding, cocksure nature,"34 is "assive, priggified and a simpleton"35 and referred to often as "my son"36 and told "steady, boy, steady"37 when he asks questions too hastily. When the student challenges the tenor of this methodology, saying for example "because I could not at once follow, you said unkind things"38, his teacher continues to dismiss him and says his knowledge is "an obnoxious minus quantity."39 As the book progresses, the nature of this exchange changes. The student's words begin to take up more space, and his teacher allows for them. The student begins to call his teacher "Papa"40, "Uncle"41, "daddy"42 and "my prophet and philosopher."43 He begins to sound like him, repeating things that he has learned in a different and more poetic language. And they begin to joke with eachother in a good-natured way, the student asking at one point "do I not sing like a robust bird?" and his teacher answering "you sing like a capon, if such, indeed, be a bird" to which the student replies good-naturedly "oh, fie upon you! Such a snarling mood for such a gracious morn! Unsour yourself, kind friend...".44 It becomes apparent that education is, to Sullivan, the guiding force behind the possibility that form can follow function at all. Kindergarten Chats shows how the student (i.e. the individual) is gradually brought to a state of enlightenment by questioning what he has been taught and forming a new vision based on personal experience and introspection. This newly informed person will go on to influence society in a positive way, and since in Kindergarten Chats the student is to be an architect, society will first be influenced by and benefit from his architecture. Throughout Kindergarten Chats, Sullivan emphasizes this process of education when he has the teacher tell his student that everything he is teaching him, he already knows. Sullivan assigns the teacher the role of stripping away whatever educational debris has clouded the "true" mind of his student in order to rediscover his "natural" intelligence and abilities. The teacher clarifies his reasons for undertaking the task: Indeed, the fact that under your fair exterior I saw shriveled faculties, led me to take up with you and see what could be done. I have scarcely said a word to you from the beginning of our talks, with the exception of a few fine-spun philosophizings, that you should not have been able to say to me, or to anyone else, had you been properly and righteously watched, warded and trained at your school, instead of being filled with architectural piffle. And even what little I have said, and it is or should be elementary in any true theory of the architectural art, you have received in a semi-obscurity of mind. And this, as I have told you before, is not your fault, for anyone can see that you are naturally bright and apt; it is your misfortune...The appalling lack of the hour is true education: education that will make men--men to the heart!45 Sullivan's belief in a fundamental, inborn state of intellectual receptivity privileges nature over nurture and the individual over society. In essence, any individual left unfettered by a standard education can succeed because they can draw on their natural resources. And when individuals take advantage of their natural abilities, society (and particularly democratic society) benefits. Interestingly, when Sullivan argues that there are basics in architecture or other subjects that are "elementary," he advances a peculiar relativism that can be understood to actually standardize individuals--each person is born with a similar native intelligence that is either fostered or squelched by external circumstances. Sullivan's romanticism and his belief in a privileged educational state-of-nature is even more obvious when he idealizes the mind of the child, which to him represents the mind in its most receptive state. In a particularly poetic passage, Sullivan literally juxtaposes the processes of nature and the activities of the child's mind. He questions: Fairy tales are of the very bloom of the heart. Why does not the heart bloom every day? Why is this ethereal charm found only in children's tales? Why the Sleeping Beauty, why Prince Charming? Why do we call these things childish? Why are we ashamed of the best, the truest, the sweetest, the loftiest in us? Why do we relegate these things to children? Why are we the reverse of tulips? Why do we flower so wondrously in childhood, and then, as the years pass, turn dull and inglorious?46 It is the children who best inhabit the natural world to Sullivan, who
react to their experiences with delight and wonder, who express themselves
freely and who stop to learn what they do not know. At the time of Sullivan's writing, the kindergarten as an institution was still a relatively novel venture. The term "kindergarten", or "child's garden", was coined in the 1840's in Germany by the educational reformer Friedrich Froebel.50 It was not until the late 1860's that the first kindergartens appeared in the United States, and despite their arrival, there was not a rapid or immediate dissemination of Froebel's ideas. Two large scale public events popularized kindergartens and the work of educational reformers in the late 19th century: The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 exhibited five separate kindergarten displays, one of which included Froebelian teaching aids, and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago provided an educational forum for those interested in the kindergarten and educational reform in general. It is not clear whether Sullivan actually attended either exposition or any of the forums or conferences which they inspired. Sullivan may actually have been introduced to Froebel through Frank Lloyd Wright, for one of the visitors most interested in the kindergarten displays at the Philadelphia Exposition was his mother, Anna Wright. Mrs. Wright apparently taught her children at home in the Froebelian method. As Frank Lloyd Wright later remembered, "Mother would go to Boston, take lessons of a teacher of the Froebel method and come home to teach the children...what shapes they made naturally if only you would let them."51 From this short commentary it is evident that Wright extolled the unhindered imagination of children and the Froebelian method, and it is possible that Sullivan was influenced by Wright's attitudes and experience. What is perhaps most important to understand is not exactly how Sullivan learned of the kindergarten, but that the late 1800's witnessed a general growth of interest in and discusion of educational methods to which Sullivan must have been at least popularly if not specifically exposed. Sullivan contrasts the kindergarten with his understanding and condemnation of higher educational practices, especially those of architectural schools. He writes: I am not tolerant of that artistocratic spirit which misdirects American youth in its search for knowledge--and would seek to impose upon it those formulas of learning and attitudes of mind toward learning which have descended to us from times when education was for the "gentleman"--for the few, for a class: that "education" which separates one from his people by the violence of its badge of alienation and uselessness.52 Sullivan insists that education is burdened by a lack of flexibility and innovation. It does not take into account the individuals it is supposed to serve, and it teaches them formulas that close, rather than open their minds. Additionally, education is directed at the privileged classes and is historically bound by the image of the educated "gentleman" who has been taught an array of requisite facts and skills. There is nothing creative in institutionalized education to Sullivan: it shuts down the individual and creates a predictable clone. It is in Sullivan's description of architectural schools that he decries the educational system in specific terms. In the same way that he understands education to warp society, Sullivan believes that architectural education breaks the spirit and potential of architects-in-training. These architects then proceed to build buildings devoid of any vision they might have once had. Sullivan rails: If an institution whatsoever were to receive healthy lads, and after four years of "care," return them mentally and physically crippled, broken-winded, weak-hearted and infected, there would be a hue and cry. And why? Because we could easily see, easily understand. It would speak at once to the heart, to the intelligence. It would be everybody's business; it would create popular clamor. But, when precisely such young men are taken in by an institution, so-called of learning, a so-called school of architecture, and, in four years, are turned out of it mentally dislocated, with vision obscured, hearts atrophied and perverted sensibilities--who cares! And why? Because it is not easily seen. The social consequences are not obvious. It is nobody's business--but ours.53 Sullivan takes this last line seriously, for Kindergarten Chats is an educational manifesto which makes obvious the social consequences of training architects improperly. By taking on a student who has been perverted by his architectural training, Sullivan's invented teacher literally demonstrates how his method can undo the damage caused by institutions. To Sullivan, those appointed as professors (as opposed to his invented teacher) cannot really teach because they are enmeshed in the machinations of institutional education. They are ignorant of their surroundings, unaware of their origins and oblivious to their senses. They have no interest in the capabilities of their students, but insist on demonstrating their own. They are bound to a lineage of professors and professorial activity, and do nothing to escape it: This professor had his professor, and that professor his, and before him that professor his, and on and on backwards in a thin, singlefoot line, to the pettifoggers of the Middle Ages, the men who knew nought of reality and cared less. These old-timers hated the light, they hated Nature that makes the light, they hated freedom, they worshipped rule and precept, they loved in their cadaverous way the schoolroom and distrusted the world. Yet, in justice, let me say a word for your professor: To break his bondage is not easy for him, for scholasticism becomes a habit of mind so fixed as to become an addiction, and is eventually believed to be a virtue. Moreover, the said professor is, by force of tradition and custom, shut out from the world's activities. They are to him non-essentials...He is steeped in the formularies and the disdains of intellectual aristocracy, and, through the easy process of denial, Democracy, for him, does not exist.54 Here, Sullivan makes his case for an education unbounded by walls or by traditional minds. Anyone who hopes to truly learn will not find their education bottled and presented in a given room, but will have to search within and outside of themselves for it. Perhaps one of the greatest influences on Kindergarten Chats, and one that emphasizes the role of democracy and of nature, is Walt Whitman. When Sullivan's teacher first describes how the student will be taught, he makes reference to Whitman: The 'good gray poet' says: 'Nature neither hastens nor delays.' So let us neither hasten nor delay, but go forward little by little, step by step. I shall not seek to instruct you or reconstruct you. I shall seek, only to persuade the faculties which nature gave you at birth, and which, now, are partly shriveled, to revivify, to send out new roots, to grow, to expand, and to bring forth as nature intended.55 This allusion to Whitman is not made merely in passing. This step-by-step process that is revealed in Kindergarten Chats is very deliberately staged to represent the changes in seasons that Whitman so eloquently described. Sullivan's student must suffer through the hardship of winter in order to rejoice and find a kind of transformation by the time spring arrives. The style of Sullivan's writing certainly owes much to Whitman.56 Even the basis (and perhaps the final form) of his architecture has been understood in Whitmanesque terms. Indeed, Sherman Paul sees Sullivan's architecture and some of his ideas as the embodiment of Whitman's poetry when he writes everything (Sullivan) wrote from the time of "Inspiration," (at age 30) and much that he built, is an elaboration and enrichment of Whitman's gospel, transmitted with renewed vitality in the utterance of word and stone...at the close of his life, when he told the story of his quest, Sullivan had become the child who went forth every day and who, in manhood, had widened the democratic vista.57 Sullivan was a great fan of Whitman's and in 1887 he went so far as to send the poet a copy of "Inspiration" which he had read at a meeting of the Western Association of Architects in November of 1886. The letter that accompanied his poem was overflowing with praise; Sullivan told Whitman that the poet had "entered (his) soul...and never (would) depart."58 There are numerous incidents in Sullivan's own life which can explain, at least in part, his ideas about education and some of the paradoxes that exist within them. Sullivan reveals himself as enmeshed in the particularly modernist paradox of decrying the very experiences which formed him. Sherman Paul has pointed out that Sullivan's distaste for higher learning did not always show itself in his own career choices. For example, Paul notes that in The Autobiography of an Idea, Sullivan gloats over his success at passing the entrance examinations for the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1874. "No other portion of The Autobiography is so heady," Paul writes, "none so apparently without reticence."59 Yet Paul notes that Sullivan does not discuss the length of his stay at the Ecole in The Autobiography, and it turns out that he only stayed for one term. Paul concludes that "for an architect who had ridiculed academic training, such an admission would have weakened his position...instead, he fills the chapter with an account of his own self-education."60 While Sullivan may have been academically trained and avoided speaking about that influence as positive, he almost always reflects on his experiences in nature and in the country as formative ones. Sullivan's early childhood was split between various cities and his grandparents' farm. This vacillation inspired in Sullivan a love of nature and a distaste for cities, and his belief in the teaching power of nature led him to conclude that he was not corrupted by his Beaux Arts education because he had not started there: The School did not give me my start. My real start was made, when, as a very young child living much out of doors, I received impressions from the shifting aspects of nature so deep, so penetrating, that they have persisted to this day....Hence I entered the school with a certain fixed mental attitude...and with a certain vague consciousness and will that someday I must inevitably express myself in my own way...61 Sullivan presents himself as someone who has been able to avoid or undo the corrupting influences he perceives in education. His romantic (and strangely undemocratic) educational philosophy is based in his belief that everyone has the ability to do this, an idea that sounds less egalitarian than inspired by the work ethic of the American Republican party. Kindergarten Chats is evidently not only an example of Sullivan's
dedication. The voices in Kindergarten Chats are many, so many
that Sullivan's work appears either as a brilliant synthesis or a plagiarized
collage. Sherman Paul devoted an entire text to tracing the origins of
Sullivan's ideas and is careful to point out certain relationships: he
finds Walt Whitman in Sullivan's poetic style and his belief in the importance
of childhood, Henry David Thoreau in Sullivan's insistence on the importance
of nature and his nature-laden metaphors, Hippolyte Taine in Sullivan's
belief that art reflects the life of a people, Friedrich Nietzsche in
Sullivan's adoration of Michelangelo.62 Paul's text should be faulted
for its lack of analysis in describing these relationships, however. In
many instances he is content to juxtapose a passage from Walt Whitman
with a formally similar passage by Sullivan without any comentary; he
is apparently comfortable with leaving the quotes to speak for themselves.
This backdrop of other voices has been understood as a framework for Sullivan's
place in history. The voices act as a shadowbox which serves as a locator
for an architect and writer who was underappreciated in his time. Hugh
Morrison is an avid Sullivan fan who acknowledges that even though "it
might be argued that no essential point of Sullivan's theory was entirely
new; every one of his ideas had already been expressed" and who insists
that "no one before him had tied them together into a consistent
system of thinking. Sullivan was probably the first man of his times to
set forth both by precept and by example the clear outlines of a new philosophy
and a new art of building."63 Morrison comes to Sullivan as a defending
biographer, and the idea of locating a "consistent system" in
Sullivan's work and a "novelty" in his building approach signals
Morrison's position. Morrison continues in this vein when he writes Here Morrison's idealism is as great as Sullivan's was. He has fallen
prey to Sullivan's ideas and even his style, absorbing them in a series
of masked assumptions. How Sullivanesque to assert that one person can
completely express modern life, that architecture is in need of renewal,
that great architecture is based in certain historical fundamentals, and
that these attitudes somehow constitute "the modern"! NOTES 1 Roland Barthes, "Writing Reading," in Roland Barthes, The
Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989), 29. |