Culture and Democracy: The Struggle for Form in Society and Architecture in Chicago and the Middle West During the Life and Times of Louis H. Sullivan

Abstract

This work by the late and great sociologist Hugh Dalziel Duncan, paints the great panorama of the Middle West, where egalitarianism is the most cherished value, and money is the most important vehicle of life. How art finds a place this society is shown the specific struggle between the architects, businessmen, unionists, and educators of Chicago. Into such specifics Duncan reveals the place of supposedly abstract theories developed by John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Thorstein Veblen, and above all, Louis H. Sullivan, whose school of architecture presents both a new form of physical design and a new order of society. rise, seeming defeat, and final triumph of Sullivan's principles of order architecture are related to his social and aesthetic theories of form society. In democratic society, all individuals must be capable of art, just as all individuals share art as experience. Sullivan's description of the development within the individual of the idea of architecture is treated as an allegory of such development the spirit of democratic values. His life is offered as a parable of the problem facing American artists as they attempt to root art democratic culture. In Sullivan's words: The critical of architecture becomes not merely the direct of art, but in extenso, a study of the social conditions producing it. of a newly shaping type of civilization. By this light, the of architecture becomes naturally and logically a branch of social science. . Duncan's exceptional volume, written with grace and clarity, registers the achievements of this Chicago School, showing how culture and democracy reached a special moment of consensus with the money-based economy of our time.