Mark Richard Smith
After a twenty-year career as a graphic designer in Dallas, Texas, I left the world of commercial art to fulfill a lifelong dream of exploring historical subjects through film. While studying for a long deferred graduate degree in history at Loyola University Chicago, I was immediately captivated by my newly adopted city and the brilliant and turbulant past it presented through its architecture.
I knew Louis Sullivan had been an innovator in the Chicago School, but I had no appreciation for the emotional power of his work until I viewed it through the photography of Richard Nickel. I’ve always had a soft spot for old buildings, and when I saw what had happened to Sullivan’s work – first abandoned by white flight to the suburbs and then destroyed by urban renewal – it touched something in me that yearned to preserve the past, especially something as uniquely beautiful as Sullivan’s architecture.
As I delved deeper into Sullivan’s life, career and legacy, I realized that there was a fuller story here than the life of one man. I saw Sullivan’s struggle to promote an American style of architecture as a profound reaction to the rapidly shifting values of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century: a formerly isolated nation of farmers, craftsmen and maritime traders transforming itself into an international industrial powerhouse. Ironically, even as Louis Sullivan’s belief in the important links between nature, individual worth and creativity seemed lost in the cacophonous, anonymous, filthy and exploitive world of the industrial city, he produced works of genius totally in touch with the needs of urban life. And as Chicago and other northern cities decayed and nearly collapsed just fifty years later, a small group of people devoted untold amounts of energy and heartache to preserving the few expressions of beauty and optimism left from before World War I, when the future looked thrilling and anything seemed possible.