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Louis H. Sullivan's midwestern banks have not been treated kindly by history. Dismissed by a generation of modernist critics as the sad swansong of a troubled late career, they have begun to attract a different kind of notice. Lauren Weingarden provides the first complete documentation of all eight banks, including the details of their commission, and argues persuasively for their establishment in the pantheon of lost architectural masterworks. The book is enriched by the recovery of Henry Fuermann's photo-archive and the inclusion of 15 previously unpublished color photographs by Crombie Taylor. What emerges from this study of the programs, plans, interiors, and ornamentation is a new appreciation of Sullivan's overall cultural and architectural intentions in these extraordinary buildings. Weingarden finds a consistency between these last works and Sullivan's heroic Chicago period. She shows that the banks were in fact the logical outcome of strategies he had been developing all along: Sullivan continued to be a rationalist planner and technician as well as a brilliant ornamentalist and decorator, and an artful interpreter of regional stylistic traditions. Long regarded as the eccentric addenda to a lapsed career, the bank commissions can now be appreciated as the truest embodiment of the democratic architecture that Sullivan had campaigned for during his entire career. Lauren S. Weingarden is Assistant Professor of Art History at Florida State University. She was recently named a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Louis H. Sullivan: The Bankswas the American nominee among all manuscripts entered for the annual Art History Prize from the International Confederation of Art Dealers. Published with the assistance of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

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CHOICE Review

An important addition to the growing list of books on the architecture of Louis Sullivan, this volume analyzes in detail the eight small bank buildings he designed for cities throughout the midwestern US in the last two decades of his career. This is the first book on Sullivan to discuss these buildings alone and to place them within the context of his earlier theories on democratic architecture, ornamentation, and planning. Previous books, by authors such as Hugh Morrison, Robert Twombly, and Larry Millett, have either addressed individual buildings or have included the banks as a minor aspect of Sullivan's overall career. Weingarden's volume is especially valuable because for each commission it includes detailed information on the clients, the building program, the drawings, costs, and contemporary critical reviews. In addition, there are a number of previously unpublished black-and-white as well as color photographs by Henry Fuermann and Crombie Taylor. The author's intention is to demonstrate ways in which the banks were the logical product and culmination of Sullivan's philosophical shift from transcendental idealism, as represented in his early skyscrapers like the Guaranty Building, to pragmatic realism, which formed the basis for the design of his banks. Recommended for architects, art and architectural historians, and those interested in American studies, philosophy, and history.-J.W. Stamper, University of Notre Dame