Louis Sullivan after functionalism.(architect)

[W]hat is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty. ... It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.

--Louis Sullivan

Ah, that supreme, erotic, high adventure of the mind that was his ornament.

--Frank Lloyd Wright

Was ever a genre of art scorned as much as was architectural ornament during the heyday of modernism? Decorative carving, panels, and friezes became abominations: excrescences lathered over otherwise honest brick boxes, and all in the service of corrupt social display. To purge them was high moral duty. In his 1908 essay "Ornament and Crime" Adolf Loos famously compared the ornament of a building to the tattoos of a criminal, thereby giving a lofty anthropological basis to what might otherwise be regarded as a matter of personal taste.

The goal, of course, was reform. A building should not derive meaning and character from the historical motifs that cluttered its skin, but from the direct, logical expression of its purpose and materials. This was the edict of functionalism, that--as Louis Sullivan put it--"form follows function." Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis embodied this doctrine, winning him the status of a prophet: the inventor of the skyscraper, the uncompromising sage who chose principled poverty over worldly success, and the oracle who passed on the functionalist gospel to his disciple Frank Lloyd Wright, who carried it in turn to the world. So went the myth. That this same Sullivan draped his buildings in the most voluptuous and sybaritic ornament America had ever seen was a matter of some embarrassment to the mythmakers.

Hugh Morrison, author of Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture (1935), disavowed the "overwrought lyricism of his ornament." Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) took the next step, cropping a photograph of the Carson Pirie Scott store so as to omit both cornice and ground level, showing only the crisp skeletal cage of its middle stories. Many a reader, persuaded that Sullivan was a Bauhaus follower avant la lettre, was brought up short in the course of a visit to Chicago by the sight of the writhing ornament of its entrance--a Cartesian grid into which Medusa had slithered.