Seventy-five years ago, my father, Robert Olmsted, finished a book – a labor of love, really, on the influential architect Louis Sullivan and Sullivan’s writings not on architecture, but democracy. Today, I'm publishing for the first time the opening of that book (here.) Let's hear it for the World Wide Web!

A bit of background is in order. My father was 47 when I was born in 1952, and he died at 66 in 1971 (just two years older than I turned Friday -- too young). I missed a good deal of his life, with divorce and distance a further complication. I only knew second-hand, especially from my sister Rosie, that before I was born he spent long hours up in the garret (yes, a real garret) of their house in Danville, Illinois, creating this work. He would have been in his 30s.

It was never published, and everyone believed the manuscript was lost. 

It was not lost, only spectacularly mislaid.  After my mother's sister died, her children were going through the attic and found a manila envelope with –-behold! --the loose-leaf, typewritten pages of the "Louis Sullivan book." My cousin Trevett handed it to me, and I must say that for some while, I thumbed the pages but didn’t really read it. I had no idea what I would find. What if it was awful or misguided or as dated as the typewriter it was written on, at least by my lights? Well, it wasn't.

Introduction

The mammoth Auditorium building in Chicago may have been demolished by the time these words are in print. If the Auditorium is razed, one of the monumental proofs of Louis Sullivan's genius will have submitted to the hand of Time. But Sullivan's legacy to the world is more lasting than stone or steel.

That opening still feels fresh and powerful, at least to me. A lot was at stake -- an architectural masterpiece  might bite the dust. The building's description -- "mammoth" for size, "monumental" for significance -- was a nice variation, especially since "monumental" worked in both senses.The introduction unfolded in the same way, a brief, well-crafted intellectual biography of Sullivan -- and therefore of my father as well. 

Seventeen years after Louis Sullivan's death he is still primarily known as an architect.  Yet those persons who were close to Sullivan during his lifetime all attest that to know him as an architect, as a giant creator-builder -- to use Sheldon Cheney's phrase -- is to know only half the man. Great as was his contribution to architecture, Louis Sullivan, the poet-philosopher, the artist-writer, the teacher, the prophet of democracy, the personality, stands far above the buildings or the theories of architecture he left to the world. If there remains any doubt about this evaluation this book is offered as conclusive evidence.

Yet this was not hagiography. Sullivan's career cascaded into darkness; he ended up alone. He suffered the fate of someone far ahead of the times. But my father was passionate about the point he wanted to make: Sullivan’s philosophy shaped his buildings. Ideas mattered most. And so did the individual. Form followed function -- a term Sullivan coined.

Sullivan's faith was in the democratic idea, a belief in the soundness and kindness of the common, the normal man -- the multitudes. Here was a faith on which to build a genuine optimism; here was a substantial support reaching down to bedrock. America pointed to her steel production; Sullivan looked at the spiritual vitality of the nation as an index of national well-being.

I just love that. I'd call it prairie progressivism, a Midwestern, land-of-Lincoln fanfare for the common man. It's in my bones as well, as readers who care about such things will know. It was an affirmation of, an appeal to, our better angels, as Lincoln had it.