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When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

Louis Sullivan

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Louis Sullivan
Age: 67 †
Born: 1856
Born: September 3
Died: 1924
Died: April 14
Architect
Designer
Boston
Massachusetts
Louis Henry Sullivan
Louis Henri Sullivan
Louis H. Sullivan
Henry Sullivan
Louis. Sullivan
Louis-Henry Sullivan
Question
Contemporary
Modern
Historical
Asks
Structure
Anachronism
Look
Remains
Startling
Looks
Civilization
Vulgarity
Good
Building
Absurdity
Fashion
Revealed
Style
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More quotes by Louis Sullivan

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Form ever follows function.
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Our architecture reflects truly as a mirror.
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An architect, to be a true exponent of his time, must possess first, last and always the sympathy, the intuition of a poet... this is the one real, vital principle that survives through all places and all times.
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The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.
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An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art. The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.
Louis Sullivan
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Alas, the world has never known a sound social fabric, a fabric sound and clean to the core and kindly. For it has ever turned its back on Man.
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How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it.
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To teach is to touch the heart and impel it to action.
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Implicit in true freedom of spirit lies a proud and virile will. Such glorious power of free will to choose, envisages beneficent social responsibility as manifest and welcome.
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But the building's identity resided in the ornament.
Louis Sullivan
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The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time--- is he who shall create poems in stone.
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It is the mass dream of inverted self, populous with fears overt and secret, that forms the continuous but gossamer thread upon which are strung as phantom beads all civilizations from the remotest past of record to that of the present day and hour.
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Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
Louis Sullivan
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It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to its life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit.
Louis Sullivan
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Once you learn to look at architecture not merely as an art more or less well or more or less badly done, but as a social manifestation, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant.
Louis Sullivan
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It was the spirit animating the mass and flowing from it, and it expressed the individuality of the building.
Louis Sullivan
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A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.
Louis Sullivan