Louis Henry Sullivan.

By Mario Manieri Elia. Princeton Architectural Press. 1997. [pounds]42

The preface to this succinct and comprehensive study of the great American master of the skyscraper is entitled 'Architects Who Write' and provides a necessary warning both about Sullivan and about other architects who reinvented themselves in polemics or autobiography. Sullivan's account of his battles against Daniel Burnham and his introduction of a monumental European Classicism, for instance, was written years - decades - after the event. Yet many biographers have taken his words at face value, so encouraging the cult of the Architect as Hero as well as a rather naive interpretation of his historic aphorism, 'Form Follows Function'.

Not that this refreshing study attempts to diminish the greatness of Sullivan, but it seeks to put him in context, not only giving Dankmar Adler and George Elmslie (inventor of much of the ornament) their due but also showing how the reverses and personal struggles that made him a more genuinely tragic figure than Mackintosh were, in part, the result of economic and political circumstances slumps that followed booms in the extraordinary economy of Chicago and differences between Republican and Democrat administrations in their attitudes to the idea of America. For Sullivan's great works - like those of Burnham and Root must be understood against a background of severe labour unrest and burgeoning imperialism.

For Elia, the elevational treatment of the lost Chicago Stock Exchange rather than the celebrated Guaranty and Wainwright Buildings was 'the high point of American architecture prior to the New Deal' and he points out that the static purity of those column-like masterpieces was only one aspect of Sullivan's struggle to produce an authentic American urban architecture. Other buildings employed compositional devices like the tier of bay windows to create more complex solutions. Unfortunately, the subtle analysis of Sullivan's exploration of form is sometimes given in terms of 'the hypotactic consolidation of a blend of differences and opposites versus the graphic manifest impossibility of such a blend. The result was an endless pursuit of paratactic assemblages'. Possibly the original Italian is clearer; possibly not.

Further complaints must be that this book has no index and that some of the excellent illustrations are mislabelled. Even so, it is a conspicuously valuable addition to the considerable literature on Wright's Lieber Meister.

GAVIN STAMP