The Charnley House

Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the making of Chicago's Gold Coast

Ed. Richard Longstreth, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004. $55 hardbound. ISBN 0-226-49274-5

Richard Longstreth's anthology should play to several audiences. Students of urban history will learn from Daniel Bluestone that the Gold Coast was anything but an obvious choice to become an upscale in the late nineteenth century and that along with the State Street shopping district it was largely the invention of one man, the developer Potter Palmer. Social historians will find out from Paul Kruty about the publications that were the HGTV of their day and what the Charnleys may have learned from them. Above all, this book should draw readers who love a mystery &endash; as long as they don't require a clear-cut solution; the documents we have don't provide it, and the architectural evidence is ambiguous.

The James and Helen Charnley house of 1891, officially the work of Adler and Sullivan, raises two questions: who were the Charnleys, to build the house they did, and who designed it? No one, Paul Sprague tells us, questioned its attribution until Wright claimed in his 1932 Autobiography that he "did" the house (not until Genius and the Mobocracy in 1949 did he claim that he "designed" it). Hugh Morrison, Sullivan's first biographer, agreed, and so have most historians, but not all, since then.

Longstreth points out in his introduction that we have almost no written record of the Charnleys themselves and the creation of the house. They seem to have been friends of Sullivan, so much of the record would have been in-person conversations, forever lost to us. The clients weren't "society," but they and their families were classic American types, wealth-makers like many of Wright's notable clients &endash; Willits and Robie in the Prairie years, Johnson and Kaufman later. Architectural adventurousness ran in the family, too. James Charnley's father had built a notable octagonal house in New Haven in the 1850s, and the Charnleys themselves had built with Burnham and Root nearly a decade before they approached Sullivan. Innovative as their house was stylistically, it fit, in other respects, what was by the 1890s becoming a pattern for well-to-do city-dwellers. It has fewer public spaces than most of its peers. Does this mean that the clients didn't like showy entertaining or that they cut corners in order to live in a prestigious neighborhood?

The bigger mystery, the one that will most interest students of Wright, is its authorship. Sprague's contribution makes the case for Sullivan and Narciso Menocal's for Wright. The editor, in an afterword, asks us to look at it as a collaboration that neither architect could have produced alone. Sprague shows, by a close examination of individual buildings and their documented dates (not always the received ones: he spells out in a footnote that Winslow, Wright's first independent commission, comes from 1894, not the previous year as most sources have it) that, far from being out of line with Sullivan's progress, Charnley fits into a program of simplification and geometric abstraction that was already several years along. He makes a parallel case that those "Wrightian" elements we admire in later works do not begin to show up for at least two more years in buildings that are undisputedely Wright's. Alongside this in turn, he makes a labored but finally plausible case that when Wright said he "did" the house he was using a common idiom that meant preparing the drawings and nothing more, and that Sullivan's Beaux Arts discipline would not have allowed his staff a larger hand in any case.

Contrary to all this, Menocal seems to think Sullivan did little but cash the Charnleys' checks. He finds all the spatial adventurousness of the mature Wright here implicitly, and he does an impressive job of tracing these elements in later buildings. Like all the contributors he sticks scrupulously to pre-Prairie and Prairie works, but this needn't keep readers from less scholarly fancies. Could the semitransparent screen that so effectively dramatizes the vertical upthrust be an ancestor of the one he designed for the Ennises in Los Angeles (but which they didn't build) some thirty years later?

The trouble with Menocal's argument, which I think keeps it from being ultimately convincing, is that it depends too much on proof by assertion, making sweeping statements and then proceeding as if they were established fact. He sees Wrightian features and persuades us to see them, too, but he never takes up Sprague's claim that Charnley's formal purity was still a few years beyond Wright's grasp.

On the other hand, he makes an excellent case that, for all Sullivan's mastery of external form, he didn't show comparable skill with interior space or with conceiving buildings from it. This aspect of the building was beyond the elder architect as well. That might be because he made his mark with office buildings, in which tenants sign up for raw square footage and finish it themselves, usually without the architect's input. On yet another hand, Sullivan's few residential design's don't show such an inclination either.

Longstreth steps in at this point to suggest a resolution: this is a building that neither architect could have done alone. Its virtues were born in the lost, unrecorded conversational give-and-take between them. Like Sprague and Menocal, he argues from the architectural facts of the house; his essay on the development of Wright's stairways from Victorian objects to look at from a distance to three-dimensional adventures we have to move through to understand, is alone enough to justify a careful reading of his afterword.

Alternatively the reader might not take a stand at all. This book can interest and entertain simply as a case study in how architectural history works &endash; the questions it faces and the methods its practitioners use to answer them.

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The above review was written by Peter Reidy. I welcome his unbiased critique for multiple reasons. First, he writes interestingly and with precision. He provides enough information to readers so that they may make their own decision as to whether or not to buy the book or find a copy at the local library. That is the sign of a good reviewer/critic.

I had originally intended to do the review, but am very biased on the subject of the Charnley house (S.009) and my biases would have colored any review.

Secondly, editor Longstreth, representative of the Society of Architectural Historians in this publishing venture, together with the University of Chicago Press, which publishes my two books on Wright, violated my intellectual property rights regarding in using copyrighted graphics, the use of which I had authorized publication by professors Sprague and Menocal, in an article by another contributor whose work I do not know. I do not license materials in which I hold all use rights to individuals whose work I do not know. Neither Longstreth, nor SAH, nor U of Chicago has rectified this situtation. How sad it is that academics violate the laws that are designed to protect their intellectual properties.

Thirdly - tho Mr. Reidy could not have known this (and is thusly fair in his summation), while the contributors should have suspected it - there is evidence that could clear up the question of authorship of the Charnley house. The evidence lies in Wright's desire to perfect his designs. Often he designed in pairs or groups, improving as he went along. For instance, the Tomek (S.128, 1904) is a trial run for the perfected Robie (S.127, 1906). More importantly regarding the Charnley of 1891, the three houses of 1892 on a common plan for Robert G.Emmond (S.015), Thomas S. Gale (S.017) and Robert P. Parker (S.017) reveal how Wright adjusted a plan for its site and client with minor variations. Add to this the Woolley house (S.023, 1893) which is a simplified version of the earlier three, and a house recently discovered north of Chicago that uses the same plan and may be another of the many (bootlegged or moonlighted) houses Wright did before leaving Sullivan, and we see a pattern. The Charnley is the improved version of a house attributed to another architect which follows the transformative pattern that Wright reverses in going from Winslow (S.024) to Heurtley (S.074) or, perhaps, from the Husser (S.046) to Tomek to Robie. More will be forthcoming on this in future months.

WAStorrer

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As a final note:

A longtime contributer to things Wrightian comments;

I have looked at the building myself from every angle, to the point of making measured drawings of it, and I have concluded that Louis Sullivan could not have designed that house on the best day of his life, with Adler, Elmslie or alone. FLW designed an impression of a Sullivan building. But like any impression, it is more Sullivan than Sullivan, like Rich Little's impression of Ed Sullivan. The book misreads the front facade and underestimates the subtleties of the plan. The placement of the dining room fieplace creates a relationship with the hall and living room much like Heller (S.038), which Sullivan would never have thought of. While the book also addresses the Babson and Bradley Houses and Bennett Project, which were done with Elmslie, as well as the projects he did on his own . . .