House and Garden 
THE WATNWRIGHT BUILDING, ST. LOUIS 
completion engineering operations invol 
great originality, skill and daring. 
An appreciation of 
Mr. Sullivan’s archi¬ 
tectural work is made 
easier by some knowl¬ 
edge of his aims and 
ideals. He holds 
views, he cherishes a 
faith, he promulgates a 
philosophy of which 
his work is the ex¬ 
pression (in so far as 
such a thing is possi¬ 
ble) in terms of pon¬ 
derable materials and 
of three dimensions. 
These views, this faith, 
and this philosophy he 
has set forth in maga¬ 
zine articles, in ad¬ 
dresses to architectural 
students or to his ar¬ 
vi 
n g 
chitectural colleagues, and in con¬ 
versation with his friends. He is a 
believer in democracy, and in the 
growing, on our American soil, of an 
architecture of democracy as beau¬ 
tiful and noble as any which the 
world has known. H e conceives 
of his art not as a thing of book- 
knowledge, of accepted forms, of 
tradition and precedent, but as a 
living language of thought and emo¬ 
tion, infinitely various and free. 
He believes that a building, like 
any natural thing, should be organic 
and expressive, not composed ac¬ 
cording to set rules out of the dry 
bones of evanished architectural 
styles. 
The esthetic problem presented 
by the tall office building,—the most 
insistent architectural problem of 
our commercial civilization,—is con¬ 
fessedly the despair of the architect 
educated in and wedded to the ped¬ 
antry of the schools, but Mr. Sulli¬ 
van conceives it to be “one of the 
most stupendous, one of the most 
magnificent opportunities that the 
Lord of Nature in his beneficence 
has ever offered to the proud spirit 
of man.” His greatest successes have been 
in the field of commercial architecture. The 
MEMORIAL VAULT IN BELLE FONTAINE CEMETERY, ST. LOUIS 
49 
