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Review of Gebhard Thesis
William Gray Purcell (1950s)

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George Grant Elmslie - Part II. (May 25, 1955)

 
ORNAMENT
 
It was during the 1896-1906
decade that George mastered
ornament, not just Sullivan's
ornament.
 
     WHILE GEORGE WAS INDEBTED to the basic principles of Sullivan
and his brilliant mastership, Sullivan himself didn't think of orna-
ment as what his detractors used to describe as "Sullivanesque,"
something of general utility that had become available through his
invention. Sullivan and Elmslie conceived of ornament as a symphon-
ic development that belonged to the concept of the living building
as a fully functioning organism. The "designer: - the man of firm
intention - simply found it there and drew it forth. He expressed
the building in the poetry and philosophy of form and offered it to
the world. It was then and there that the word "exfoliation" was
born; a word not only referring to the leafy forms, but to geometrical
 
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relations to pattern and sculpture of every kind, and in all the most
diverse materials and crafts - the soul of the building in flower.
 
  PEOPLE HAVE the wrong idea about
Sullivan's ornament and the rela-
tion of what Sullivan had done to
what George Elmslie was to do.
I'm now the only one who can make
this clear, because I am the only
one, other than Wright, who knows
from first hand experience just
what was going on in the Sullivan
office. Wright would not be the
best of reporters - he left in
1894.
 
     UPON WRIGHT'S DEPARTURE in 1894, George took over all design
coordination. It was three or four years before he was able to
handle projects on his own from concept through decorative detail.
All this time George was working with Engineer Ritter, Sullivan's
close friend and consultant. Ritter had done all the Adler and
Sullivan pioneer structural projects beginning with the above grade
work on the Auditorium. Of course there were office draftsmen-
engineers on all the tall buildings and George eventually became
capable in structural mathematics. When we went together in 1910 to
take our State Board Exams in Urbana, for our Illinois licenses,
George passed as well, or better, than I in all subjects despite the
advantage of my four years' organized study at Cornell.
 
     Ninety percent of all the ornament in the Guaranty Building in
Buffalo came from George Elmslie's hand. In fact, he told me him-
self that the only ornament that Sullivan actually sat down and
 
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developed for that building were the capitals and the big ornament
that climbs up over the cover of the cornice at the top of the build-
ing. But there is still a lot of ornament on Guaranty which is closer
to Sullivan in spirit and communication than it is to the Elmslie of
Owatonna, Condict, Schlesinger and Mayer, and the Purcell and Elmslie
ers.
 
     A most careful analysis should be made about this, for in two
more generations architecture will be in flower again. "Ornament"
however will in no visual sense carry anything resembling what was
produced by Sullivan, Elmslie and Wright. How could it possibly?
Structure and materials are already wholly changed. It may happen to
architecture here as it has in Russia. Political and other pressures
of mass emotion may throw the creative art of the nation - indeed of
the world - into the control of men who will not tolerate free arts.
In the writing of books those who fear change and intellectual adven-
tures are already threatening non-conforming teachers and librarians
with the loss of job security. So we can be sure that in another
thirty years the forms of all objects and buildings will be as differ-
ent as a pine differs from a palm or a pineapple. While the new flower
and fruit will be so inevitable that those who are to enjoy it will
wonder why we were so dull, we cannot assure ourselves that it will
be expressing the freedom envisioned in Sullivan's book "Democracy,
a Man Search."
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  IT HAS BEEN SAID of George Elmslie's
ornament, "The movement of the
ornament was essentially on the plane
of the surface; the effect being
entirely opposite from a Baroque or
Gothic structure." And again,
"This two-dimensional quality must
be understood as a key to all
Elmslie's work in ornament."
 
     THESE TWO STATEMENTS are in conflict, because with respect to
the substance of a building - its material surface, and its idea
substance - only an appliqué ornament could be two-dimensional as
between building and its decoration. Any ornament that arose out
of the idea, or out of the material fabric of a building, would have
to be three dimensional or it couldn't do any arriving.
 
     The nature of ornament is one of the most difficult things to
explain to a world that is afraid of ornament, which has no ability to
produce ornament, which does not rejoice in ornament. The word "orna-
ment" today does not mean what it originally meant, in the great organ-
ic periods of living architecture. The word ornament now means some-
thing applied, something unnecessary, something gratuitous, and ugly
words have been sludged from unwashed language to describe any living
thing which appears beyond the actual construction forms.
 
     Ornament in its organic and generic sense is the flower and the
fruit of the building; not only the flower and the fruit of its mater-
ial fabric, but the flower and the fruit of the spirit that produced
the building. Ornament is nourishment for the people by whom and for
whom the building was made. It has been said, "Although many of the
 
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present day critics may have some reservations about the quantity of
Elmslie's ornament, there would be few who would criticize its
essentially fine quality." That statement is a true statement, but
a very incomplete statement. Reservation about quantity does not
refer to the generic concept "ornament." Concern with the quantity
of the ornament is like saying that one has reservations about the
ability and desirability of a tree to produce its full contribu-
tion of blossoms and mature them into fruit.
 
  THERE CANNOT BE TOO MUCH ornament
in the generic sense. It is orna-
ment for which the form of the
building came to be. People can
satisfy their creature comforts
and their mechanical needs quite
easily without the aid of archi-
tects.
 
     BUT WITHOUT ARCHITECTS people cannot build their spiritual lives
nor even themselves in beauty. In fact the "Spirit of Ornament," if
we only had a goddess to watch over that concept, would be a laugh-
ing, humorous goddess, because she is always laughing at the abstrac-
tionist architects who reduce a building to its minimum mechanical
demands.
 
     The abstractionists reduce the poem to a telegram and forget what
was to be said, and why, and to whom, with what end in view. In
architecture they become so taken up with the science of deletion that
they omit providing for even the routine service requirements, which
must then be supplied by the owner as best he can. The owner then
 
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becomes an amateur architect engaged in the thankless remodeling of
a stubborn fabric. In this process is lost even the esthetics of the
original design, whatever academic value it may have had.
 
     A very good basis for recently heavenly laughter comes from the
enclosing of tall metal buildings with various sheets of stainless
steel or aluminum. Architects found almost at once that a plain un-
ornamented surface as originally conceived would not work because the
fresh rain from the sky seized all the carbon from the air and from
the window ledges, washed it down the face of the building, compelled
the designers and the users to retreat from "pure" structural logic
and admit in embarrassment that the surface of the building looked
like an old gasoline tin. The window washing problem also ran into
increased cost of labor due to the dribbled glass.
 
     So we find Mr. Harrison in the newest of his buildings working
hard (see FORUM) to design a sheet metal enclosing wall for which the
best solution appeared as an incised or stamped pattern of wedge
shaped troughs, each one of them angled so as to gather the muddy
dribbles and spout them clear of the building.
 
     Thus the decorative flowering was here fertilized by rain and
"soil." Such a mechanical and commercial origin for ornament is not
to be despised, but it certainly is a long way from the spirit of joy
and contribution in which Sullivan and Elmslie set about to make
people happy.
 
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  THIS IS THE RIGHT PLACE to record a
  report on the practical and technical
  qualities of Sullivan and Elmslie
  ornament which has come to me only
  during the past few weeks.
 
     IN AN EFFORT to find further Sullivan and Purcell and Elmslie
historical material, I finally located Neil Gates, the son of the
founder of the Teco Pottery Company which for years made all of Sulli-
van's and all of Purcell and Elmslie's architectural terra-cotta.
They developed the polychrome glazes for exterior architectural terra-
cotta. I happily found that he, Neil, lives right here in Pasadena.
 
     I've had a preliminary telephone conversation with him. He
believes that he can locate waster pieces that were thrown into the
rubbish heap up there at Teco, Illinois. He thinks that possibly some
of the samples still sit there in the offices and stock rooms. He
will report in a few weeks. But meantime, he gave me this basic ac-
count of ornament production. It will show you first hand how far
from the case is any suggestion that even the tiniest part of any
Sullivan or Elmslie ornament is two-dimensional.
 
     To better understand Mr. Neil Gates' story, look at the background
of the great ornamental flowers that center on the panels of the origin-
al Schlesinger and Mayer 1898 canopy over the Madison Street sidewalk.
The delicate ornament arising out of the cast "surface" of the back-
ground is actively aware of the substance of the iron which is to
father the ornament. As you look at the surface of the background, in
contrast to the very vigorous flowering and wild-nature geometry of
 
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the central growth, the background surface vibrates like a breeze
blowing across the surface of a lake. These flat backgrounds may
appear at first as graphic patterns drawn on the clay, but when you
apply creative vision in depth to this "surface," you see that across
the surfaces of these cast iron panels under Sullivan's mind and
under Elmslie's mind and hand, the delicate waves and wavelets of
ornament are lifted out of the substance of the iron exactly as the
wind reaches in beneath the surface of the water and lifts and patterns
wavelets. Certainly as we think further, how can anyone assume that
there is no depth. The third dimension, however micro small, in what
you distantly see on the surface of a slightly wind-blown lake can be
detected by the change in the color of the water and the color can
only be the result of microcosmic aqueous topography.
 
  NEIL'S COMMENT on Christian
  Schneider's method of modeling the
  ornament from Sullivan and Elmslie
  drawings, which I shall now describe,
  was also more than surprising.
 
     I HAD NOT KNOWN of this before, because I have never gone out to
Teco, Illinois. As I think of it now I can't imagine why I never went
to the plant. Whether George ever did, I don't know. Schneider
sometimes brought the clay to the office and of course always excel-
lent 5 x 7 negatives of all work before firing.
 
     I know of no instance where the relation between a sculptor and
a designer was more intimate than that which existed between Sullivan,
 
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Elmslie and Schneider from 1890 until Schneider's death; forty years
of it. Neil tells me that unlike any other modeler, Schneider laid
on his clay, not as dabs of clay pressed on here and there in approx-
imation of detail for later development, but as all-over, even thick-
ness layers, the full size of the entire project. Thereupon, in
developing the volutes, foliage, geometry, Schneider as sculptor now
faces his solid slab of clay; he is ready to deal with substance, not
surface. He proceeds to excavate all the ornamental material out of
the layered mass of clay.
 
     Neil said that it was fascinating to watch him as he worked down
from the surface of the clay, reaching one layer after another. Be-
tween the lowest depth and the details which appeared out of the visible
surface, he always knew exactly which layer he was working with. I
asked Neil if the layers were of different colors or the separations
tinted. "No, he could tell by the feel where he was."
 
     Now this is really an astonishing revelation toward a better
understanding of the nature of true ornament. I know of no other
instance where a "sculptor" working in clay maintains a continuous
awareness of the paradox represented in this approach to form by
antithesis, building up from a solid "void" to the surface which will
contain the idea, excavating solid substance down to what will support
the idea. This is what gave this work its remarkable life. One
wonders what would happen today if a modeler, instead of "building
 
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out" upon his iron supporting armature, would start with a solid spar
of moist but firm clay and excavate back to the surface of the image
which he would be sensing exactly as Greek sculptors used to do, as
Michelangelo did.
 
     Excepting certain Scandinavian artists, the almost universal
procedure today is one in which the sculptor in stone is not a sculp-
tor at all, but a modeler. In clay he builds up his image, patch by
patch, then has a mechanic transfer its forms into the mass of rock
by mechanical parallelism. Then only "as culptor" does he do some
whittling and polishing of the surface. Certainly the spirit, the
basic thought stuff out of which a sculptor is working, cannot handle
two creative concepts at the same time. Thus we live in a world
where stone sculpture is at best a sort of stereotype of modelling [sic]
and not true sculpture at all.
 
  BACK IN 1909 I put "air-planes"
  (then so called) in the leaded
  glass of the Stricker dining room
  in honor of what had happened
  at Kittyhawk two years before.
 
     FROM THEN ON, in mutually enjoying what George was doing, I used
to say to him that his volutes had anticipated the airplane. Note
where a given volute takes its origin at a stem of growth. This may
not necessarily be a stem imitating Nature's support of living
foliage, but merely a token stem of geometric origin. In any event,
instead of arising as a simple, on-dimensional, one-width flat ribbon,
 
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or even a round or square rod, George's stems begin at once to express
life and mobile thought by constantly changing size, cross section,
character and direction. As these swing around the curve and blossom
into foliating forms, volutes and free geometry, they all tilt as
railroad tracks are tilted for speeding trains, or as an airplane, or
a bird curves against the drafts as it swings in circles, then re-
balances as it seeks another path. Many of George's volutes and other
of his unfolding forms are in their articulation and sweep like the
movement of flocks of birds, where the main mass will swing in to a
great volute, with little subsidiary flocks breaking off to a swirl on
slanted wings in another direction, turning and rejoining the principal
movement; or crossing the main path to produce contrapuntal develop-
ments within the four-dimensional development.
 
     Select any one of these volutes. It is a little world complete in
itself, but incomplete; more development will yet appear. There is
more than can ever be seen; it points you on. It makes you think of
figure skaters, of the arm motions and body motions of dancing which
are significant as the movement of the feet -- more so indeed, be-
cause the feet also report their cooperation with the motion of the
entire body. It reminds one of escaping deer in the forest dodging
trees, leaping over brush; of escaping fish, or salmon trying to leap
through rushing waters. Your attention my be upon a little develop-
ment of foliated material as big as your thumb lifting its head in some
tucked corner, or it may be a great moving growth. Whatever your
 
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interest, study these man-made forests of patterns from the most
minute to the most complete, through all the ranges of line, of wholly
free geometry. This ornament of George Elmslie's honors, but does
not copy, the growth in nature, in the forest, in the sea, in crystals
and chemistry. It always rejoices in subtle movements which Whitman
characterized as the insouciance of the movement of animals, or which
today is shown in the slow motion pictures of plant growth and the
unfolding of flowers.
 
  IN SULLIVAN AND ELMSLIE you have
  an ornament that is not concerned
  with things at all. It reports
  a yet to be completed episode.
  The existence of the ornament is
  the record of a process completely
  unrelated to the static world;
  uncapturable [sic]; a constant invita-
  tation to the eye to follow its
  story as one would read a long
  novel.
 
     HERE IS A "MOVING PICTURE" which makes happiness, because it
gives the beholder something to do -- he must do the moving, he must
move his eyes, he must move his thoughts and he comes to move his
feelings. The "experience" is not what you get out of the Elmslie
symphony in ceramics or bronze, but what one brings to it out of his
own life. This is quite a contrast to the cinema where the beholder
becomes more and more static while the picture on the screen beats
louder, fiercer and harder, to accomplish its way with him.
 
     I have dwelt upon this matter here because for a long time I
 
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have felt that something must be said to combat the current philosophy
of minds concerned with the logic of words, confined to concepts which
can be analyzed and cataloged, while acknowledging no awareness of the
ineffable logic of nature and man which cannot be so captured. The
impulse of every human creature is to see something included in his
spiritual possessions that will make him happy. Richard Guggenheimer
says in his "Creative Vision" (Harper and Brothers, New York, pp. 80-81):
 

"Whenever man experiences what he calls the beautiful he
enjoys a sense of growth in the direction of integration.
It gives him an insight into the quality of wholeness or
relatedness that underlies the apparently separate parts
and incidents of being. He becomes charged with a convic-
tion of design, of meaning, of almost mysterious sufficiency.
That is why a developed sensitivity to art is important
to philosophy. Many creative minds have confessed that in
their early efforts they were as incapable of embracing
extensively formed thoughts as they were of large mathemat-
ical conceptions. Their intuition of form came to grips
with reality as they acquired an appreciation of plastic
expressions in sculpture and painting. Experience with
these arts developed an expanded ability to think. By
sustained attention to the wholeness that they felt was
intimated in creative seeing, the consolidated habits of
attending to similar integrations wherever they could
approach or discover them in metaphysics. They had
'believed in them' as far back as they could remember
meditating on such things, but only on the basis of an
unsubstantial sort of 'felt' conviction."
    SO IN THESE days where people are not supplied with joyful visual
and tactile experience in the use of their buildings, they turn
elsewhere. Ornament they must and will have. We find them rejoicing
in the ornamental patterns of women's clothes, of the fabrics that
are patterned and ornamented for men's wear, in the show windows
where goods are displayed. One can have a laugh with our Goddess of
 
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Ornament over the present paradoxical situation. Architects who
"just hate ornament" and will not give you a well reasoned explanation
of why they would not dream of having any ornament appear on their
buildings, nonetheless take plane for Mexico and there, momentarily
lost to the far off world of streamline, let themselves go with real
joy and deep emotional satisfaction before the Mexican colonial
churches. Here structure is hidden behind ornament like tree trunks
beneath a lush forest, their domes bright with unafraid color. Back
home again, in the land of the advertising pitch, these architects
forget the natural power possessed by these living stones singing
the hopes and the joys of all the people. Can we recover this rela-
tion within the sterile world of abstractions without meaning,
communication without a message, all presented as intellectual esthetics
which catch nobody's breath in delighted surprise?
 
     Never have artists had to face a deeper need in the anxious and
unsatisfied hearts of people everywhere. But in answer they talk
to each other or more often only to themselves in an invented un-
esperanto of form which is not worth learning. The generality of
artists have an intellectual basement full of tools which they polish
and repolish by artificial light. The missing factor is necessity;
they can think of nothing to make; their skills, which are many, are
not perfected for service but as collections for exhibit.
 
 

 

      Collection: William Gray Purcell Papers, Northwest Architectural Archives, Correspondents, David S. Gebhard [C:124]
research courtesy mark hammons