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EMBELLISHMENTS
This issue’s embellishments were culled from the façade of the Bayard-Condict Building, the only New York City structure by the great Chicago architect, Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924). The white terra-cotta ornament has just recently been unveiled from its layers of netting and scaffolding after an extensive restoration. The late 1890s building displays the idiosyncratic decorative vocabulary Sullivan created by pulling from a variety of sources. Celtic interlocking patterns, sinuous Art Nouveau tendrils and Classical winged figures flow over the building’s terra-cotta skin. He deftly fuses these seemingly disparate elements into one cohesive style that is used to delineate, not mask, the building’s structure under its white sheath. The different patterns are used to express the separate architectural elements of the façade. 
Sullivan leaves the piers’ vertical stretches unadorned. The piers are two different widths, one defining the vertical steel structure behind, the other the window mullions. The tall slender piers culminate in classical female figures whose wings stretch out and fill the space under the cornice. The unadorned shafts of the piers create a strong vertical thrust, expressing Sullivan’s belief that a skyscraper “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from top to bottom is a unit without a single dissenting line.”  VSA Metropolitan Chapter 232 East 11th Street New York, NY 10003 Email the Metropolitan Chapter - Victorian Society in America. |
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