Although not as famous as the Paris cemetery Pere-Lachaise, Graceland Cemetery in Chicago attracts thousands of tourists every year. Some visitors go there to admire the monumental gravesites of Chicago's rich and famous, including Marshall Fields, the Armours, and the McCormicks, but most make the pilgrimage to see just one little structure: the Carrie Eliza Getty tomb. Designed by Louis H. Sullivan in 1890, this tomb is unlike any other at the cemetery. It has nothing of the bold pretention or ostentatiousness of some of its neighbors. On the contrary, the Getty tomb is small, delicate, and very elegant; in fact, one has to search carefully to find it amid all the pompous monuments that one can find at Graceland.
Why do so many people make an effort to see the tomb? No doubt visitors feel attracted to this little structure because of its beautiful ornament, an ornament that is neighter aggressive nor sad, but rather light and uplifting. On the front of the tomb, in the center of a bare field of smooth, gray limestone, are two copper doors, which attract immediate attention because of their blue-green color and intriguing ornament. Visually, the doors bind the bottom half of the structure with the top, which is of a strikingly different character. Here, in contrast to the plainness of the lower section, most of the stone is covered with a starlike ornament in low relief, while the arch in the center also retains a plain style. On the sides and back we find a similar composition.
System of Ornament
One glance at the rest of Sullivan's work - both what he designed with his partner Dankmar Adler between 1880 and 1895 and what he did after the two architects split up - tells us that ornament played an important role in all his buildings. What's more, we can perceive a system behind it.
Much has been written lately about the meaning of Sullivan's architectural ornament. In order to expose the public to these newly articulated views, the Chicago Historical Society, in collaboration with the St. Louis Art Museum, decided to mount an exhibition entitled Louis Sullivan: The Function of Ornament, which explores why he used ornament derived from motifs in nature and what goals he strove to accomplish. Numerous drawings, photographs, fragments of the actual buildings, and models testify to Sullivan's philosophy about architecture which was closely bound up with his conception of ornaments and which he consistently tried to realize in three-dimensional forms throughout his life.
Born in Boston in 1856 to an Irish-Swiss family, Louis Henry Sullivan decided at a young age to become an architect and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his hometown at the age of 16. A precocious student, Sullivan soon discovered that everything he was being taught at MIT actually emanated from a European school: the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He therefore decided, after one year to consult the original source. First, however, he was obliged to earn money for the trans-Atlantic voyage and his stay abroad, so for one year he worked as an architectural draftsman in Philadelphia and Chicago, and then, in the summer of 1874, took a boat from New York to France via England.
Sullivan stayed in Paris for a little less than twelve months, during which time he worked at the atelier of Emile Vaudremer, studied at the
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