Tapestry Brick
"We never know how important anything may become, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant its initial appearance."
-Louis Sullivan
The final task for Sullivan was combining his ideas of composition and his ideas of Democracy to create actual architecture. Sullivan believed that a building is itself a full composition, and so it should have a specific character. The building should also be a beautiful gift to society as a whole, and so it should be experienced at a human scale by people on the street. Both of these requirements were solved with the use of brick and terracotta, in what Sullivan called "tapestry brick".
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In his essay Artistic Brick, Sullivan explains that with the new technological advances in brick and terracotta manufacture, architects now have greater control over the color and texture of the finished product. This allows architects to use a combination of rich-toned brick and richly ornamented terracotta to create a facade that is less like a t-shirt and more like an oriental rug. This facade was to wrap around the building, expressing the building plan and creating a complete form instead of an ornate front with bare sides.
Detail of the National Farmer's Bank
The final task for Sullivan was combining his ideas of composition and his ideas of Democracy to create actual architecture. Sullivan believed that a building is itself a composition, and so it should have life and a specific character. The building should also be a beautiful gift to society as a whole, and so it should be experienced at a human scale by people on the street. Both of these requirements were solved with the use of brick and terracotta, in what Sullivan called "tapestry brick".
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In his essay Artistic Brick, Sullivan explains that with the new technological advances in brick and terracotta manufacture, architects now have greater control over the color and texture of the finished product. This allows architects to use a combination of rich-toned brick and richly ornamented terracotta to create a facade that is less like a t-shirt and more like an oriental rug. This facade was to wrap around the building, expressing the building plan and creating a complete form instead of an ornate front with bare sides.
Sullivan valued the beauty of these colorful bricks so highly that he recommended using a deeply raked joint so that each brick stands out individually from the facade. This is because the brick is not simply a beautiful object, but also "the visible symbol of a train of social activities, an expression of industrial thought and energy." Part of the significance of the brick or terracotta was the social process that took place in order to bring them into existence. The new industrial processes of brick production forced architects to interact with new types of peers, like brick manufacturers. This increased social connection was to Sullivan an expression of Democracy, where buildings were not the work of a solitary genius but were instead born through collaborative effort. Sullivan wrote "Architecture is truly a social function and form, and it is the feeling of humanity that makes a structure a beautiful creation."
This is similar to the ideas of William Morris, who said that the beauty of an object partially comes from the human touch involved with the creation of the object. But while Morris was thinking of human touch in a less industrial way, Sullivan was eager to utilize the advantages of industrialization. This is similar to the attitude of Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan's protégé, who wrote the essay The Art and Craft of the Machine, where he defended the use of machines to create beautiful things that are accessible to the common man.
Sullivan seemed to be accepting of the use of new technologies in his design because he believes that technology is simply an extension of the architect's abilities. He says "to be sure a building may have its functions of plan and purpose expressed in a literal mechanical way that tends to repel.... This certainly is up to the architect. For if the head and its intellectual activities be not suffused by that complexity of emotions and sentiments we call the heart, no building can be beautiful, whatever means in the way of materials may be at hand." (emphasis mine). In Sullivan's mind, if an architect is not sensitive to the character of the building, it does not matter what technology they use, because they will still manage to create a building that repels people. As a result, technology is simply a tool that reflects the quality of the architect, not a force that drives an architect to a beautiful or not beautiful conclusion.
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Despite the fact that Sullivan and Wright would not exactly agree, they both would have supported the idea of a collaborative, social building process. The collaborative effort of creating a building along with the care expressed by the architect are the social and human ties Sullivan believed that a building needs to be truly beautiful.
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Left: Detail of the Van Allen Building showing a combination of terracotta ornament and brick masonry.