A temptation with formal analysis is to detach the object of study from larger life, to concentrate on its properties that inhere in similar objects, and to restrict art’s importance to art itself. Analysis of form is David Van Zanten’s strength, but by narrowing his perspective, it leads to questionable conclusions. For example, the point where this stimulating book begins to unravel is when the authors claims that “Sullivan’s Houses are as Important as His Banks,” almost the title of Chapter 4. Sullivan’s houses are as important as his banks only if we regard them as primarily design exercises, which is Van Zanten’s wish. But if we examine them as real or realizable habitations, their importance lies in the question they raise: Why were they such failures?

The six houses Van Zanten discusses include (with one exception) the eight Sullivan designed from 1898 to 1912, of which five were rejected, two were erected but later demolished; and one that has been a fraternity house since the 1950s. Sullivan realized all nine of his bank commissions, one of which was a remodeling job, between 1906 and 1919. Of these, seven remain banks and the other two still stand—one as an ice cream parlor and the other empty. Common sense suggests that the houses were less important than the banks because they were less successful; unlike the banks, they did not work. But it is not success or failure, nor synchronization of plan and program, that interests Van Zanten. What interests him is the significance a form may have for other forms.

The houses are important, he argues, because in them Sullivan was able, as never before or in any other genre, to assemble complex interrelated spaces based on “right angle and 45-degree axes and grids” radiating outward from centering points through thick-walled, cubical, volumetric outlines—the planning “strategy” he had been taught at the École des Beaux-Arts—and because, with that assemblage, he perfected his “design system,” which Van Zanten so nicely reconstructs in Chapter 3. The houses thus become the architectural acme of Sullivan’s career. It matters not that most of them were never realized, and perhaps it is better thus, because Van Zanten is the scholarly counterpart of the “paper architect” who never builds, for whom reality resides in the drawing. I only mean this analytically, as he is a sound, productive historian. Sullivan’s City is saturated with telling observations and illuminating insights. The Introduction and Chapters 1 through 3—on Sullivan’s training, assumptions, professional objectives, and accomplishments—are solidly grounded. His treatment of how Sullivan formed ideas—about ornament, of what he had in mind with preskyscraper loft buildings and pre-Auditorium theaters, of how the Transportation Building was a “performance” that “suddenly” made the World’s Columbian Exposition go “technicolor,” of his rivalry with Daniel Burnham, of the content and import of his design system, and particularly, of how sixteen dissimilar column capitals in the Auditorium banquet hall constitute “a seminar on ornamentation”—enhance our understanding of a great designer. But Chapters 4 and 5 and the Conclusion, based largely on his reading of lines on paper, become a kind of formalist fantasy akin to the “fantasy city” he says Sullivan created for himself late in life.

In his preface, Van Zanten acknowledges that he is taken by “the sheer fascination of the architectural drawing that has convinced us—and many before us during the last two centuries—that reform must lie in form, that a problem diagrammed is a world set free.” Van Zanten has written extensively on late nineteenth-century French architecture, but here I think he refers to the Revolutionary era. If one considers the optimism informing the visions of Etienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, or Charles-Etienne Durand, one can indeed imagine “that a problem diagrammed” might—not “is” but might—lead to “a world set free,” that for a brief moment when so much seemed possible, reform "might"—not “must” but might—"lie in form." Such thoughts, however, were little more than professional conceits, for in Revolutionary France, architects were no less servants to power than under the monarchy. Yet because the content of power had changed, something like the opposite of Van Zanten’s idolization of drawings did remain imaginable: that new forms might spring from social reform and that a world struggling for freedom might generate new ideas. Although “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” proved illusory, late eighteenth-century Paris in no way resembled late nineteenth-century, “land of dollars” Chicago in which architecture’s agenda never even paid lip service to freeing the world. Nor was it understood that a drawing carried an obligation to improve the commonwealth. The iconic status Van Zanten attributes to drawings seems more artificial than artifactual.

The problem with Chapters 4 and 5 is that they conflate drawing and reality: private artifice becomes social artifact. “The meaning of ornament for Louis Sullivan”—Van Zanten’s subtitle—is that it is “a surrogate for grander compositions.” The nineteen plates of Sullivan’s A System of Architectural Ornament (1924) “demand to be read as maps or aerial city views” of the “actual architecture or urbanism”—hence Van Zanten’s title—"his artistic life never enabled him to produce." Thus, at the bottom of plate 13 (depicting Burnham’s 1909 Chicago Plan), “we might see the domical city hall with its flanking buildings and projecting diagonal and annular avenues” above which “the tight grid of the Loop marked by a file of projecting skyscrapers” leads the eye to the top of the drawing and “something akin to the parks and piers extending out into…Lake Michigan.” “We should not take this parallel literally,” he warns, in spite of having pronounced the plates “as real perhaps as any architectural drawing is in relation to actual construction.” What is the implication here? That any architectural drawing is a fantasy? That fantasy informs actual construction? If either is so, form is indeed everything.

I must confess that to follow the argument about plate 13, I mistakenly turned to plate l6 and, in spite of this, “Sullivan’s city” appears there as well (although the plates are quite dissimilar, which is to say it appears in neither). If one thing resembles another or their forms have complementary properties, it does not prove their relationship. Burnham’s plan was presented to Chicago’s most influential commercial and social club as a guideline for reordering a real city, and portions of it were later constructed. Sullivan’s drawing was sheer fantasy. Though commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago, the drawing was, as Van Zanten observes, “a consuming sensual gluttony,” “a performance,” the subject of which “was Sullivan himself.” It was not a city or about a city and lacked any social content. Unless Sullivan was himself Chicago, his plate was not a plan.

Van Zanten’s conflation of architectural form with life as lived is most problematic when applied to real buildings, such as the James Charnley residence in Chicago (1891). This house is especially important, he contends, because in it Sullivan introduced the organizing principle of all his subsequent dwellings: the “architectural promenade,” which is the privileging of circulation, “the gathering of the whole interior space into a single, grand enfilade.” The thesis is that the spatial arrangement of Sullivan’s late-career houses is the key to understanding all his work, and the enfilade the key to his spatial arrangement. Enfilade is also Van Zanten’s trump card: “The foundation of the conventional misunderstanding of Sullivan’s work,” he insists, “has been the refusal to see it spatially, as the architectural enhancement of movement to a goal….” At Charnley, the promenade takes us on a stunningly beautiful tour: from the deep entry passage, under an archway, behind a wall, upstairs to a “courtyard” lit from above on the second floor, around additional turns and through additional spaces with recapitulating and beckoning vistas, reaching at last “its destination in the balcony” over the front door. It is the only destination that Van Zanten allows.

Van Zanten mistakenly assumes that the promenade requires a goal, and enfilade an end point. Were he correct, the question would still nag: Why the balcony? It is difficult to imagine that the daily routine of even a well-to-do family would include promenading (with all the sartorial splendor it requires) and yet would be simple enough to envision family and guests taking the air to see and be seen by neighbors? But how probable is it that a few self-congratulatory moments would have taken priority over several hours of fine dining and engaging conversation? If one supposes that the primary reason for having a social event is an activity incidental to it, then one could further suppose that a functionally peripheral balcony intended to accommodate that activity is actually the raison d’être for the spatial organization of an entire house. But one improbability belies the other. In theory, the notion of promenade is captivating, but in residential reality makes very little sense.

An additional problem exists: if Sullivan organized residential space solely to encourage elegant movement in formal situations, what then do we call inelegant, unpromenade-like, but decidedly necessary, movement from one room or floor to another to sleep, bathe, read, converse, write a letter, tend to children, or manage the household? Daily life, perhaps—for which Sullivan made no provision, if Van Zanten is to be believed—explains why so many of his residential clients rejected his proposals. Sullivan did provide for daily life, of course, if ineffectively, but Van Zanten’s formalist approach leaves that out.

If Sullivan’s work is defined as art but voided as containers of life or portions thereof, Van Zanten’s analysis has merit. Architecture can be both but never just one. For all the tantalizing observations in his book—and Cervin Robinson’s striking photographs—it is in the end formalist abstraction quarantining Sullivan from the fullness of life his work addressed.