Louis Sullivan: the Struggle for American Architecture

The northeast Florida premiere showing of the internationally significant film, Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture, will take place at the 5 Points Theatre, 1028 Park Street, one day only, this coming Sunday, July 18th, at 2:00 pm and 7:00 pm. This will be only the sixth time this movie has been shown publicly.

There is limited seating, and it is expected to be a sell-out. Buy your tickets at the 5 Points Theatre box office now, or on online.

The film was the winner of the Best Documentary at the 2010 Kansas City Film Fest and was an Official Selection at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2010. Its director, Mark Richard Smith, will be appearing in person at the Jacksonville showing to introduce the film.  The movie showing is a benefit for the Jacksonville Historical Society, Riverside Avondale Preservation, and Jacksonville AIA. It is also co-sponsored by Cinemania & the 5 Points Theatre.

Louis Sullivan was perhaps America's greatest architect, in some ways surpassing even his most well-known student, Frank Lloyd Wright. He has been called "the creator of the modern skyscraper" and even "the Father of American Architecture". Yet, after designing only a few dozen buildings (many of which are among the most beautiful ever created in this country), he died in poverty and relative obscurity. His is the greatest story never told in American architecture.
 This film marks the first time that Sullivan's life and career of have been brought to the screen. There has never been an in-depth exploration of him as an artist and what he tried so hard to do for American architecture.  After months of research that began in early 2007, director Mark Richard Smith began traveling throughout the Midwest and East Coast to view first hand most of Sullivan’s surviving works. The experience shaped his commitment to presenting as vividly as possible the stirring, profound beauty of Louis Sullivan’s architecture. Much of the footage is made up of moving shots that trace building details and ornamentation not readily seen by the naked eye.

But this film aspires to present a lot more than just great photography. Sullivan’s quixotic belief in the unbreakable connection between social values and architecture is closely examined, as are the cultural forces at work at the end of the nineteenth century that made it impossible for Sullivan’s aesthetic to take root in the American consciousness. The film presents him as an artist who never felt completely comfortable in either the vanishing world of nineteenth-century romanticism or the unsentimental and mechanized one of the twentieth century. Yet he understood both like no other artist of the period. Out of this conflict came incomparable works of architecture that vividly captured the end of one age and the dawn of another.

And just as significant, the film looks at how Louis Sullivan’s genius exerted such a tremendous influence on the development of the most famous architect who ever lived, Frank Lloyd Wright.

This is an important film to be shown in Jacksonville, because the work of Sullivan greatly influenced our own local superstar architect, Henry John Klutho.