Here is a story from a couple years ago about the evanescence of human creations - as well as some interesting comments about Chicago architect Louis Sullivan and the bungalows themselves. Also recall how the Village of Riverside tore down a Sullivan masterpiece in 1960. Village Trustees, like hurricanes, are sometimes blind.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-0509080196sep08,0,1273586,print.story?coll=chi-homepagenews-utl
GULF COAST CRISIS: IN MISSISSIPPI
Wright-Sullivan gems gutted
Twin bungalows--both claimed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan--suffer Katrina's wrath
By Michael Martinez and Blair Kamin, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune national correspondent Michael Martinez reported from Ocean Springs, with Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin in Chicago
September 8, 2005
OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. -- A pair of bungalows that provided a tangible link to two of the giants of Chicago architecture, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, thrived for more than a century on this stretch of the Gulf Coast whose marsh grasses and offshore islands evoke a bigger cousin of the Great Lakes.
Then came Hurricane Katrina.
Now, one of the bungalows is "vaporized," in the words of its owner, and the other is severely damaged. The two were part of a four-building waterfront compound, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, that Sullivan and Wright both claimed to have designed.
The destroyed bungalow was for two decades a vacation getaway for Sullivan, renowned for his Carson Pirie Scott store on State Street and his pioneering skyscrapers. A companion servant's quarters a few paces away also was destroyed. Only a concrete pad indicates something sat there.
From the bungalow's veranda, Sullivan could gaze through overhanging white wisteria onto the waters of Davis Bayou, drawing inspiration for his urban high-rises from the rural paradise.
Now the bungalow is a carpenter's scrap pile, scattered as far as 100 yards away from its original location. Everything is gone except an urn planter, brick foundation pieces and the famous tree where, in a well- known photograph, Sullivan struck his iconic pose looking toward the sea.
"This is like somebody coming into Independence Hall and burning the Declaration of Independence. It's irreplaceable," said Paul Minor, 59, a Biloxi personal injury lawyer who meticulously renovated the house after purchasing it in 1986.
The only relatively good news is that the two other structures in the district--the second bungalow and a nearby guesthouse--are still standing, but with significant damage. While Wright never lived in any of the buildings, his fingerprints may be on them because he was Sullivan's chief draftsman.
The bungalows "are so wrapped up with Sullivan and Wright," said architectural historian Paul Sprague, a former Chicago resident who lives in Florida. "For Sullivan, this was a place he escaped from Chicago. It was a place he renewed himself. He had it for 20 years. As far as the history of architecture is concerned, it plays a part in the evolution of his work."
What remains of the Sullivan bungalow is haunting. Like Stonehenge, a chimney rises 15 feet and stands alone. At its feet is the rubble of an architectural gem beloved by Sullivan for its mystical powers--"the paradise, the poem of spring, Louis' other self " is how he wrote about it in his autobiography shortly before he died in 1924.
Like sifting through pieces of a broken dream, Minor walked through rubble that included precious materials such as 100- year-old heart pine wood. He had spent a small fortune on such details to restore parts of the interior to duplicate the original design.
When he first saw that the "house was vaporized," he said, "I went to my knees."
"I truly thought I had the best house ... along the Gulf Coast. This is true Southern living where you take advantage of the serenity and the beauty of the gulf," he said.
Added his wife, Sylvia, 58: "The Louis Sullivan house is no more. It's just--floosh!--gone. It's disintegrated."
(It has been a tumultuous summer for Paul Minor, who stood trial last month on charges of bribing state judges. He was acquitted of some charges, but the jury couldn't render verdicts on other counts. The federal prosecutor's office hasn't yet announced whether it will seek to re-try Minor.)
Late in Sullivan's life, when he was in desperate financial straits, Sullivan wrote that his bungalow was destroyed by a "wayward West Indian hurricane." In fact, he was using hyperbole to describe how he was forced to give up the one-story, shingle-covered home to Chicago terra cotta manufacturer Gustav Hottinger, who had lent him money.
This time, the hurricane was real, and it crashed into the compound, which is about 100 yards from the beach.
The four structures, clad in cypress shingle siding colored a dull blue, were built in 1890. The bungalow that was not owned by Sullivan was rebuilt in 1897 after a fire.
While hardly masterpieces, the bungalows were part of the legacy of two extraordinary architects: Sullivan, renowned for his swirling ornament and for coining the maxim "form ever follows function," and Wright, even more admired for his Prairie Style houses and such dazzling monuments as the corkscrewing Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Their intertwining stories, however, have a trace of bitterness.
Early in his career, Wright worked for Sullivan, calling him "Lieber Meister," or "beloved master." But in 1893, Sullivan fired Wright after learning that Wright, his chief draftsman, was designing "bootleg" houses without his permission.
Their disagreements even extended to the authorship of the side-by-side bungalows in Ocean Springs--one built as Sullivan's vacation house, the other a getaway for Chicago lumber dealer James Charnley, who also commissioned a masterful Wright-Sullivan house in Chicago's Gold Coast.
But architectural historians agree on this much: Sullivan first visited Ocean Springs in 1890 to recover from the exhaustion caused by his work on Chicago's Auditorium Building, 430 S. Michigan Ave., the handsome multipurpose structure that was completed in 1889.
"He was completely taken with the Gulf Coast and the beauty of the natural landscape," said Tim Samuelson, a Chicago architectural historian who assisted the renovation of the Sullivan bungalow in the 1980s. "It gave him inspiration. It gave him rest. It fueled him and allowed him to come back to the city and renew his work."
After meeting Sullivan in New Orleans in 1890, Charnley and his wife led him to Ocean Springs, according to William Storrer, author of "The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright." They transferred five of their 21 acres to Sullivan, Storrer writes, and asked Sullivan to plan a house for them.
Wright later claimed credit for the bungalows, noting that Sullivan's firm, Adler & Sullivan, "refused to build residences" and that the few the firm did design "fell to my lot."
The top of the "T" consisted of a full-width veranda that would catch the breeze coming off the Biloxi Bay; the stem of the "T" had a kitchen and, in the more elaborate Charnley bungalow, an octagonal dining room. The houses had broad overhanging eaves that sheltered them from the hot Southern sun.
In 1905, Architectural Record magazine described how visitors sitting on the veranda of the Sullivan bungalow could look over "great clusters of white wisteria hanging from the roof" toward a rose garden, trees and "across the stretch of water of the bay glittering with countless gems beyond the prices of the ransom of kings."
The post-Katrina scene could not be more different.
The Charnley bungalow's sills are knocked three or four feet off its piers. The bungalow exhibits the wending grooves of termite infestation in massive 12-inch-by -12-inch pine sills upon which floor joists sat.
Inside, the exotic, whorled designs of burly pine paneling are exposed to open viewing; the paneling covers the walls and ceiling. The roof over the eastern wing has collapsed. An interior floor has buckled, as if it now sits on a massive barrel. The absence of front doors and porch make it look as though the house's teeth were kicked in.
For all the damage, local historian and Ocean Springs Record columnist Ray Bellande, 62, thought the Charnley bungalow could be saved as he surveyed the tattered structure.
"It could be restored, but it would take a lot of money and a lot of patience," Bellande said.
A companion cottage to the Charnley bungalow received less damage. Its front, octagonal-roof entrance was knocked off its foundation, but the remainder was relatively intact, including a shelf loaded with hardback books about Frank Lloyd Wright.
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