Adler and Sullivan's Guaranty Building in Buffalo

1996 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Siry
Keyword(s):  
Structural Stability ◽  
Office Building ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Monumental Architecture ◽  
Labor Conditions ◽  
Unit System ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hippolyte Taine ◽  
Civic Center

As the last of Adler and Sullivan's tall steel office buildings, the Guaranty responds in form and ornament not only to Sullivan's aesthetic program, but also to functional and constructive demands of the type articulated by Adler and others, and to an urban context of monumental architecture in Buffalo's civic center. The Guaranty's spatial and structural planning were based on a unit system of design, which also underlay the proportions of its street elevations and fenestration. The Guaranty was related to Adler and Sullivan's earlier Wainwright Building, whose fronts may reflect concern for conveying structural stability in light of concurrent debates on high buildings. Use of terra-cotta rather than brick in buildings like the Guaranty was prompted in part by labor conditions. The accentuated verticality of the elevations, which exemplifies ideas expressed in Sullivan's essay "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," also recalls the theory of Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), professor of aesthetics and history of art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, whose ideas Sullivan had studied.

Lu Märten: An Introduction to Four Texts

October ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Jenny Nachtigall ◽  
Kerstin Stakemeier
Keyword(s):  
Labor Conditions ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Full Life ◽  
Proletarian Art ◽  
Life Work

Abstract This article presents an introduction to four texts that the German feminist-materialist art historian Lu Märten (1879–1970) published between 1903 and 1928. It outlines some of the major concepts of and contexts for this unduly neglected thinker. Her writings covered a wide terrain that spanned studies on the labor conditions of female artists, polemics against “proletarian art,” and a monist, rather than dialectical, view on film, art, and what she called the “full life-work of a human.” At the core of her multiple endeavors was the demand for remaking the history of art as a history of form that is more capacious than art's institutionalized Western field. Situating Märten's work in historical debates (e.g., on Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s), the introduction also points to the new legibility that her nonaligned materialism gains with the material turn in the humanities.

War of Perception, Perception of Time

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-267
Author(s):  
Kuniichi Uno
Keyword(s):  
Michel Tournier ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Perception Of Time

For Gilles Deleuze's two essays ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’ and ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’, the crucial question is what the perception is, what its fundamental conditions are. A desert island can be a place to experiment on this question. The types of perception are described in many critical works about the history of art and aesthetical reflections by artists. So I will try to retrace some types of perception especially linked to the ‘haptic’, the importance of which was rediscovered by Deleuze. The ‘haptic’ proposes a type of perception not linked to space, but to time in its aspects of genesis. And something incorporeal has to intervene in a very original stage of perception and of perception of time. Thus we will be able to capture some links between the fundamental aspects of perception and time in its ‘out of joint’ aspects (Aion).

Conditions of Visibility

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Shared Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Prejudice ◽  
Historical Past

We often assume that works of visual art are meant to be seen. Yet that assumption may be a modern prejudice. The ancient world - from China to Greece, Rome to Mexico - provides many examples of statues, paintings, and other images that were not intended to be visible. Instead of being displayed, they were hidden, buried, or otherwise obscured. In this third volume in the Visual Conversations in Art & Archaeology series, leading scholars working at the intersection of archaeology and the history of art address the fundamental question of art's visibility. What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for a work of art to be seen at all? The answer is both historical and methodological; it concerns ancient societies and modern disciplines, and encompasses material circumstances, perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. The emerging field of archaeological art history is uniquely suited to address such questions. Intrinsically comparative, this approach cuts across traditional ethnic, religious, and chronological categories to confront the academic present with the historical past. The goal is to produce a new art history that is at once cosmopolitan in method and global in scope, and in doing so establish new ways of seeing - new conditions of visibility - for shared objects of study.

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