Jewel Box
Essay Press, 2026. Trade Paperback. New. Item #663084
ISBN: 9798986135298
New! 'Jewel Box engages the buildings that the architect Louis Sullivan designed in the last years of his life. Though Sullivan is widely considered the father of modern architecture, he spent the last thirty years of his life struggling to find work: in part, because of his unwillingness to compromise with the Gilded Age capitalists who were his best clients and biggest supporters. In small towns across Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Sullivan tried to develop an architecture of democracy, an architectural practice that would restore American democracy to its utopian promise. Jewel Box investigates both the accomplishment and the failures of Sullivan’s architecture. The book revives Sullivan’s design practice, recreating his ostentatious, ornate buildings as elaborate concrete poems that spill across the page. But, it also locates Sullivan’s architecture in a colonial landscape, documenting the way that Sullivan’s achievement relies on the genocidal erasure of native peoples—an erasure that Sullivan participated in, calling for an “indigenous” American architectural style, built by white architects. Jewel Box is the second volume in a proposed trilogy about the midwest, its architecture, history, and infrastructure. The previous volume in the series, Discipline Park, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2023; the final volume, Prairie School, is currently in progress.' ~ Publisher.
Price: $20.00