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The Trading Room: Louis Sullivan and the Chicago Stock Exchange

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No one should visit Chicago without exploring its most famous museum, The Art Institute, and no one should leave the museum without walking through the lovingly reconstructed Trading Room of the Stock Exchange Building, built in 1894 by architects Louis H. Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, and demolished in 1972.

Long before his contributions to the new, authoritative "Complete Architecture of Adler & Sullivan," author John Vinci, himself a notable Chicago architect, wrote this short account of the rise, decay and demolition (in 1972) of the Stock Exchange Building and the subsequent reclamation of its most important interior. The focus of "The Trading Room" is the spirit and decorative genius of Sullivan (1856-1924). A mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan is sometimes referred to as the father of modernism, and he's widely credited for defining the form and potential of the earliest skyscrapers. But the aspect of his work that most fascinates Sullivan's many ardent fans is his decorative vocabulary. He employed every available craft--stone cutting, masonry, bronze casting, stencil painting, glass fabrication, etc.--to organically unite natural imagery, geometric precision, and vibrant color within his expressly functional designs.

As a simple visual taste of Sullivan for a general audience, this book is a good one (and, unfortunately, out of print). But it's really short, a picture book more than a monograph, and thin in terms of larger architectural context and technical content. The book is well written and organized--Vinci makes the most of the few pages he has to work with. But by racing through the account of preservationists' efforts to halt the building's demolition, for example, it misses an opportunity for some potentially dramatic storytelling. Even the mysterious and tragic disappearance of the great architectural photographer Richard Nickel is confined to a dedication of no more than 120 words.

The main draw, and it's a strong one, is the enormous percentage of illustrations: In 72 pages there are more than 50 black and white historical photos--including some by Nickel--several architectural drawings, and seven color photos of the room's exquisite, painted stencils (which, again unfortunately, don't appear to be consistently reproduced). Right now, for what old copies are being sold for here, "The Trading Room" is worth picking up.