Framing what we see: the role of ornament in structuring Louis Sullivan’s design logic

This paper presents an informal shape grammar that describes Louis Sullivan’s system for ornamentation. The goal of the grammar is to serve as an analytical tool to describe Sullivan’s existing designs, but also to generate new designs founded in the same logic. Towards this end, the grammar, which is organized into seven groups of rules, is used to generate several of Sullivan’s compositions, as well as new designs by the author, as a vehicle both to explore the particular parameters of Sullivan’s most intricate work, and to speculate about how Sullivan’s system could be implemented in, and impacted by, contemporary technologies.