ABSTRACT
In 1892, his Charnley house and Schiller Theater Building were finished in Chicago, Sullivan suggested that "it would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well-formed and comely in the nude," but it was a prohibition he never applied to his own work. Decoration was seen as an unfortunate disguise of materials as well as of structure. Certainly it is true that some materials, left plain, are inherently decorative, having, in Ruskin's words, "ingrained ornament." But in other respects, the modernist tirade against ornament no longer convinces us. For one thing, even modern design was never free of decoration. A special case of ornament based on natural forms is ornament based on man.
