Review: The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan by Richard Nickel and Aaron Siskind with John Vinci and Ward Miller

In its depth and breadth of research, elegance and range of images, and quality and size of production, this book may be without precedent in historical studies of American architecture. Its creation involved extraordinary, ongoing collaboration among architects, historians, preservationists, photographers, curators, librarians, foundations, book designers, printers, and other contributors over nearly sixty years since the project’s inception. It has been so long in development that its creation bridges the prevailing midcentury consensus that Sullivan was a forerunner of the modern movement, and the renewed interest of the later twentieth century in his work’s ornamental richness, a view that coincided with the postmodern architectural movement of the 1980s. This book’s store of information will...