William Stout Publishers

In 1954 Crombie Taylor, acting Director of the Institute of Design in Chicago and an architect working in the modern idiom, undertook the restoration of Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Building at a time when Sullivan’s work was rapidly being demolished.

While recognized primarily as a savior of Sullivan’s architectural legacy, Crombie Taylor was an influential architect in his own right. His designs, and his tenure at the Institute of Design in Chicago, helped create a bridge between Sullivan’s era and the post World War II Modernist era. Later positions, including Professor and Associate Dean for Architecture at the School of Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California further established his reputation as both an inspired restorationist and a gifted architect and teacher.

Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan collects and reproduces, for the first time, photographs of Taylor’s own buildings, his polychromatic stencils from Sullivan’s Auditorium & Garrick Buildings, as well as Taylor’s color photographs of Sullivan’s art glass.

Jeffrey Plank is Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia. Crombie Taylor: Modern Architecture, Building Restoration, and the Rediscovery of Louis Sullivan completes Plank’s three-part series on Louis Sullivan and architectural photography, building restoration, and architectural history. The Early Louis Sullilvan Building Photographs (with Crombie Taylor; 2001) and Aaron Siskind and Louis Sullivan: The Institute of Design Photo Section Project (2008) also were published by William Stout. Plank’s “Crombie Taylor, Aaron Siskind, and the Adler and Sullivan Project” exhibit at the Illinois Institute of Technology (co-curated with John Vinci) displayed in large format the photographs and stencils reproduced in the Siskind and Taylor books; it was acclaimed one of the ten most memorable exhibits of 2008 by the Chicago Tribune.