Louis Sullivan

I paraphrased Louis Sullivan on ornament in our recent meeting. Here is the full quotation (rather more articulate than my rendering):

"The ornament, as a matter of fact, is applied in the sense of being cut in or cut on, or otherwise done: yet it should appear, when completed, as though by the outworking of some beneficent agency it had come forth from the very substance of the material and was there by the same right that a flower appears amid the leaves of its parent plant."

"Ornament in Architecture," in Kindergarten Chats and other writings (N.Y.: George Wittenborn, Inc., 1947), p. 189.