Geology & Botany of the Sullivan Jewel Boxes, Part 2: Fired Clay That's More Than the Sum of Its Parts | Purdue National Bank, West Lafayette (1914)
Looking southward, at the central portion of the northern elevation.
To get an overall sense of the building, see Part 1 of this series.
Mortar, windows, sidewalk, and base course excepted, everything you see here was originally clay—rock-derived sediment of the finest particle size—or clay turned to stone.
Architect Louis Sullivan's magnificent terra-cotta ornament, finished in green, cream, and golden glazes, was fabricated of clays derived from two disparate sources. The body or bisque of each cladding unit came from glacial till of the late-Pleistocene Lemont Formation, mined on the property of the fabricator, the American works in McHenry County, Illinois. For the glaze, however, ball clays rich in kaolinite were imported from England.
The handsome maroon brick, which has darkened somewhat with the passing of the years, comes from material extracted from beds of Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) Borden Group shale, both quarried and fired in Crawfordsville, Indiana. As noted in the preceding description, Sullivan stipulated that its mortar should be color-matched with the brick. And so it was, until it was repointed several decades after the bank was completed.
It's this shot of the set that best reveals the interplay of masonry styles:
- a header bond within the projecting border, at top;
- the lower main wall surface in common or stretcher bond; and
- the Flemish bond of the pillars punctuating the windows.
The other photos and descriptions of this series can be found in my Geology & Botany of the Sullivan Jewel Boxes album.
Geology & Botany of the Sullivan Jewel Boxes, Part 2: Fired Clay That's More Than the Sum of Its Parts | Purdue National Bank, West Lafayette (1914)
Looking southward, at the central portion of the northern elevation.
To get an overall sense of the building, see Part 1 of this series.
Mortar, windows, sidewalk, and base course excepted, everything you see here was originally clay—rock-derived sediment of the finest particle size—or clay turned to stone.
Architect Louis Sullivan's magnificent terra-cotta ornament, finished in green, cream, and golden glazes, was fabricated of clays derived from two disparate sources. The body or bisque of each cladding unit came from glacial till of the late-Pleistocene Lemont Formation, mined on the property of the fabricator, the American works in McHenry County, Illinois. For the glaze, however, ball clays rich in kaolinite were imported from England.
The handsome maroon brick, which has darkened somewhat with the passing of the years, comes from material extracted from beds of Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) Borden Group shale, both quarried and fired in Crawfordsville, Indiana. As noted in the preceding description, Sullivan stipulated that its mortar should be color-matched with the brick. And so it was, until it was repointed several decades after the bank was completed.
It's this shot of the set that best reveals the interplay of masonry styles:
- a header bond within the projecting border, at top;
- the lower main wall surface in common or stretcher bond; and
- the Flemish bond of the pillars punctuating the windows.
The other photos and descriptions of this series can be found in my Geology & Botany of the Sullivan Jewel Boxes album.