The classificatory analogy
reference to organic function. So we will return in due course to the analogy with biological taxonomy in architecture. Cuvier’s functional attitude to anatomy will emphasise that organic relation between the parts, that coherence of the systems of the body, to which I have already made reference in the discussion of functionalism. If we have detected a ‘biological’ basis to those compositional techniques deriving from Durand and carried on in the French Beaux Arts tradition, which, however radical originally, decayed at last into sterile and inhibiting formulae, this is not a characteristic which would have been recognised by the theorist of ‘organic architecture’, Louis Sullivan, in the retrospective view of a hundred years later. For Sullivan the additive procedures and ‘elementary’ character of Beaux Arts composition were ‘the mere setting together of ready-made ideas, of conventional assumptions’. The Beaux Arts method is, he says ‘a mechanical, not an organic process; it is, indeed, the very antithesis of an organic process’.21 What the concept of ‘organic’ is which Sullivan comes to hold, we shall now begin to examine.
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