Louis Sullivan / Seed-Germ
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Issue 2 correspondence: "Urforms", Esther Leslie p. 110–115
Anaxagoras (498-428): is known for his groundbreaking ideas about the nature of the universe, matter, and mind. He proposed that the universe is infinite and composed of a blend of mind and matter, with mind regarded as a unique form of matter that is both powerful and conscious. Anaxagoras rejected the notion of primary units in matter, asserting instead that it is infinitely divisible, where all things contain a portion of everything else—a concept he encapsulated in the idea of "seeds" representing the qualities of all substances.
Anaxagoras Fragment 1: All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite. And, when all things were together, none of them could be distinguished for their smallness. For air and aether prevailed over all things, being both of them infinite; for amongst all things these are the greatest both in quantity and size.
Anaxagoras Fragment 4: And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours, and that men have been formed in them, and the other animals that have life, and that these men have inhabited cities and cultivated fields as with us; and that they have a sun and a moon and the rest as with us; and that their earth brings forth for them many things of all kinds of which they gather the best together into their dwellings, and use them. Thus much have I said with regard to separating off, to show that it will not be only with us that things are separated off, but elsewhere too.
But before they were separated off, when all things were together, not even was any colour distinguishable; for the mixture of all things prevented it—of the moist and the dry; and the warm and the cold, and the light and the dark, and of much earth that was in it, and of a multitude of innumerable seeds in no way like each, other. For none of the other things either is like any Other. And these things being so, we must hold that all things are in the whole.
Louis Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament:
Leslie: Through his 'abstract gardening' Goethe discovered the 'Urpflanze', the 'urplant', an ideal prototype that contains all the plants of the past and the future. From this he conceived a stereoscopic mode of cognition in which simultaneity and succession both appear. The more general model extracted of this stereo-conception he terms the 'Urform' or the 'Urphanomen'.
Louis Sullivan Seed ornament:
Louis Sullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament: 
These shelter basic forms and all their future metamorphoses. Ur-configurations are formal relations aesthetically perceived within objects of everyday attention. Only through such doubled time and vision can perception and understanding be complete.
Sketch in Eisenstein's Dynamic Mummification:
Walter Benjamin was long intrigued by Goethe's antipositivist scientific method. He imported the notion of the ur form into his theories of criticism, history and Technology
True criticism brings about 'the unfolding, the germination of the work's immanent core'.
History, and history writing, is conceived as the unfurling or blockage of potentials, wish-images, dreams and possibilities.
Louis Sullivan, Owatonna Jewel Box Ornament 
Technology, likewise, is seen to incubate all the forms into which it could or must develop. It holds pre-forms of new machineries that may reveal themselves only in one instance at first-for example in film where 'all the notional forms, tempos and rhythms that lie preformed in today's machines' find 'final formulation'.
Benjamin writes: 'We are only just beginning to infer exactly what forms now lying concealed within machines will be determining for our epoch.' The future lives in the present, possibility is coiled up inside actuality." 
Marx: Reason has always existed, but not always in a rational form.
The critic can therefore seize upon any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop out of the special forms of existing reality the true reality of that which ought to be, that which is reality's final aim.
Louis Sullivan in Ornament in Architecture, 1896: If our artistic rhythms a result are to be significant, our prior meditations—the cause—must be so. It matters then greatly what is the prior inclination of the mind, as much so indeed as it matters what is the inclination of a cannon when the shot is fired.
NOTE: CLEARLY TO GRASP THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE APPROACHING FUSION OF THE INORGANIC AND THE ORGANIC INTO A SINGLE IMPULSE AND EXPRESSION OF MAN S WILL, THE IDEA MUST STEADILY BE HELD IN MIND THAT THE RIGID GEOMETRIC FORM IS CONSIDERED AS A CONTAINER OF ENERGY UPON WHICH A GERMINAL, LIBERATING WILL IS IMPOSED BY MAN S FREE CHOICE, INTELLIGENCE AND SKILL. THE PLANT ORGANISM DERIVES ITS IMPULSE FROM THE SEED-GERM, AND IN ITS GROWTH DEVELOPS SUB-CENTERS OF FURTHER GROWTH. THE SEED-GERM MAY THUS BE CONSIDERED ALSO AS A CONTAINER OF ENERGY, FORMING OF ITS OWN WILL SUB-CENTERS OF ENERGY IN THE COURSE OF ITS FUNCTIONING DEVELOPMENT TOWARD THE FINALITY OF ITS CHARACTERISTIC FORM THE EXPRESSION OF ITS IDENTITY.
LS: 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.
Here by this method we make a species of contact, and the spirit that animates the mass is free to flow into the ornament — they are no longer two things but one thing.
If now we bring ourselves to close and reflective observation, how evident it becomes that if we wish to insure an actual, a poetic unity, the ornament should appear, not as something receiving the spirit of the structure, but as a thing expressing that spirit by virtue of differential growth.
I take it as self-evident that a building, quite devoid of ornament, may convey a noble and dignified sentiment by virtue of mass and proportion. It is not evident to me that ornament can intrinsically heighten these elemental qualities. Why, then, should we use ornament? Is not a noble and simple dignity sufficient? Why should we ask more?
If I answer the question in entire candor, I should say that it would be greatly for our aesthetic good if we should refrain entirely from the use of ornament for a period of years, in order that our thought might concentrate acutely upon the production of buildings well formed and comely in the nude. We should thus perforce eschew many undesirable things, and learn by contrast how effective it is to think in a natural, vigorous and wholesome way. This step taken, we might safely inquire to what extent a decorative application of ornament would enhance the beauty of our structures — what new charm it would give them.
If we have then become well grounded in pure and simple forms we will reverse them; we will refrain instinctively from vandalism; we will be loath to do aught that may make these forms less pure, less noble. We shall have learned, however, that ornament is mentally a luxury, not a necessary, for we shall have discerned the limitations as well as the great value of unadorned masses. We have in us romanticism, and feel a craving to express it. We feel intuitively that our strong, athletic and simple forms will carry with natural ease the raiment of which we dream, and that our buildings thus clad in a garment of poetic imagery, half bid as it were in choice products of loom and mine, will appeal with redoubled power, like a sonorous melody overlaid with harmonious voices.
LS: At the moment the tree in the forest starts and quivers at the first stroke of the axe, at the moment the first blow is struck in the rock that has slumbered through the ages, at that moment the human element makes its entrance into that absorbing drama we call architecture . . building materials do not come into their places in a structure, of their initiative, or by accident.
So the materials of building are but the elements of earth removed from the matrix of nature, and reorganized and reshaped by force; by force mechanical, muscular, mental, emotional, moral and spiritual. If these elements are to be robbed of divinity, let them at least become truly human.
"The Aspect of Freedom is Beginning to Appear":
Thus it is the architect's task to vitalize building materials, to animate them collectively with a thought, a state of feeling, to charge them with a subjective significance and value, to make them a visible part of the social fabric, to infuse into them the true life of the people, to impart to them the best that is in the people.
Ada Louise Huxtable: Sullivan's famous and often controversial architectural ornaments, a lush, interlaced jungle of geometric, organic, and whiplash forms, enriched and defined his buildings as a kind of signature and trademark.
His contemporaries thought his ornament saved his off-beat solutions from cold and incomprehensible unfamiliarity. His heirs of the 1930's rejected it as traditional trimming and preferred to admire the bare upper stories of his buildings.
Today, we return to it with gratitude for its undeniable sensuous beauty, seeing it as the catalyst between structure and expression that made Sullivan's famous dictum "form follows function" neither the sterile nor the limited doctrine of its later interpreters.
LS letter to Walt Whitman:
Letraset for Architects:
Nickel gave his life to save Sullivan's buildings. Nickel gave his life to save Sullivan's buildings. 
Protest against the demolition of the Garrick Theater designed by Sullivan. 
LS: The fragrance of a living art shall float again in the garden of our world.