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Democracy: A Man-Search, a book by Louis Sullivan, was first published fifty years ago, although he wrote it in 1908. The great Chicago architect completed what is a kind of 350-page prose poem at a moment when his career was at a low ebb. Its belated publication and the obscurity into which it has fallen are not surprising. By turns declamatory and almost deranged, evoking Whitman and Nietzsche, the book virtually guaranteed that architects, its most likely readers, would ignore it, as it did not mention architecture at all. Yet the idea of democracy it put forth is the same as that which Sullivan propounded in all his writings on American architecture.

Louis Sullivan's book Democracy: A Man-Search put forth the idea that "democratic form" is an organically unfolding process and an object of symbolic representation; and that it emerges from the collective imagination of a modern, progressive society and is an act of individual poetic genius. The books connections to architecture and the ideological claims by architects point not only to the difficulties of translating political concepts into three dimensions but also to the historical instability of the term democracy itself, which, despite its symbolic value, has frequently amounted to a hurrah word or a safe-conduct pass. The notion of democratic architecture in late-capitalist society has become at once more marketable and more elusive as the paradigm has shifted over the last half century from a culture of monuments to one of spectacles. Adapted from the source document.