John H. Edelmann

Who was John H. Edelmann?

John H. Edelmann was a socialist-anarchist who worked as an architect in the office of Alfred Zucker, a successful commercial architect of the 1880s and 1890s in New York City. As an architect, Edelmann's sole surviving monument is the former headquarters of the Decker Brothers Piano Company, the Decker Building, at 33 Union Square West, New York. Paul Sprague, a professor of architectural history at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, reports that Louis Sullivan credited Edelmann with the idea for his maxim, "Form follows function," a watchword of Modernism.

Before coming to New York, Edelmann had worked as a draughtsman for the Chicago architects William LeBaron Jenney and Dankmar Adler. It was Edelmann who introduced the young Louis Sullivan to Adler, with whom he formed a partnership. The late Prof. Donald Egbert of Princeton indicates that Edelmann came to New York in 1886 to work in the mayoral campaign of Henry George, the most influential proponent of the "Single Tax" on land, also known as the land value tax. Edelmann worked in the offices of Alfred Zucker from 1891 to 1893.