Jewel Box
Toby Altman
June 30, 2026
Jewel Box engages the buildings that the architect Louis Sullivan designed in the last years of his life. Though Sullivan is widely considered the father of modern architecture, he spent the last thirty years of his life struggling to find work: in part, because of his unwillingness to compromise with the Gilded Age capitalists who were his best clients and biggest supporters. In small towns across Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, Sullivan tried to develop an architecture of democracy, an architectural practice that would restore American democracy to its utopian promise.
Jewel Box investigates both the accomplishment and the failures of Sullivan’s architecture. The book revives Sullivan’s design practice, recreating his ostentatious, ornate buildings as elaborate concrete poems that spill across the page. But, it also locates Sullivan’s architecture in a colonial landscape, documenting the way that Sullivan’s achievement relies on the genocidal erasure of native peoples—an erasure that Sullivan participated in, calling for an “indigenous” American architectural style, built by white architects.
Jewel Box is the second volume in a proposed trilogy about the midwest, its architecture, history, and infrastructure. The previous volume in the series, Discipline Park, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2023; the final volume, Prairie School, is currently in progress.
This wonderful collection, Jewel Box, is a philosophical treatise on architecture is/as poetry. It is a brilliant consideration of what meaning-fullness signifies. What are the implications of perceiving with an unblinking eye? In the tradition of Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Toby Altman’s luminous, bold and tender poetic work, Jewel Box, reconfigures architecture as metaphor in a way that illuminates the burdens of truth with a heavy and loving heart. As a collection that goes beyond simple genre organization, Jewel Box provides an essential template of how to, tenuously, bravely, “walk the walk.”
— Tracie Morris, author, human/nature poems
While Louis Sullivan’s most famous maxim—form follows function—seems prescriptively straightforward, how this idea manifests in his buildings and writings is anything but. Jewel Box traces, trips over, overwrites, and re-writes anew Sullivan’s bombastic and yet delicate forms, his flowery peons to democracy celebrating indigeneity at the expense of the indigenous, and the geographies, regions, and institutions that allowed his buildings to take shape in order to tarry with the grief, enrapture, pain, and pleasure that comes from encountering architecture’s beauty as it is premised on varying scales dispossession.
— Adrienne Brown, author of The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership and The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race
TOBY ALTMAN is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has received fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Northwestern University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Michigan State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Residential College of the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) and Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.