Sullivan, Louis Henri

Sullivan, Louis Henri (1856–1924). American architect of Irish and German descent. He worked briefly with F. Furness in Philadelphia, PA (1872–3), before moving to Chicago, IL, and the office of W. Le Baron Jenney (1873–4). He was in Paris in 1874 at the École des Beaux-Arts under Vaudremer before returning to Chicago in 1875. He entered the office of Dankmar Adler c.1879, and became a full partner in the firm of Adler & Sullivan in 1883. Their first joint work was the Auditorium Building, Chicago (1886–90) containing a 4,000-seat theatre, hotel, and office-building, the exterior showing the influence of H. H. Richardson and the interior an eclectic mix of flowing foliate forms containing elements of Arts-and-Crafts invention as well as Art Nouveau themes. Even more Richardsonian was the powerful St Nicholas Hotel, St Louis, MO (1892–4—destroyed), with its massive round arches.

From 1888 to 1893 Adler & Sullivan employed the young Frank Lloyd Wright, who was devoted to Sullivan, calling him Lieber Meister (Dear Master), but designed work on his own account in violation of his contract while working for the firm, which led to his leaving to establish his own practice. However, Adler & Sullivan continued to prosper. Their two best-known skyscrapers, the Wainwright Building, St Louis, MO (1890–1), and the Guaranty Building, Buffalo, NY (1894–5), adhere to Classical principles in that each has a plain plinth-like base; a series of identical floors above expressed by bands of windows and panels set within recessed strips between piers, with large corner-piers acting as antae; and crowning cornices (the Wainwright Building cornice is particularly lushly enriched). Some critics, however, have seen these buildings as expressing the framed structures behind the external skins.

In 1898–1904 Sullivan (having set up on his own (1895) after the partnership with Adler was dissolved in) built the Schlesinger & Mayer (later Carson, Pirie, Scott, & Co.) Store, Chicago, which marked a change of direction, in that it did not emphasize the vertical, but created a series of horizontal openings framed by the skeleton structure of floors and vertical supports. However, he still treated the two lower storeys as a massive plinth enriched with ornament, clad the upper storeys with white faïence, filled the voids in with Chicago windows, and capped the whole with an overhanging cornice-like roof. It is the paradigm of the Chicago School (but see Purcell & Elmslie).

In spite of his de rigueur remarks in the Engineering Magazine (1892) suggesting that ornament should be eschewed for a while, he was an inventive and uninhibited user of architectural enrichment combined with powerful simple geometries and blocky masses, as in the Getty Mausoleum, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago (1890), and the Wainwright Tomb, Bellefontaine Cemetery, St Louis, MO (1891–2). At the Getty Mausoleum the arch motif looks back to Richardson's work, and strong, simple geometrical forms with well-integrated ornament were themes Sullivan explored in the elegant and colourful series of Banks he designed (e.g. National Farmers' Bank, Owatonna, MN (1906–8), Merchants' National Bank, Grinnell, IA (1913–14), People's Savings & Loan Association Bank, Sidney, OH (1919), and Farmers' & Merchants' Union Bank, Columbus, WI (1919) ). Sullivan's ebullient ornament became part of American Mid-West commercial architecture in the early decades of C20, especially in works of the Midland Terra Cotta Company and other firms: its inventiveness is inconvenient for those who insist he was a ‘prophet’ or ‘pioneer’ of Modern Architecture.

Sullivan was a prolific writer, his output covering the period 1885–1924, but his prolix texts lack clarity, and his obfuscatory style has been interpreted as indicative of profound thought. In 1896, in his ‘The Tall Building Artistically Considered’, published in Lippin-cott's Magazine, he announced that ‘form follows function’, a dictum eagerly grasped by the protagonists of the International Modern Movement. However, a careful reading of Sullivan's own texts makes clear that his concept of Functionalism embraces and calls for emotional, expressive, spiritual, and creative values that later Modernists wholly rejected. His built work shows very clearly that it had virtually nothing in common with the teachings of the Bauhaus or with the apologists for the style that was to be almost universally embraced after 1945.

Bibliography

Bush-Brown (1960);
Condit (1952, 1964);
Connely (1960);
EM, iii (1892), 633–44;
Frei (1992);
D. Hoffmann (1988);
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, xx/4 (Dec. 1961), 3–19; xxvi/4 (Dec. 1967), 250–8, 259–68, and xxxix/4 (Dec. 1980) 297–303;
Ed. Kaufmann (1956);
Lippincott's Magazine, lvii (1896), 403–9;
Manieri-Elia (1997);
H. Morrison (1998);
Placzek (ed.) (1982);
Paul (1962);
P&J (1970–86);
Schmitt (2002);
M. Schuyler (1961);
Sprague (1979);
Sullivan (1956, 1967, 1980);
Szarkowski (2000);
C. Taylor et al. (2001);
Twombly (1986);
Twombly et al. (2000);
van Zanten (2000);
Zukowsky (ed.) (1987, 1993)