Sullivan, Louis

Sullivan, Louis (1856–1924), architect.Born in Boston, Louis Sullivan studied architecture for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after which he worked for Philadelphia architect Frank Furness. In 1873, he moved to Chicago to work for William Le Baron Jenney and then to Paris, where he attended the école des Beaux‐Arts. Returning to Chicago in 1875, Sullivan worked for various architects, the last being Dankmar Adler, with whom, in 1883, he formed the partnership of Adler and Sullivan.

Louis Sullivan's fame rests on the new style of architecture he created in 1890 and developed during the ensuing decade. It was then that Sullivan in the United States and a handful of architects in Europe envolved personal styles no longer based on the classical vocabulary of Greco‐Roman buildings, styles that in their opinion expressed mystically the spirit of their own age, and were therefore “modern.” When in 1890 Sullivan achieved the kind of originality both in architectural and ornamental design that he sought, he was slightly ahead of most European modernists. His new style first emerged in the Getty Tomb in Chicago and Wainwright Building in St. Louis, where each structure is a simple cube decorated with Sullivan's own floral and geometric ornament.

Between 1888 and 1893 Frank Lloyd Wright worked for Sullivan. The fruit of this relationship was Wright's acceptance of Sullivan's credo that the modern architect's only worthy goal was to create an original architecture of his own, an ideal that Wright brought to fruition in his own work. After 1895, when the firm of Adler and Sullivan was dissolved, Sullivan garnered only occasional commissions, mostly for small banks.
See also Modernist Culture.

Bibliography

Hugh Morrison , Louis Sullivan, 1935, reprint 1998.
Robert Twombly , Louis Sullivan, 1986.

Paul E. Sprague