SULLIVAN, LOUIS 1856-1924

Architect

Chicago's Premier Architect

While not recognized in his own time as a pioneer of modern architecture, Louis Henri Sullivan enjoyed the admiration of his peers during his years as Chicago's premier architect. He was one of the first architects in the late nineteenth century to struggle to free the profession from its adherence to styles of the past, to decoration for its own sake, to masking the functions of buildings in an effort to emphasize their surface effects. His dictum "form follows function" subsumed aesthetics to structure without sacrificing elegance. This dictum became the rallying cry of modern architects, beginning with Sullivan's most famous student, Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan's most important work took place between 1880 and 1905, after which he sank into obscurity. Later his reputation was restored by American and European architects who pointed out that Sullivan was the progenitor of architectural modernism. The great American architectural critic Lewis Mumford called him "the [Walt] Whitman of American architecture." The American Institute of Architects awarded Sullivan its Gold Medal in 1946, twenty-two years after his death.

Early Life and Training

Sullivan was born in Boston in 1856 and spent much of his youth on his grandparents' farm near the city. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1872 to study architecture but left after a year for New York City, Philadelphia, and finally Chicago, where he briefly worked for the architect William Le Baron Jenney. He attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris for six months, returning, disillusioned, to Chicago in early 1875. In 1879 he went to work for Dankmar Adler; in 1881 the two men formed a partnership. The first important building to reflect what would become Sullivan's unique style was the Borden Block (1880), in which he experimented with the structure, form, and ornamentation of tall buildings. One of Sullivan's greatest works was the Auditorium (1890), designed with his partner, Adler. At the time it was completed it was the tallest building in Chicago, and it soon came to be regarded as one of the world's finest opera houses. The Auditorium had five thousand lights and 150 footlights, and could seat four thousand people. Its blend of rational structure and poetic ornamentation elevated Sullivan to international fame. Sullivan went on to design the Garrick Theater in the Schiller Building (1892), the Transportation Building (1893) for the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Stock Exchange Building (1894), all in Chicago. The Wainwright Building (1892) in Saint Louis is believed to be the first tall building to express its steel skeleton in its exterior.

Later Life

After designing the Guaranty (later Prudential) Building (1895) in Buffalo, New York, Adler and Sullivan dissolved their partnership. Sullivan's career took a downturn after the partnership ended; but despite a dwindling clientele, in 1904 he designed what many consider one of his best buildings: the Schlesinger and Mayer store—now the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store—in Chicago won praise for the purity of its exterior. Sullivan also designed a series of bank buildings for small towns in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio; some of these banks are still admired for their forms and ornamentation. The best is the first, the National Farmers (later Security) Bank Building (1908) in Owatonna, Minnesota. Sullivan became an alcoholic and died, forgotten and in debt, in 1924, his accomplishments not yet fully appreciated.

Source:

Albert Bush-Brown, Louis Sullivan (New York: Braziller, 1960).

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