Louis Sullivan

American architect

• Born: September 3, 1856
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: April 14, 1924
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Remembered as the primary creator of the modern skyscraper, Sullivan was a pioneer in the artful design of tall buildings and in the development of distinctly American architecture.

Early Life

Louis Henry Sullivan was the son of Adrienne List Sullivan, who had been born in Geneva, Switzerland, to a Swiss mother and a German father. Her family emigrated to Boston in 1851, where she met the man who was to become Louis’s father, an Irish immigrant dancing master named Patrick Sullivan. During his infancy, Louis and his parents shared a house with his mother’s family, in part from financial necessity. Louis formed a strong attachment to his grandparents, particularly to his grandfather, a former teacher.

When the two families separated in 1861, the Sullivans took up residence briefly at the seaside in Folly Cove, Massachusetts. There, Sullivan developed a great love of the sea that would remain with him into maturity. Louis was reluctant to leave the life of rambling on the rocky coast to start school in Boston in 1862, and there is some evidence that it was his strong rebellion against first grade at the Brimmer School that prompted his parents to send him to live again with his grandparents, who had since moved to the country themselves. There, Louis continued to find classroom learning tedious but enjoyed wandering the countryside and learning from his grandfather, who was tolerant of his questions and of absenteeism from school.

Rebelliousness toward formal education, faith in his own interests and instincts, and a conviction that learning was better accomplished through observation of nature and close interaction with a master would characterize the rest of Sullivan’s educational career. By the age of twelve, he was already so fixed in his ambition to become an architect that he chose not to accompany his parents when they moved to Chicago, but rather to live with his grandparents near Boston, where he believed he could get a superior education.

Without completing high school, Sullivan gained admission to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of sixteen, but within the year he became disillusioned with the rigidity and classicism of the architecture program there and sought more practical training, working for the Philadelphia architect Frank Furness. Sullivan’s later work showed the influence of both Furness, who was noted for his ability to subsume detail into an overall composition, and the Philadelphia Functionalists, architects of commercial buildings who emphasized structure and height; nevertheless, Sullivan moved on quickly to Chicago, where he worked in the office of another prominent architectural master of the day, William Le Baron Jenney.

In 1874, Sullivan made another, characteristically brief, attempt to gain academic training in architecture. Against stiff competition, he won admission to the prestigious École des Beaux Arts in Paris, only to remain enrolled for less than a year. Despite its brevity, this experience shaped his method of working throughout his life; it was at the École des Beaux Arts that Sullivan learned the “esquisse,” or sketch, method of design, whereby the architect, after carefully considering a problem, prepares a rapid drawing that becomes the fixed basis for all future work on the project. Sullivan used this technique throughout his career, on one occasion completing the initial sketch for one of his most famous works, the Wainwright Building, in less than three minutes.

Life’s Work

The period of Sullivan’s most important contributions to American architecture began in 1883 when he formed a partnership with the German-born Dankmar Adler, a structural engineer. Sullivan had begun collaborating with Adler on a freelance basis after his return to Chicago in 1875. Only four years earlier, Chicago had been devastated by the great fire, so there was much architectural work to be had. The partners concurred in their preference for designing public buildings, and as the men gained fame, these became an ever-increasing proportion of their commissions, ultimately adding up to at least two-thirds of their completed works.

Adler, who had both technical genius and the ability to work with clients, was the perfect complement to the artistic and sometimes temperamental Sullivan. The most illustrious product of their collaboration was the massive Auditorium Building, erected between 1886 and 1890 at a cost of three million dollars to house the Chicago Opera Festival. The building took up an entire city block and rose to seventeen stories in a massive tower. When the building was completed, Adler and Sullivan took up offices in the top two floors of the tower, and it was there that the young Frank Lloyd Wright worked as personal assistant to Sullivan until 1893, at which time the two men had a falling out over Wright’s taking on freelance design work, in defiance of the terms of his contract with Adler and Sullivan. Despite the ill will on which they parted, Wright acknowledged Sullivan as his master in his autobiography.

Adler and Sullivan’s success with the Auditorium Building led to other commissions, and in increasing numbers, these were outside Chicago. Adler, because of his expertise in acoustics, was invited to consult on the design of Carnegie Hall in were chosen, and the firm was hired to build a new opera house in Pueblo, Colorado. In 1890, they were asked to design the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, an office tower that first illustrated Sullivan’s ability to give the tall building an artful and coherent structure.

In 1895, the firm dissolved with Adler’s retirement from architecture to work for an elevator company and earn a regular salary, a step necessitated by a period of economic depression in the country that left Sullivan and Adler with few design commissions. The two men parted with some hard feelings that were intensified by Sullivan’s claiming sole credit for the last building they designed, perhaps the most magnificent of their skyscrapers, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, New York.

The last twenty years of Sullivan’s life were spent in increasing hardship, isolation, and embitterment; his marriage at the age of forty-two to a much younger woman ended after ten years. In the midst of another national depression that left him with little work, Sullivan was forced to sell most of his possessions in order to make a settlement with his estranged wife. Included in the sale was the vacation home he had designed for himself on the sea at Ocean Springs, Mississippi; the house was revolutionary in its simple, horizontal design that took maximum advantage of the ocean setting, while offering protection from summer heat. At this retreat, Sullivan had designed elaborate rose gardens and again displayed the love of nature and the sea that he had first manifested as a boy.

In his last years, Sullivan’s only commissions were for a series of eight small banks in midwestern cities. Although they were not immediately recognized as masterpieces, these structures display the balance of contradictory impulses that is characteristic of Sullivan’s genius. They are brick structures whose simple mass is offset by intricate decoration, concentrated at points of interest, highlighting either the entrance or the flat roof line. At this time, Sullivan also expressed his aesthetic philosophy in writing, completing his The Autobiography of an Idea only days before his death on April 14, 1924.

Significance

Sullivan worked in a period of aesthetic ferment, at a time when American artists were attempting to discover a national style and to break free from European tradition. Sullivan, who believed that the architect should be “a poet and an interpreter of the national life of his time,” expressed his democratic convictions in his preference for designing public buildings, in his inviting and encompassing entrances—most notably the famous golden doors of the Transportation Building that he designed for the Columbian Exposition—and in his use of humble native plants such as corn husks, weeds, and grasses in his design motifs.

The development of steel frame construction and of the elevator made the construction of skyscrapers a possibility and introduced a range of new design difficulties, notably how to make such buildings light and how to organize their facades so as to create aesthetic wholes rather than agglomerations, which Sullivan was the first to master. He pioneered in the treatment of the exterior of such buildings as a skin through which their structure could be perceived, and he applied his famous principle, “form follows function,” to the design of the facade of the skyscraper, arguing that it should reflect the functional tripartite division of such buildings into an entry level or base, a stack of office tiers, and an attic that would house machinery. Sullivan’s theory of the skyscraper was articulated not only in his most successful buildings, such as the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, but also in his influential essay, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.”

During the first half of the twentieth century, Sullivan was largely respected for his modernism. The increasing simplicity of his overall designs was praised, while his profuse surface ornamentation was largely ignored, or was considered to be a regrettable remnant of nineteenth century taste. During the 1970’s, however, with the reawakening of interest in Art Nouveau and the contemporary British Arts and Crafts Movement, reassessment of Sullivan’s contribution also began, and an appreciation for the contradictory elements of his work arose.

Bibliography

Bush-Brown, Albert. Louis Sullivan. New York: George Braziller, 1960. A brief but informative overview of Sullivan’s life and work containing many excellent illustrations, showing interior and exterior views of many of his most famous buildings.

Kaufman, Edgar, Jr., ed. Louis Sullivan and the Architecture of Free Enterprise. Chicago: Art Institute, 1956. The exhibition catalog includes illustrations and a discussion of many of Sullivan’s major works.

Manieri Elia, Mario. Louis Henry Sullivan. Translated by Anthony Shugaar and Caroline Green. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. Overview of Sullivan’s life and work, placing his buildings within a historical and theoretical context. Contains black-and-white drawings, plans, and photographs.

Menocal, Narcisco G. Architecture as Nature: The Transcendental Idea of Louis Sullivan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981. This study of the ideas underlying Sullivan’s design work, written by an architectural historian, emphasizes his connections to nineteenth century American thought.

Morrison, Hugh. Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture. Introduction and revised list of buildings by Timothy Samuelson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Originally published in 1935, this groundbreaking work was the first full-length biography of Sullivan. It focuses on the historical and intellectual context in which Sullivan’s work was accomplished.

Sprague, Paul E. The Drawings of Louis Henry Sullivan: A Catalogue of the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection at the Avery Architectural Library. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. This catalog emphasizes Sullivan’s skill as a draftsman and facilitates study of his design methods.

Sullivan, Louis Henry. The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: American Institute of Architects, 1924. This embittered intellectual autobiography, written in the third person late in the architect’s life, is as revealing in its omissions as it is in its often unreliable narrative of events.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Kindergarten Chats. In The Interstate Architect and Builder, 2-3 (February 16, 1901-February 8, 1902). Reprint. New York: Dover Press, 1980. This extended Socratic dialogue on architecture conducted with a younger colleague, reputedly modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright, was originally published in fifty-two installments.

Twombly, Robert. Louis Sullivan: His Life and Work. New York: Viking Press, 1986. This well-researched study corrects misinformation provided in Sullivan’s autobiography and in books by other writers. It emphasizes Sullivan’s achievements in the context of American architectural history.

Van Zanten, David. Sullivan’s City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan. Photographs by Cervin Robinson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. Focuses on the evolution of Sullivan’s use of ornamentation from his earliest skyscrapers to his later buildings.

Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943. In chapter 2, Wright recounts his experiences working as Sullivan’s assistant.